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. . .
Fascinating to see how many arguing against spilled milk - fatherhood is fast on its way to being an institution independent of marriage. That is a statistical fact. The proverbial cow has left the barn. Is it ideal? No. Traditional? No. Are two parent households better? Almost always. Have we found a reliable way to promote marriage in a democracy? No. So what do we do in a less than ideal situation? We encourage & support men in positive parental engagement anyway. Not for them but for their kids. Stigmatizing unmarried Dad’s doesn’t make them get married it just makes them less engaged with their kids.
It *is* harder for men to be good dads when they are unmarried. Part of what makes a dad a good dad is a kind of steadiness, which is undermined by not being able to make and keep a promise of fidelity.
My husband wrote for Plough on this theme: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/holidays/fathers-day/men-of-fidelity
"Perhaps it’s better to think of a man’s vows not as a shackle but as an anchor, an anchor that attaches him to something solid so he does not drift off into callow dissolution. [...] The proper use of vows of fidelity is to bind oneself to particular loves: committing to love another person not only with a general charitable disposition but with the specificity of deliberately weaving your lives together. We are finite beings, and there are infinite things in the universe worthy of affection, attention, and care. Instead of trying to embrace, say, every woman in the world (the approach of Zeus and other mythical men on the make), the husband embraces the world in the person of one woman."