“Poor Single Mothers Need Money,” reads the headline at Bloomberg News, “Not Husbands.” Talk about dismantling the patriarchy!
It seems the assault on fathers is coming from all corners these days.
What does the research tell us? Children raised without a father present are far more likely to be raised in poverty, to be involved with crime or drugs, and to do poorly at school. They are also far more likely to end up as unwed parents themselves. Yet Kathryn Edwards, a researcher for the RAND Corporation, argued in a recent op-ed that it is folly for policymakers to worry about single mothers’ singleness. The problem isn’t a lack of a complementary life partner, the argument goes. The problem, we’re told, is simply a lack of money.
It’s on-brand, of course, for an analyst from RAND in a Bloomberg News opinion piece to tackle a social problem and declare that it’s simply an economic problem. But it’s also part of a trend. Increasingly, it’s en vogue to diminish the importance of marriage and especially the value of fathers.
One might trace the current erasure of fathers back a decade to Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, whose piece de resistance was a slideshow titled “The Life of Julia.” Julia went through life blessed by all sorts of federal aid that provided her a great preschool, tuition relief, health insurance, and even, in the end, a child — all with no other human present, including no father for her child. After all, who needs a father if you have the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act?
In recent years, it has become more explicit. A group of school teachers called D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice put out a
plan
that involved “dismantling the patriarchy.” The group called for “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear-family structure,” calling for a “village” to support mothers. The “educators for social justice” never once mentioned fathers as part of that village.
Marriage rates are plummeting, especially among the working class, and out-of-wedlock births are at record numbers. This is celebrated in the major media: “Those who panic over the rise in the number of single Americans do not see that this statistic includes lives of hard-won independence,” one New York Times op-ed opined.
Independence from the patriarchy, it seems, requires wiping fathers out of the picture, which, they opine, is a small enough void that a few more bucks from Uncle Sam can fill it.
