The LizLibrary gives the goods on fatherlessness

Google Alerts for single dads waft into my Inbox every morning by the nice Google people.

Often they include great stories of single dads struggling to make it just like everyone else.

About half the time, though, the articles contain the dreaded Fatherless Gospel (If-dad’s-not-there-it-ain’t-a-family)–statistical “evidence” designed to show an effect of father-absence on families and kids.

I’m not sure where this stuff started but the National Fatherhood Initiative (paid for with YOUR US tax dollars) does a damned good job of laying it on thick and lots of journalists get their information there.

A few weeks ago I started Googling fatherlessness and lo and behold, in and amongst all the folks jumping on board with the fatherless effect, I found Liz. The first page I happened on was the page of US presidents and jurists growing up without fathers–except I didn’t realize that at first because it’s a long as your arm and figured I must be wrong. But I wasn’t! Go and check it out. (Pictured, George Washington, whose father died at age 10; Barack Obama, raised by a single mother)

Then there were the pages and pages of careful debunking of the Fatherless Gospel. Here’s an example of how the Liz Library picks apart of the fatherless arguments. Listen to this carefully. It’s a doozy. You’ve undoubtedly heard this statistic manipulated a dozen times before while people screech “FACT!” at you, which means you’re not supposed to open your mouth and shoot it down.

From this page: [The bracketed "Duh" is my editorial comment; the rest is from Liz]

___

Myth: Children growing up without a father in the home are more than twice as likely to end up in jail.

Fact: Children growing up without a father in the home are many times more likely to have had a father who spent time in prison.

[JP: Duh] That’s why he was absent.

[Statistics suck, don't they. In addition, according to a report in the New York Times, a study among 1,000 girls in detention in Alameda, Los Angeles, San Diego and Marin counties, revealed that 54 percent of their mothers and 46 percent of their fathers had been locked up, indicating that the greatest predictor of criminality in girls is having a parent who has been incarcerated. (Kind of bodes against all those fatherhood programs who want to inject criminals into the life of yet more kids, doesn't it.) ]

Fact: The most significant predictor of criminality is having a parent or other close relative who exhibits anti-social behavior or has been incarcerated.

DiLalla, L. F., & Gottesman, I. I. (1989). Heterogeneity of causes for delinquency and criminality: Lifespan perspectives. Development & Psychopathology, 1 (4), 339-349.

Fact: “Taking all the evidence together, marital discord has a stronger relation with delinquency and aggression than parental absence.”

Loeber, R. and Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (1986) ‘Family factors as correlated and predictors of juvenile conduct problems and delinquency’, in: M. Tonry and N. Morris (Eds.) Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, Vol.7, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 77-78

Comment: “The single greatest predictor of who will wind up in prison is whether his father was in prison.”

Ivins, Molly, column August 30, 2000, re Bureau of Justice Statistics, commenting on the astounding growth of the Texas prison population.

___

And by the way, for those who are divorced or separated, there’s a ton of information on joint custody and other pertinent issues. But back to jail-time issue for a sec. I just heard this yappety-yap on someone’s website not two weeks ago from a poster who express moral outrage at the number of babies who would be born to single mothers this year because of this very “fact.” Makes you want to barf.

Filed under: critical thinking, fatherlessness, kids, solo life , families, father absence, fatherlessness, Google alerts, jail, National Fatherhood Initiative, single parents, statistics