Father Hunger: A Selection from Stephen Marche’s The Unmade Bed (2018)
“The increased symbolic value of fatherhood has arrived in the middle of an accelerating crisis of fatherlessness. The number of American families without fathers has grown from 10.3 percent in 1970 to 24.6 percent in 2013; that percentage has more or less stabilized over the past five years, at the level of about a quarter of all families, which means that in 2016, 24.7 million children in the United States were fatherless. In the United Kingdom the number of families without fathers is increasing by twenty thousand a year, leading to the existence of ‘father deserts’ in poor areas, where fewer than half of families include a father. Every country in the EU has followed this trend toward fatherlessness, as have Canada and Australia.
Only the most callow and naïve can see this development as some kind of fluid redefinition of the family structure. It’s a social disaster. Fatherlessness as a condition has been linked with virtually every social ill you can name: young men who grow up without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail; 63 percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes, as are 71 percent of high school dropouts, 85 percent of children diagnosed with behavioral disorders, and 70 percent of all juvenile detainees. Fatherlessness correlates to higher aggression, lower achievement in school, significantly higher rates of delinquency, and increases in criminal activity.
Psychoanalysts have identified the effects of ‘father hunger’ in the night terrors of eighteen-month-olds. In a 2014 study of more than 40 million children and their parents, researchers at Harvard examined the relationship between economic mobility and a series of factors, including racial segregation, income inequality, school quality, social capital, and family structure. Overwhelmingly family structure was the strongest connection. The crisis of income inequality and the decline of social capital are the subjects of wide-ranging, furious debates, and the quality of schools is the main subject of almost all local politics. But family structure matters more, much more. The researchers themselves were surprised at the strength of the connection: ‘The fraction of children living in single-parent households is the strongest correlate of upward mobility among all the variables we explored. . . . Family structure correlates with upward mobility not just at the individual level, but also at the community level, perhaps because the stability of the social environment affects children’s outcomes more broadly.’
Though no studies with such breadth and vigor have been undertaken for the EU, the connection between fatherlessness and poverty has been well-established by researchers in all of those countries as well. Again we see the limits of feminism as a political agenda in the face of the new realities of family life. ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ may be true. But a kid needs a father like a fish needs other fish. (Exceptions are lesbian families, which show no trace of the crisis of fatherlessness. Why is unclear.)
The figure of the father is more prominent because of rather than despite his widespread absence. Again the hollow patriarchy haunts us. The symbolic significance of fatherhood is at an all-time high, while real fathers, in the flesh, have gone missing. The rise of fatherlessness has revealed how intensely fatherhood matters. Fathers spending time with their children results in a better, healthier, more educated, more stable, less criminal world.
Exposure to fathers is a public good. If the Harvard study is to be believed, and they looked at forty million children, having a dad is a surer sign of your ability to move up in the world than where you went to school or what neighborhood you’re from. No wonder men want to show off their kids. Fatherhood is a clearer status symbol than a car.”—Stephen Marche, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth about Men and Women in the 21st Century (2018)
