|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Why Have All the Fathers Gone--and Will They Come Back?
| Article
# : |
10530 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
3,680 Words |
| Author
: |
Interview With David Blankenhorn
David Blankenhorn is president of the Institute for American
Values, a New York-based organization that conducts research
on issues of family well-being, family policy, and civic
values. |
THE WORLD & I: Let's begin by talking about the state of American fatherhood.
David Blankenhorn: There is a crisis of fatherhood in America today. In fact, I believe that the most socially consequential family trend of our time is fatherlessness, that is, male absence from family life. We are in a situation where one-third of the American children are living apart from their fathers--and if the patterns we are seeing contiue, roughly half of all the American children alive today will spend a significant part of their childhoods living apart from their fathers. Thus, living without a father is approaching a rough parity with having a father as an experience of childhood.
We spent the 1970s and '80s in the family debate focusing mostly on the roles of women and the condition of children, almost as if men were secondary. And yet a lot of what is driving our social problems is men leaving their children and the mothers of their children--that is the big dynamic.
W & I: What factors do you think have allowed the problem to reach these proportions?
Blankenhorn: I have asked myself, "Have there been changes in American culture that have disproportionately affected men?" And I think there have been.
Culture typically tells men--and this has been true throughout human history--that what they are supposed to do is to be good family men. The main way that culture harnesses maleness to a social purpose is to tell men that they should be good husbands and fathers.
But when a culture does not do that, men tend to become isolated and therefore more prone to violence. Conservatives such as James Q. Wilson and liberals such as Myriam Miedzian remind us that poorly socialized males constitute the essential source of violence and crime in all societies. Margaret Mead has suggested that the supreme cultural imperative is the challenges of socializing men.
So OK, our culture today increasingly does not encourage men to be good husbands and fathers. The culture tells them that there are many possible options. They may choose to be good family men, but they may also choose not to be. There are many competing norms of masculinity out there, and family norms for men are getting weaker.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
