Family Fact: Absent Dads

Family Quote: Dad-Shaped Soul-Holes

Family Research Abstract: Devoted Daddies

"Thirty-four percent of children, or 24 million, live in homes without their biological fathers. This includes 66 percent of black children, 35 percent of Hispanic children and 27 percent of white children." 

(Source: Cheryl Wetzstein, "Fatherless homes no longer on rise," The Washington Times, April 9, 2002; http://www.washtimes.com/culture/20020409-15728760.htm; referencing "Father Facts," from The National Fatherhood Initiative; http://www.fatherhood.org.) 

"Dads, there truly is a dad-shaped hole in the souls of your children that they desperately need you to fill. Filling this hole will cost you dearly in humility, time, and all-out effort. But, the price you and your children will pay if you don't do it will be devastatingly high."

(Source: Mike Potter, "There Are Holes in Their Souls...In the Shape of Their Dads!" Parenting Teenagers, April 28, 2003; http://www.parentingteenagers.org/pages/a_mp07.htm.)  

Modern social theorists have advanced any number of ideas for making American men better fathers. Curiously, such ideas have not usually included getting men to attend church regularly. Religious involvement, however, does make men better fathers, according to sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia.

Writing in a recent issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, Wilcox reports that in nationally representative data collected between 1987 and 1994 from 13,017 adults as part of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), a clear linkage emerges between religion and paternal involvement. That data, Wilcox concludes, show that "religion is related to paternal involvement in all three areas that were examined: one-on-one engagement, dinner with one's family, and volunteering for youth-related activities."

Readers might falsely suppose that the linkage between religion and good fatherhood simply reflects the fact that the same commitment to conventional values that makes men good fathers also makes them church-goers. But by using a statistical model that takes "civic engagement" into account, Wilcox advances convincing evidence that the religious effects in his study are "for the most part, not artifacts of...a conventional habitus." In other words, "religion appears to make a unique contribution to paternal involvement above and beyond its status as a conventional activity. In all likelihood, the specific attention that religious institutions dedicate to family life accounts for the religious effects found in this study."

Although Wilcox found a linkage between religion and good fatherhood in all denominations, he uncovered evidence of "an independent effect" of "conservative Protestant affiliation" on some aspects of fatherhood: "Conservative fathers are more likely to be involved with their children in personal activities such as personal talks than unaffiliated and mainline Protestant men." Wilcox reports that conservative Protestant fathers are also "more likely than unaffiliated men to have dinner with their children and to participate in youth-related activities." In an age when feminism defines political correctness, Wilcox highlights the effects of conservative Protestantism on paternal involvement as "particularly striking in light of the gender traditionalism championed by conservative Protestant churches."

Wilcox concludes by arguing that since previous research has established that "paternal involvement is positively associated with a range of beneficial child outcomes," religion may-like civic engagement- "exert positive effects on children through its association with increased paternal involvement."