Are Fathers Really Fungible?
W. Bradford Wilcox
I have a lot of respect for Pamela Paul. So it pains me to say that her new piece in The Atlantic, “Are Fathers Necessary?”, gets it wrong, and in two very big ways. The gist of her argument is that sociologists Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey are right in claiming that fathers play no essential role in the lives of their children. Or, in their words, ”based strictly on the published science, one could argue that two women parent better on average than a woman and a man…”
Paul’s first mistake was to take Biblarz and Stacey’s article as an impartial, scientific treatment of the “published science” on gender and parenthood. Alas, it is not. In fact, a close reading of their article’s appendix indicates that the vast majority of the published studies they relied upon are deeply flawed from a methodological perspective. Specifically, most of the studies relied upon small, unrepresentative samples of same-sex and heterosexual couples. You just cannot draw strong conclusions one way or another from these studies, given their methodological limits.
Second, Paul overlooked the fact that Biblarz and Stacey acknowledge in their article that same-sex couples appear to be more likely to break up than heterosexual, married parents. To quote from Biblarz and Stacey: “the comparatively high standards lesbians bring to their intimate unions correlate with higher dissolution rates.” In fact, a number of other studies also find that lesbians have significantly higher dissolution rates, compared to heterosexual, married couples. And given the fact that some of the nation’s most eminent family scholars, such as Andrew Cherlin, stress the importance of stability in children’s lives, this fact should give Paul pause.
Finally, Biblarz and Stacey ignore a growing body of research relying on large, random, representative samples of American children that indicates fathers do indeed play a distinctive role in the lives of their children. See, for instance, this study on the impact of fathers on girls’ risk of teenage pregnancy. I will be summarizing this research in a report that will be released later this year. I hope it will help set the record straight, and that Paul will reconsider her position on fathers.
Loading ...
Hm. I’d like to point out that a divorce and it’s outcome does not necessarily equal instability. My childhood was significantly more stable once my parents divorced. An unhealthy marriage is far more damaging to children then one (or if the child is lucky two,) stable, single parents.
It’s not enough to promote lower divorce rates, one has to promote healthy marriages.
Agreed, agreed, and enthusiastically agreed! Promoting healthy marriages is vital exactly because a marriage that is so unhealthy as to be “damaging to children” is unthinkable – as well as untenable.
That being said; Betsy has posted a link on her Life Without Children thread to a study called The Social Retreat from Children and How it is Affecting America. I just finished it and it is so worth downloading to read and even save for future reference.
Part of the report describes how, because marriages have become so much less child-centered along with the rest of society, the definition of an unhealthy marriage has changed from one that is abusive on some level to one in which an unrealistic level of fulfillment is provided solely by your spouse alone.
That’s not acceptable either. No one person can be truly and completely fulfilling to another – not even as a spouse – especially when children come into a marriage. We have to get back to being a lot less narcissistic and focus on the well-being of our children. Ask an elderly couple who’ve made that their priority in life and see if they don’t tell you that pouring your life into your caring for your progeny together is indeed a truly fulfilling way to spend your life together.
EDIT my previous post: “…an unrealistic level of fulfillment is provided solely by your spouse alone” should read “…an unrealistic level of fulfillment is NOT provided solely by your spouse alone”.