Not a day goes by where we don’t see a person on TV talking about the problems of father absence and out of wedlock births. Do a search for “Responsible Father” and up pops web sites and government programs directed at men and talking about their responsibility to their children. As a 25 year father rights activist I am well aware of these programs having attended state and national seminars put on by government promoting responsible fathers all aimed at fixing fathers. Unfortunately they are all the same and doomed to failure for they fail to properly identify the problem and keep blaming men and ignoring the federal government and states as the culpable parties.
The 1935 Social Security Act (SSA) included federal dollars for Aid to Dependent Children. At that time most black mothers worked so the program was aimed primarily at white mothers with a deceased, absent, or unable to work husband. In the early 1960s civil rights activists and welfare reform activists worked to eliminate biases within the system and black mother participation increased. Fearing the program would reduce marriages the name was changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1962. In 1964 President Johnson began his war on poverty campaign which added food stamps and medicaid for poor people. Thus the role of father as financial provider was usurped.
In 1967 the federal government required states to establish paternity and also to extend benefits of unemployed male parents. In 1968 the Supreme Court ruled that the AFDC benefits could not be reduced for a man in the house if they were not deemed to be an “actual or substitute parent.” In 1981 the Supreme Court ruled that a step-fathers income be considered. Thus providing a financial incentive to mothers to not live with their children’s father and to not marry any future significant others.
In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw that there was a crisis in African American families as 23.6% of births were to unmarried mothers. He also noted that historically the rate of increase or decline in African American male unemployment paralleled the rate of AFCD cases but in 1962 the lines crossed with AFDC cases going up as unemployment claims went down. He warned against Defining Deviancy Down as single mother houses were becoming socially acceptable. When he published his findings in “The Negro Family: the Case for National Action” he received criticism from civil rights leaders for labelling blacks. The report was not put into policy by Johnson due to this.
In 1960 the birth control pill was approved for use in the United States giving women reproductive choice. In 1970 abortion was legalized. Men have no similar effective temporary birth control method nor means to “abort” an unwanted pregnancy. If a woman has an unwanted pregnancy she can terminate the pregnancy regardless of the wishes of the man. If a woman decides to carry the pregnancy to term, even if she lied to the man about her reproductive status, and even if he doesn’t want to be a father, she can establish him as the father and he will be held financially responsible for the child.
The Feminist movement began in the 1960s and originally touted itself as an equal rights movement but the radical feminist movement split off from that blaming “patriarchal white men” for “oppression” of women. It portrayed the view that men were abusers of women and children. The theme of the feminist was women don’t need men. Labor participation increased for women throughout the 60’s with 1963s Equal Pay Act and 1965s establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and prohibitions on sex discrimination in employment. While originally about choice, the movement looks down and denigrates women who choose a traditional nuclear family over a career, encouraging young girls to forego the former and choose the latter as the social norm.
Historically the person wanting out of a marriage or who committed adultery lost custody of the children. In the late 1800s the courts increasingly relied on the Tender Years Doctrine holding that young children be placed with the mother and older children with the father. In 1970 California passed the first “no fault” divorce law and this trended across the land. In reality all one needed to do to escape a marriage was to file for legal separation in family court, live apart for a year, then file for divorce under the abandonment statutes. New York was the last state to enact no fault divorce in 2010. Child custody changed in the 1970s abandoning the Tender Years Doctrine in favor of The Best Interests of the Child standard. Thus decision making on custody was placed at the courts discretion. Even with this standard the mother custody rate after divorce was well over 85% due to judicial bias against men. Divorce rates jumped to about 50% of all marriages.
The combination of subsidized single mother homes and easy divorces saw divorces and father absent homes rise as did AFDC claims. In 1988 President Reagan signed the Family Support Act establishing a federal Office of Child Support Enforcement thus removing states rights in this area. He ordered the states to have support guidelines in effect but left the states only one year to establish them. Each State was to also establish an Office of Child Support Enforcement. While labelled as “child support” the massive bureaucratic program was designed to establish paternity of children receiving AFDC and hold the father financially responsible and return the money to federal coffers. And thus the “Deadbeat Dad” was created.
Lacking time to establish reasonable child support guidelines the states just enacted the example guidelines provided by the federal government, an income shares model which taxed the “non custodial parent” (most often the father) 17% of his income for one child and 25% for two (with some variation in states). The assessment is pre tax dollars so the payer is responsible for the income tax in addition to the income transfer and one child is 35% and two 48% of gross income. In later years draconian collection methods were implemented, including incarceration. Fathers making close to 3 figure salaries can usually make the payments and still get by but a father making under $60,000 is reduced to living below poverty levels. Studies have shown that the vast majority of “deadbeats” are really dead broke, inability to pay the number one reason for default. Incarceration disproportionately affects poor fathers who tend towards young fathers and fathers of color.
In the 1990s Sanford Braver conducted the only federal research on child support and the family and he published his findings in “Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myth’s.” This, and subsequent private studies, have shown that about 80% of divorces are filed by women with the number one reason being “we grew apart”. The divorce rate peaked at about 50% of all marriages and has been declining as the marriage rate is rapidly declining. After divorce mothers obtain about 50% of the marital assets, usually more, and gain custody of children in about 85% cases. Worse, there are virtually no access enforcement avenues for a non custodial parent denied access by the custodial parent, and 50% of women admitted to having interfered with a fathers access to his children.
In out-of-wedlock births the support guidelines provide a perverse incentive for women to have multiple children with multiple fathers as two 17% payers (34%) is higher than one father paying for two (25%). Poor young men have no disincentive to having out-of-wedlock children as they have no income to be taxed. And those with out-of-wedlock children are incentivized to work off the books, crime and drug distribution two good off the books income earners. Access to their children can be had by providing direct financial support to the mother in exchange for access. And we are now in the third and forth generations of children raised in single mother homes, thus establishing it as the societal norm for 1/2 the population.
As government “helped” the family these past 6 decades we saw marriage decline, divorce and out -of-wedlock births increase and now 40% of children live absent their father, close to 75% of African American fathers. I think it’s plain to see, it isn’t fathers that need to be taught responsibility.
James Hays, Lt. (Ret) NY En-Con Police, past President of the Coalition of Fathers and Families NY, Inc. (FaFNY) and past Director of the NY Men’s Action Network (NYMAN).