Forty percent of children growing up in America today are being raised without their fathers

(Source: "Making Ideas Change the World", Policy Digest, National Center for Policy Analysis, July 28, 1997.)

"Parents want to do what is best for their children.  So do most adults.  We should not let the age-old cultural priority on childrearing-the sentiment that children are our future-slip from our grasp, as now seems to be happening.  A serious problem is that less than one-third of households today contain children, down from more than three-quarters in prior centuries.  The task will not be easy."

(Source: David Popenoe, "Can the Nuclear Family be Revived?" Society, vol. 36, no.5 [July/August 1999] pp. 20-30.)

Government social workers make a poor substitute for a father in the lives of young boys.  The dubiousness of relying on government care rather than paternal care showed up clearly in data recently scrutinized by a team of social scientists at Oxford University.  Statistical tests performed on 26 years of data collected from 8411 British subjects born in 1958 revealed significantly elevated levels of "adult psychological distress" among men who had grown up "with a single (not widowed) parent" or had had "a childhood experience of public care."  The Oxford scholars calculate that, compared to peers reared in intact homes, the 33-year-old men in their study who had come from a single parent home-"for reasons other than the death of the parent"-were more than twice as likely to have psychological problems indicated by an elevated Malaise Score (Odds Ratio of 2.6). Likewise, compared to peers who had had no such experience, the 33-year-old men in their study who had experienced "public care" in childhood were more than six times more likely (Odds Ratio of 6.2) to suffer from psychological distress.

"For those involved in deciding children's future," the Oxford team sagely remarks, "the study is a further reminder of how difficult it is for the public parent to improve on children's psychological well-being...particularly that of boys."

(Source:  Ann Buchanan, JoAnn Ten Brinke, and Eirini Flouri, "Parental Background, Social Disadvantage, Public 'Care,' and Psychological Problems in Adolescence and Adulthood," Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 39[2000]: 1415-1423.)