My life is a tale of two boys with two very different dads.
When my first son, Trey, was born 30 years ago, I was what they now call a "baby daddy" — a young, unmarried high school dropout with a bad drug habit and a rap sheet. I never considered marrying my son's mother. In fact, I just disappeared from her life after the baby was born. As a result, Trey grew up feeling abandoned and hostile.
When my second son, Corey, came along 15 years later, I was not the same man who fathered Trey. By then, I was happily married with a college degree and a promising future. Corey is my whole life. He just finished his freshman year in college studying engineering.
I am sharing this painful, personal story so that middle-class Americans might better understand why so many poor, young, African-American men drop out of high school, father children out of wedlock and then wind up in prison. The answer: Many of them were reared, like my first son, by a single mother on public assistance and missed the essential, nurturing presence of a full-time father.
Absent fathers come with a huge cost, beyond just the emotional impact. In Steven L. Nock and Christopher J. Einolf's report, The One Hundred Billion Dollar Man, the data are striking. The federal government spent at least $99.8 billion providing assistance to father-absent families in 2006. Between 1960 and 2006, the number of children living in single-mother families went from 8 percent to 23.3 percent. Currently, 34 percent of children live without their biological father. Poverty is prevalent: 39.3 percent of single-mother families lived in poverty, but only 8.8 percent of father-present families lived in poverty. Most distressing, 80 percent of African-American children can expect to spend at least part of their childhood living apart from their fathers.
From the start, the system works against fathers by penalizing them and ultimately pushing them away. To illustrate my point, let's suppose that Greg and Kisha, two unwed, uneducated African-Americans, have just learned that Kisha is pregnant. Kisha goes to the welfare office seeking assistance during her pregnancy. Because our society wants healthy babies, Kisha gets the benefit of good prenatal care and a good nutrition program. At the same time, she's told she must provide them the name of the baby's father so the government can open a child support case against him. This means the father will be held responsible for the cost of the baby's care.
That may seem like a fair bargain for middle-class men with an education and income, but we are talking about a young man with no high school diploma and no legal way to earn enough money to meet the support payments. So Greg begins to accrue a debt he cannot pay. Unfortunately, the child support system cannot always distinguish between a deadbeat dad and a dead-broke dad.
The child support case drives a wedge between the mother and father at a time when they should be encouraged to come together to create a family around their new baby. These parents usually do not have the skills required to maintain such a relationship, particularly at a stressful time with a demanding new baby. Eventually, the mother may get angry with the father and retaliate by withholding access to the child. Consequently, the father stops visiting. When the kid grows up, he may join a gang in search of the caring relationships he did not have at home. It's highly likely that the familiar, destructive cycle will repeat itself: A fatherless child will beget yet another fatherless child.
Messrs. Nock and Einolf further state that, "There are also consequences of father absence that have implied indirect consequences for government programs. … Overall, however, children of fatherless families use mental health services at a higher rate than children of two-parent families, have more behavior problems at school, and are more likely to enter the juvenile justice system. They do less well at school, and schools may have to make additional efforts to educate them. Their higher use of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, and their poorer physical and mental health, may cause them to use medical services more than children of two-parent families."
The situation, however, is not hopeless. Public policymakers can assist young African-American males to be better citizens and better fathers. They can provide low-income fathers with the same attention our society gives to unwed mothers. Our social welfare agencies should assist these young, unmarried men in building an enduring relationship with the mother and child, regardless of whether they get married.
In recent years, I have struggled to establish a half-decent relationship with my first son, Trey, who now works for a landscaping firm. He's a great person, but there is no way I can ever make up for neglecting him while he was growing up. My own experience and the bleak prospects of so many other young black men in Baltimore led me to create an organization 11 years ago called the Center for Urban Families, where we try to help young men, many of whom are just out of prison, become not only good employees but also better fathers and husbands.
Too many people boil the problem of fatherlessness down to the collection of child support. Simply sending debt collectors after these dead-broke dads will not solve this very complex social and economic problem. All of the child-support arrears in the country don't come close to equating to the $98 billion of costs associated with fatherless households. While the exact costs can be debated, there is no debate about the positive economic status of father-present households. In these difficult economic times, promoting responsible fatherhood may be the best and most cost-effective anti-crime, anti-poverty program yet.
