There’s an epidemic of children growing up without fathers in the inner cities of America.
Not much is being done to address the problem.
Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago, has witnessed this epidemic firsthand.
Programs for nonresident fathers faced many challenges. These men say they love their kids, and are pained by their physical and emotional separation. Lacking the resources to contribute financially, not physically present to assume practical child-rearing tasks, many have no idea what they can really do. Depressingly few have seen effective and present fatherhood in their own lives. Many have difficult relationships with the mothers of their children. For understandable reasons, mothers’ families don’t always welcome a biological father’s sporadic or potentially disruptive intervention.
It’s sad that a phenomenon that has been building for 3-4 decades is only recently being studied and understood. Prior studies ignored fatherlessness and instead blamed “essential and meager welfare programs for pathologies that were actually caused by broader economic and social forces.”
If you look at it from a personal economic sense, you can see the forces at work and the decisions that end up being made:
If a man suddenly finds himself thrown together with a woman he barely knows and may not even like, if her rising expectations in the wake of the birth leaves her feeling it’s impossible to please her, and if he believes she views him as expendable if a better catch comes along, she will be seen as a poor source of commitment. Such a man will likely fail to invest—shape up, overlook differences, and be content at home—to the degree required.
It’s a constantly unstable situation, and caught in the middle are innocent children who did not ask to be raised in a situation this fraught with peril.
The saddest story was of a man who worked all day to support his estranged family, but saw his wife’s new boyfriend buying ice cream for his own daughter. The boyfriend has his own estranged children and family, but he makes more money. Like the man said, “[h]e lost his family. So he gotta take mine.”
It’s a story that keeps repeating itself more and more throughout America, and kids being born out of wedlock have a much higher chance of getting involved in crime, drugs, and dropping out of school.
Look, if you have kids—you stay at home and raise them. It stretches even further back—don’t have unprotected sex with a woman you wouldn’t be comfortable with having kids with and spending a lifetime with. If that doesn’t scare enough guys into wearing condoms or women into taking birth control, I don’t know what will. That 2 minutes could cost you 18 years.
