Nearly One in Three American Children Live Without A Father
We can go on and on about immigration, Afghanistan, Social Security or health care but at the core this is the sort of thing that is contracting American society:
The number of children living apart from their fathers has more than doubled in the last fifty years, from 11 percent in 1960 to 27 percent in 2010.
That’s one of the key findings from a new report on fatherhood in the United the States that was released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project — just in time for Father’s Day.
The findings paint a grim picture of many fathers’ lack of involvement in their children’s lives, using data from over 10,000 people to determine the percentage of “absent” or “non-resident” fathers in America, which the report defines as those who do not live with their children.
A decline in marriage rates may be partially to blame. In 1960, 72 percent of the adult population was married; that share had dropped to 52 percent by 2008. Eighty seven percent of children ages 17 and younger were living with two married parents in 1960 compared with 64 percent in 2008.
According to the report’s co-author Gretchen Livingston, an increase in divorce rates over the last half-century may also play a role.
Men are the majority of unemployed, at a time when over 1/4 of children are fatherless. Fathers teach men how to be functional men. Men without fathers are robbed of someone to tell them how to be a functional man. The results shouldn’t be shocking.