'Deconstructing the Essential Father" is the title of an article by two psychologists — Louise Silverstein and Carl Auerbach — who set out to show that fathers are not terribly important to the well-being of their children and that traditional marriages are no better than any other family arrangement. It isn't an especially impressive article. Its prose is dry, its arguments are shallow, its conclusions are disproved by a mass of scientific evidence, and its political bias is blatant — the authors end by calling for a "large-scale" expansion of welfare and electing more women to government.
 The new issue of American Psychologist features an attack on fatherhood that is as scientifically shoddy as it is politically blatant. |
Certainly not for its science. Silverstein and Auerbach make it clear that their purpose is not to report on the results of a dispassionate inquiry. It is to rebut the conclusions of "neoconservative" social scientists whose research demonstrates that the absence of fathers in the lives of so many American children has led to a wide array of serious social problems. The word "neoconservative" appears repeatedly, and it isn't meant as a compliment. That would be fine if the authors were writing for The Nation or Mother Jones. But scientists writing for professional journals don't ordinarily attach pejorative political labels to other scientists or their work.
Scientists also don't ordinarily admit that they have allowed their politics to color their research and are using their research to promote their politics. These authors do.
"We acknowledge that our reading of the scientific literature supports our political agenda," they write. "Our goal is to generate public policy . . . that supports the legitimacy of diverse family structures, rather than policy that privileges the two-parent, heterosexual, married family."
Thus openly flying their colors, they trot out one shopworn claim after another. When it comes to children's welfare, "it is economics, not marriage, that matters." Fathers do not make "a unique and essential contribution to child development." There are "potential costs" to having a father in the home: He might blow the household budget by "gambling, purchasing alcohol, cigarettes, or other nonessential commodities."
All in all, Silverstein and Auerbach assert, "we do not find any empirical support that marriage enhances fathering or that marriage civilizes men and protects children."
That statement appalls Wade Horn, a much-published psychologist and president of the National Fatherhood Initiative. "No empirical support? There is a whole [scientific] literature attesting to the importance of fathers and marriage." Married fathers spend far more time with their children, on average, than those who aren't married. Decades of research on the effects of marriage show that men tend to drink less, use drugs less, carouse less, and work harder when they become husbands. As for protecting children, countless studies have found that children do better when they grow up in a two-parent married household than in any other setting.
"Their statement — 'we do not find any empirical support' — can only be true," Horn says, "if they've never read the literature."
Marriage in America has never been weaker. In a report earlier this month, the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University found that the marriage rate has fallen 43 percent since 1960. The divorce rate is near its all-time high. More than 50 percent of teenage girls now think that having children out of wedlock can be a "worthwhile lifestyle." One outcome of these wrenching social shifts is that 22 million children — 40 percent of America's kids — live apart from their fathers.
The consequences are not good. Intact two-parent families are rarely perfect, of course. But they generally provide a far safer environment for children than the alternatives.
Boys who grow up away from their fathers are twice as likely to end up in prison. A girl raised by an unmarried or divorced mother — even a white girl from a prosperous background — is five times more likely to become a teen mother than a girl who grows up with both biological parents. Teens from single-parent or stepparent homes are more likely to possess drugs, own a weapon, or assault someone at school than teens from intact families. Young children living with both biological parents are at a much lower risk of physical or sexual abuse than children in other living arrangements.
"Social science research is almost never conclusive," sociologist David Popenoe, a noted expert on families, has written. "There are always methodological difficulties and stones left unturned. Yet in three decades of work as a social scientist, I know of few other bodies of data in which the weight of evidence is so decisively on one side of the issue: on the whole, for children, two-parent families are preferable to single-parent and stepfamilies."
What Silverstein and Auerbach have written is not science. It is the opposite: a political screed that ignores what science has proven. Why would the American Psychological Association promote something so shoddy?
"Our position on that," the spokesperson at the APA tells me, "is basically no comment."
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
-- ## --
Follow Jeff Jacoby on X (aka Twitter).
Discuss his columns on Facebook.
Want to read more? Sign up for "Arguable," Jeff Jacoby's free weekly email newsletter.