Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (26 page)

Families with unmarried parents often defy expectations, says Sara S. McLanahan of Princeton University, who studies such families. “One of the surprises was how attached these parents really are to each other,” McLanahan told me. But many did not live together. “These people are not rejecting marriage; they’re hoping to get married, and the fathers are very involved.” They help the mothers through pregnancy and come to the hospital for the birth. But their resources are limited. They are often very poor. About half of the fathers had been incarcerated before the birth of their child. And only about one-third of these couples are together five years later. “Parents are breaking up and re-partnering. There is a lot of instability. And they are having children with new partners.” And the study shows that the children in these families are not doing as well as children in stable families.

McLanahan and one of her colleagues, Marcia J. Carlson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, have looked at what might be done to encourage fathers in poor families to become more involved with their children. Efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancy among unmarried women, especially teens, were only partly successful. Efforts to encourage greater father involvement by focusing on increasing absent fathers’ child-support payments did not work out so well. The problem was that the absent fathers often didn’t have the resources to make the payments. And programs to boost fathers’ emotional involvement with their children also largely failed, but those that encourage involvement at the time of a child’s birth looked promising.

“We’re realizing that the mother-father relationship is crucial,” Carlson told me. As we saw earlier, maternal gatekeeping is an important issue to consider. “The more nuanced understanding now is that the mom can encourage the dad or discourage the dad, and it probably has a lot to do with how she perceives him as a guy. The more a mother and father cooperate and can trust each other, the more the nonresident father stays involved.” Father involvement can also be influenced by whether a mother has a new partner—a social father, as “for a lot of kids, the biological father isn’t the last father they’re going to have,” she said. And sometimes “the social father tends to be as involved as the biological father.” Carlson believes that worries about father absence and its harmful consequences for children are justified. Kids without fathers or father figures playing an active role in their lives face greater risks.

*   *   *

Once again, the laboratory animals nicely complement the work done with human families. In this case, the basic research has helped to explain
why
father absence makes a difference to children. Poverty in children might actually alter the wiring of their brains.

Katharina Braun and her colleagues in Germany looked at the brains of rodents found in Chile called degus, which have complex families and social structures and engage in play. Male degus are exemplary fathers: they invest a lot in their pups and spend more time with them as they grow up, while the mother gradually withdraws. The father huddles with the pups, licks and grooms them, and carries them on his back. And degus have a curious feature that makes them interesting for father research: when fathers are absent, the mothers don’t compensate by spending more time with the pups. So it’s fair to assume that the pups raised by a single mother “are in fact partly emotionally deprived,” Braun and her colleagues have found. Whatever they could find out about that emotional deprivation in degus could point the way toward identifying similar deprivation in human subjects.

Previous studies with other rodents had shown that separation from a mother or a father could produce wiring changes in the brains of their pups, especially in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain’s frontal cortex involved in emotions and thinking, as well as communication and social interactions. Braun and her team wanted to see if the absence of a father could rewire that anterior cingulate cortex in their pups. When they raised pups without fathers and examined their brains under the microscope, they found that their suspicions were correct: the father-deprived degu pups had fewer synapses, or connections, in that portion of the cortex.

As I’ve noted, the separation of a human father from his family can also lead to poverty, and it’s becoming clear that poverty itself can produce changes in the frontal cortex. Mark M. Kishiyama at the University of California, Berkeley, looked at twenty-six children seven to twelve years old and assessed their brains’ electrical activity as they looked at a variety of images on a computer screen. Thirteen of the children—boys and girls from different ethnic groups—were from families with college-educated parents and a mean annual family income of $96,157. The other thirteen were from families without college-educated parents and with a mean annual income of $27,192. The children were also given a battery of neuropsychological tests to measure their competence in such things as memory and proficiency in language. Indeed, the researchers found that the workings of the prefrontal cortex were altered in the poor children, in a pattern resembling what happens to people with frontal-cortex damage.

*   *   *

When we put all this together, we can make a strong case that the absence of a father in a family can have devastating consequences for children. Many children do well, of course, without fathers in their homes. We all know children who grew up in difficult circumstances but now live rich and rewarding lives. Not all of them grow up to be the president of the United States, but Barack Obama is an example of what can be achieved by a child who grew up without a father but managed to overcome it.

Some researchers who study fathers have concluded that while they have become convinced that involved fathers are important for children, they are not
essential
. I doubt that many of them want to rewind the tape to the 1950s, with fathers as breadwinners—who were not encouraged to be involved dads—and mothers as homemakers. The economic pressures that have driven many women into the workforce have created an opportunity for fathers to be far more involved with their children than they have been in the past.

When my children from my first marriage were young, I lived in New Jersey and commuted to a demanding job at the Associated Press in Rockefeller Center. I boarded a train before 7:00 a.m., and if a story wasn’t breaking late in the day, I got home at 6:30 p.m., with just enough time to ask them about their day and read to them before they went to bed. Now my wife and I both work at home, and I can adjust my schedule to spend much more time with my children. I’m glad to know my involvement is a good thing. But that’s not why I spend time with my kids. I do it because I like it.

Afterword: Fathers Matter

During the time that I was researching and writing
Do Fathers Matter?
, I met many parents who wanted to know more about what I was finding out. Casual conversations, sometimes with people I’d just met, would turn into surprisingly personal discussions about fathers, about our own fathers, and about our children. One single mother of twins asked me, only half jokingly, “What do I need to know?”

Sometimes the stories were very moving, as in the case of one woman who offered to tell me about the unusual experience she’d had with her family. “I never knew my birth father,” she told me. Her parents had had only “a very brief relationship that ultimately resulted in me,” she said. When she was too young to go find her father, her mother never made any attempt to introduce them. When she was old enough to go after him herself, she was resentful that he had never come looking for her. “I never wanted to meet him. I was very much of the opinion that he was the adult, and it was his responsibility to seek me out. He never did.”

Later, when she thought about having children, though, she began to wonder about him—where he was, what he was doing, and who his relatives might be, because they would be her relatives, too, of course. She tracked him down online, where she discovered that he had died just a few months earlier. She also learned that he and his family had lived in the same town as she did when she was growing up. She decided to get in touch with her newly discovered relatives.

“I had cousins who knew people I went to school with. I had a new set of aunts and uncles who knew my other set of aunts and uncles. And there I was, finally wanting to know my real father, with no hope of ever doing so … except through his family.” She told me that as a child, she had been an A student with shabby clothes—a teacher’s pet who got picked on for being “a little too chubby and a little too smart.”

She went on to earn a Ph.D., after some difficult emotional crises, and is now a scientist and a journalist. But, she says, “I’ll never really know what it’s like to have a father. When I read about fathers being a big influence in the development of confidence or persistence or strength or grit, I’ll always wonder what I would have been like with a father.” The father she never knew clearly matters in her life, even though she had rejected the idea of connecting with him earlier. The relatives she is now coming to know say that they see a lot of him in her.

Another woman, Alana, is the daughter of a sperm donor whose identity and whereabouts she tried to discover, only to find that her birth father was untraceable. When she told a friend that she hoped to someday meet a man with whom she could have kids, the friend replied, “You don’t have to have a man in your life to have children.” Alana was stung by the response. Her mother had decided to have a child without a man in her life, and that decision had devastated Alana. After giving the matter some thought, she wrote a response to her friend’s remark:

“As a matter of fact, you
do
need a man to have a child—and a woman too! Kids (like me!) eventually grow brains and realize that they’ve been suckered out of a major,
major
requisite for happiness.” She refers to sperm donation as “deliberate spiritual robbery.” Alana desperately wants to know something about her biological heritage. It’s not just that she wishes she had known her father; it’s that knowing him would be knowing more about who
she
is. A talented musician, Alana told me she hopes to become famous enough through her music that one day her father will spot her face on an album cover, see that she resembles him, and recognize that she must be his daughter. And that he will get in touch.

These stories are reminders of the importance of fathers in people’s lives. As a father myself, I might be accused of having a one-sided point of view of the significance of fathers. But conversations with these women and with countless men told me that I am not alone in believing that fathers are important. These two women I’ve described feel a powerful sense of loss, a loss that some grief experts call ambiguous loss. Never having known their fathers, or having known what it’s like to grow up with a father in their families, they don’t know exactly what they’ve lost, but they feel the pain and the yearning.

As both a journalist and a father, I’ve watched as the research on fatherhood has unfolded over the past decade. The science is affirming what many fathers and their families believe. Yet the message has only gradually begun to reach the world outside laboratories and universities. While fathers are now very much a part of our discussions of family life, we are still slow to accept men and women as equal parents.

One place where this can be plainly seen is in the courts, where family issues are often stripped to their barest essentials. Research on fathers has produced scarcely a ripple there. Heartbreaking decisions are made hundreds of times every day by judges who seem to know nothing about modern notions of fatherhood. We might have expected this sort of ignorance in the early days of research on fatherhood, and, indeed, it’s easy to find. One striking example occurred in 1988, when a judge in Detroit was considering a case in which a father was seeking custody of his daughter, then twenty-two months old. Experts testified that the girl had a closer relationship with her father than with her mother and that he had been her primary caretaker. Speaking from the bench, the judge sputtered, “I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that the father is better for a twenty-two-month-old girl than the mother. And I can’t swallow it. I’m going to vomit on it … I don’t care how good a father [he is].”

The attitude persists. As recently as the fall of 2012, the family law newsletter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) denounced joint custody between mothers and fathers, suggesting that fathers sought joint custody only to reduce their child support payments. “The fathers’ custody activists claim that both legal and physical joint custody is in the best interest of the child. But it is no coincidence that joint custody drastically reduces the father’s child support payments and other financial obligations,” the newsletter said. “In reality, after joint custody is agreed to or ordered by the court, many mothers often have the child or children most of the time, while the reduced child support payment from the father negatively impacts the mother’s ability to support the child or children.” I’m sure that this is true some of the time. But nowhere here does the newsletter concede that some fathers might seek joint custody because they want to spend more time with their children. Nor do the authors seem to be aware that involvement of fathers in their children’s lives is important. Instead, the newsletter links to a website that features a list of the “myths and facts” related to fatherhood and family law. Myth number one? “A father’s involvement is crucial for the well-being of a child.”

Similar anti-father sentiments have arisen as some state legislatures have considered shared-parenting bills, in which fathers and mothers would have joint custody unless circumstances dictated otherwise. When the New York State legislature considered such a bill in 2006, NOW–New York State argued strongly against more father involvement. “If a person is not involved in the lives of his or her children during the marriage, why would that involvement increase after divorce?” wrote Marcia A. Pappas, its president at the time. That’s a reasonable question—in the case of the father Pappas was describing, the involvement probably wouldn’t have increased. But the question presumes that all fathers are the same, and that none of them is involved in the lives of his children—which certainly isn’t true.