I just discovered Dr. Gordon Finley over at Men’s News Daily. Here he is on the challenges to fatherhood:
fatherhood itself is under fire on multiple fronts and with multiple losses, not only for children and fathers, but also for society. Consider three: male unemployment, divorce, and non-marital childbearing.
Male unemployment today is higher than female unemployment while not coincidentally female educational attainment is higher than male educational attainment. Combined, these gender gaps portend a family gender role reversal with uncertain consequences. Specifically, for eons, men have supported women for love, sex, companionship, and for being good mothers to their children. Given the current reversals, will women support men for love, sex, companionship, and for being good fathers to their children?
Second, although sound social science research clearly indicates that children want a father in their lives, these three trends auger against the fulfillment of children’s wishes. The strongest evidence comes from the children of divorce. Multiple studies from multiple perspectives all reach the same conclusion: children of divorce not only miss their fathers but they also want legislatures and judges to change family law and family court practice so that they can have a loving and nurturing father involved in their lives.
The third challenge to fatherhood is non-marital childbearing. In the 1950’s, only four percent of children were born out of wedlock, while today it is about forty percent — a tenfold increase. While there is no “natural law” that children born out of wedlock should be at higher risk of losing contact with their fathers than children born within marriage, there is a very clear informal “social law” joined by formal “family law” jointly dictating that father absence increases with out-of-wedlock births.
Gordon E. Finley, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology at Florida International University in Miami. His bottom line on fatherhood:
“Like Liberty, the price of fatherhood is eternal vigilance.”