Patriarchy in some cultures can be excessive. Parents can have too much control over their children’s lives. Men can have too much power over women. The present can have too much deference for the past.
None of this is true in America today, though. One in four children is raised without a father or stepfather present. Fewer and fewer men are getting married every year, and fewer and fewer men are becoming fathers every year.
The number of childless men who do not want children has doubled over the past decade, and one study of young men found decreasing interest in heading a family.
A commentator would have to be blind or delusional to suggest that the United States has too much patriarchy. We quite clearly have too little of it, to the detriment of children, men, and women.
Some feminists still argue that mothers are perfectly fine without a male partner, that the nuclear family is a system of oppression, and that marriage is outdated. They are ideologies that are impervious to the data.
Girls are 9 percentage points more likely to be depressed if their father is not present in their lives. Black and Hispanic underachievement in school can be mostly explained by the increased absence of fathers.
The data on the importance of fathers is massive and incontrovertible. Brookings Institution economist Melissa Kearney wrote an entire book on the importance of children having two parents. Kearney did not rely on moral arguments or appeals to tradition. She just laid out the hard data demonstrating that children do better when raised by two parents. For this crime, she got her liberal card revoked.
Of course, single mothers struggle compared to married mothers, suggesting that women, too, benefit from the presence of their children’s father.
Finally, not that feminists will care, men are happier, more fulfilled, and less likely to commit crimes, abuse drugs or alcohol, or be violent if they are fathers. Call it the paternity benefit.
Of course, this depends on a truer, fuller understanding of paternity than the one we have today.
“Paternity” can mean different things. It’s a latinate word, the analog of “fraternity.” It ought to connote a real relationship, and one which forms the identity of the “pater” — makes him a better man.
In our debased culture, though, “paternity” tends to connote a mere biological fact. In the 1990s, when the baby boomers — the torch bearers of the sexual revolution — it was a staple of daytime television for a pregnant woman or new mother to appear onstage with a sexual partner, while the host revealed the results of a paternity test. If the man weren’t the father, he would jump around the stage in celebration. “Paternity” has become a curse in the eyes of young men whose vision of the good life is shallow and self-serving.
We need a culture infused instead with positive visions of paternity. Good fathers need to be exalted and celebrated. Young women should be raised to seek a man who would be a good father. Young men’s education shouldn’t merely point toward career success, but toward marriage and fatherhood.
CALIFORNIA HAS NO RIGHT TO ITS OWN IMMIGRATION POLICY
Attend any award ceremony or retirement event, and you’ll likely hear the honoree say that his family is the most important thing in his life. We all know this. Why can’t our public discourse, educational institutions, and media make this obvious to young people?
This Father’s Day, let us celebrate fatherhood and make it clear to not-yet-fathers what a high calling it is.