Why fatherhood and marriage don't have to go together
Conservatives need to recognize the world as it is, not as they wish it was
It’s Father’s Day, and I wish a very happy one to all the Dads out there. You guys rock.
I’ve written about fatherhood here before, including some gushy stuff about my own Dad. And it’s a big theme of my book Of Boys and Men and indeed of my work in general. Also I just debated AEI’s Ian Rowe on the topic of fatherhood, and especially how far it requires marriage, both at a UVA debate hosted by the Institute for Family Studies (which you can watch here) and on an edition of the Honestly podcast (which you can listen to here), along with Daily Dad author Ryan Holiday. My contribution to the debate has just been published in essay form here: Ian’s response is here.
My argument for fatherhood as an institution that is independent of marriage is the one that has attracted most criticism from conservative reviewers, so it was good to have the change to engage more on the topic. Here I’ll just draw out the main points of my argument:
Dads have a moral obligation to care for their kids. Maybe this sounds obvious, but it’s important not to weaken the normative case for paternal responsibility in the process of arguing that marriage is not a necessary precondition: fathers have a moral obligation to be the best fathers that they can be. Becoming a parent is perhaps the only truly irreversible decision that we make in life. And it comes with obligations that are immovable. As I put it in the debate: “Be a divorced man can never be an excuse for being a deadbeat dad.”
Kids do better with engaged Dads. The evidence that fathers matter to the outcomes for children is now incontrovertible in a way that was less true as recently as 10 or 15 years ago. As Harvard family scholars Marc Grau Grau and Hannah Riley Bowles write: “The importance of engaged fatherhood is now undisputable in ways it was not in earlier decades.”
Marriage and parenthood are separating. Forty percent of children, and 70% of black children, are now born outside of marriage. Only a minority of children will spend their whole childhood with both biological parents.
The economic basis for marriage has transformed. In 1979, 13% of women earned more than the typical man. Today, 40% of women do. That is a huge change. Forty percent of children, and 70% of black children, are now born outside of marriage. Forty percent of breadwinners are women. In almost half of married couples (45%), the wife earns as much as or more than the husband.
Preaching marriage won’t work. First, people don’t need persuading. Most survey evidence says that marriage is still the ideal for most people in terms of raising children. Second, the American working class does not seem to me to be very receptive mood for lectures from liberal elites about how they should be living their lives.
Marriage promotion policies don’t work. We have good evaluation research on marriage promotion programs. The overall impression was pretty clearly summarized by my former colleague, Ron Haskins, at the Brookings Institution, in a piece for National Affairs, where he wrote: “There is little reason to be optimistic that programs providing marriage, education, and social services will significantly affect marriage rates.” Side note: During the Q&A at the UVA debate, the effectiveness of one program was highlighted: a church-led marriage ministry in Duval County Florida called Communio. I hadn’t heard of this, or looked at the evaluation, so I did not comment at the time. But having now looked into this particular program a little, color me skeptical in terms of proven impact. (If you want a tonally caustic but substantively quite compelling criticism of the evaluation, there’s this from Phil Cohen).
Fatherhood promotion policies do work. By contrast, there’s pretty good evidence that pro-fatherhood policies, especially the provision of paid leave for Dads, has a real impact on the time fathers spend with children, quality of relationships, and so on. (I’ll have much more to say on this topic soon.)
Don’t give unmarried Dads an F grade. The insistence that good fatherhood requires marriage sends a chilling message to the Dads who are not married to the mother of their children. If you have to be a husband to be a good Dad, what does that mean for the tens of millions of fathers who are not married, or who were and are not anymore? What’s the message we’re sending to them? If we’re not careful, the message is: You failed. You’re benched. You don’t matter anymore. Even if perfection is indeed loving, committed parents in marriages that last, we must be extremely careful in our public policy, and our public pronouncements, not to make the perfect the enemy of the good
What this all means, I think is this:
I think that men can and should be both good husbands and good fathers. But I don’t think they have to be the former in order to be the latter. Insisting that only husbands can be good fathers, in my view, will not result in a mass reversal of these recent trends around marriage rates. It’s much more likely to send the harmful message to those who are not married, or who were married and are no longer, that they’re already failures.
Life is complicated. Life is messy. But the one unconditional moral obligation you have as a father is to your children. No matter how they came into the world, and no matter your relationship with the mother. Responsible and engaged fatherhood is unconditional. It’s not conditioned on the relationship with the mother.
That’s the world we live in, and I think we had better make the best of it.
As always, thanks for reading and sharing. And look out for a big announcement, right here, next week. . .
"In family questions, inasmuch as men were understood to be so strongly motivated by property, an older wisdom tried to attach concern for the family to that motive: the man was allowed and encouraged to regard his family as his property, so he would care for the former as he would instinctively care for the latter.
This was effective, although it obviously had disadvantages from the point of view of justice. When wives and children come to the husband and father and say, "We are not your property; we are ends in ourselves and demand to be treated as such," the anonymous observer cannot help being impressed.
But the difficulty comes when wives and children further demand that the man continue to care for them as before, just when they are giving an example of caring for themselves. They object to the father's flawed motive and ask that it be miraculously replaced by a pure one, of which they wish to make use for their own ends. The father will almost inevitably constrict his quest for property, cease being a father and become a mere man again, rather than turning into a providential God, as others ask him to be.
What is so intolerable about the Republic, as Plato shows, is the demand that men give up their land, their money, their wives, their children, for the sake of the public good, their concern for which had previously been buttressed by these lower attachments. The hope is to have a happy city made up entirely of unhappy men. Similar demands are made today in an age of slack morality and self-indulgence. Plato taught that, however laudable justice may be, one cannot expect prodigies of virtue from ordinary people. Better a real city tainted by selfish motives than one that cannot exist, except in speech, and that promotes real tyranny."
Allan Bloom "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987)
Agreed, but the delivery system guiding young people to received wisdom has broken down. One young person said she didn't want a religious wedding even though she grew up Catholic because of the sex scandals. I pointed out every institution and profession has scandals. Unfortunately, the emotional commitment to institutions and to some sort of authority is gone. Now we have ignorant children making life changing decisions based on specious, fanciful and self indulgent ideas. I think maybe there might something being re-created, as evidenced by the popularity of Jordan Peterson, but I find it hard to believe YouTube is going to replace religion, and authority in families.