Hammering it home: Daughters need dads
USA TODAY, June 10, 2003
It's widely recognized that boys benefit from having dads around as role models and teachers about manhood.
But does having a father at home make much difference for girls?
But even in affluent families, girls become sexually active and pregnant earlier if they don't live with fathers, according to the largest and longest-term study on the problem. It was released in May.
Compared with daughters from two-parent homes, a girl is about five times more likely to have had sex by age 16 if her dad left before she was 6 and twice as likely if she stops living with her dad at 6 or older.
The study of 762 girls for 13 years took into account many factors that could lead to early sex, says Duke University psychologist Kenneth Dodge, the study's co-author. Still, there was an independent link between teenage sex and girls not living with their biological fathers. More..
Divorced Dads:
Shattering the Myths
Dr. Sandford L. Braver and Diane O'Connell
This is the result of the largest federally funded 8 year study of the issues confronting parents and their children in the United States.
Shattering the Myths. The surprising truth about fathers, children and divorce. More ..
Fathers 'have key role with children' after families split
The Telegraph, London, U.K.
Researchers say they found a direct relationship between children's behavioural problems and the amount of contact they had with their natural father.
The effect was more pronounced in single-parent families, particularly where the mother was a teenager. In such cases, children were especially vulnerable emotionally if they had no contact with their father. More..
Where's Daddy?The Mythologies behind Custody-Access-Support |
Fatherlessness is one of the greatest social problems in Canada
Interesting Quote from Amy Alkon, The Advice Goddess, syndicated columnist in over 100 US and Canadian publications:
-While the law allows women to turn casual sex into cash flow sex, Penelope Leach, in her book Children First, poses an essential question: “Why is it socially reprehensible for a man to leave a baby fatherless, but courageous, even admirable, for a woman to have a baby whom she knows will be so?”
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fathers commit a tiny minority of child abuse and about half the domestic violence.
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The vast majority of child physical and sexual abuse is committed in single-parent homes, home usually where the father is not present. "Contrary to public perception, research shows that the most likely physical abuser of a young child will be that childs mother, not a male in the household." [Patrick Fagan and Dorothy Hanks, The Child Abuse Crisis: The Disintegration of Marriage, Family, and the American Community (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation "Backgrounder," 3 June 1997), p. 16.]
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The father is the parent most likely to be the protector of children. "The presence of the father . . . placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse," according to David L. Rowland, Laurie S. Zabin, and Mark Emerson, in a study of low-income families. "The protective effect from the father's presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators." ["Household Risk and Child Sexual Abuse in a Low Income, Urban Sample of Women," Adolescent and Family Health, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 29-39.]
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A British study found children are up to 33 times more likely to be abused when a live-in boyfriend or stepfather is present than in an intact family. [Robert Whelan, Broken Homes and Battered Children: A Study of the Relationship between Child Abuse and Family Type (London: Family Education Trust, 1993), p. 29.]
Cornell University professor Urie Bronfenbrenner
One of the most eminent developmental psychologists of our time wrote:
"Controlling for factors such as low income, children growing up in [father absent] households are at a greater risk for experiencing a variety of behavioural and educational problems, including extremes of hyperactivity and withdrawal; lack of attentiveness in the classroom; difficulty in deferring gratification; impaired academic achievement; school misbehaviour; absenteeism; dropping out; involvement in socially alienated peer groups, and the so-called teenage syndrome of behaviours that tend to hang togethersmoking, drinking, early and frequent sexual experience, and in the more extreme cases, drugs, suicide, vandalism, violence, and criminal acts."
Paternal Abandonment
Research, mainly in the Unites States, published in refereed journals by respected scholars like Sanford Braver, Margaret Brinig, Douglas Allen, Ilene Wolcott, Jody Hughes, Judith Wallerstein, and Sandra Blakeslee, and corroborated by the professional experience of authors as ideologically diverse as Constance Ahrons, Shere Hite, David Chambers, Robert Seidenberg, and Rosalind Miles, indicates that paternal abandonment cannot account for widespread fatherlessness.
Father-deprivation is a more reliable predictor of criminal activity than race, environment or poverty.
Father-deprived children are:
- 72% of all teenage murderers.
- 60% of rapists.
- 70% of kids incarcerated.
- twice as likely to quit school.
- 11 times more likely to be violent.
- 3 of 4 teen suicides.
- 80% of the adolescents in psychiatric hospitals.
- 90% of runaways
Sources: National Fatherhood Initiative (U.S.A.), US Bureau of Census (U.S.A.), FBI (U.S.A.)
"Father-deprivation is a serious form of child abuse that is institutionalized and entrenched within our legal system. Powerful sexist people have a vested interest in diminishing the role of men, especially their role as fathers. Research proves that children thrive with the active and meaningful participation of both biological parents, and is true for post-divorce families." (Dick Feeman, Joseph Maiello, Mike Jebbet, "Child Custody or Child Abuse", Victoria Times-Colonist, Jan 8, 1998).
The Importance of Father Love: History and Contemporary Evidence
Published in Review of General Psychology of The American Psychological Association, Inc
This review contains such topics as:
- Father Love Is as Important as Mother Love
- Father Love Predicts Specific Outcomes Better Than Mother Love
- Father Love Is the Sole Significant Predictor of Specific Outcomes
- Father Love Moderates the Influence of Mother Love
- Paternal Versus Maternal Parenting May Be Associated With Different Outcomes in Sons and Daughters
Children who grew up fatherless are:
- Eight times more likely to go to prison.
- Five times more likely to commit suicide.
- 20 times more likely to have behavioural problems.
- 20 times more likely to become rapists.
- 32 times more likely to become runaways.
- 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances.
- Nine times more likely to drop out of high school.
- One-tenth as likely to get A's in school.
The Institute for the Study of Civil Society ( Civitas
) U.K.
Stunning statistics on the problems of fatherless homes
Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family
Delinquent Behavior, Future Divorce or Nonmarital Childbearing, and Externalizing Behavior Among Offspring: A 14-Year Prospective Study
The American Psychological Association, Inc., The Journal of Family Psychology, December 1999 Vol. 13, No. 4, 568-579
by Robert E. Emery, Mary Waldron and Katherine M. Kitzmann.
This is another study showing that children are significantly disadvantaged in never-married sole
maternal custody or divorced sole-maternal custody than in intact families. In fact, the study does indicate
that the damage of divorce is about the same level as never having the children involved with their father.
Certainly, raising children outside of the influence of both parents is clearly detrimental to the
child.
Custody and Couvade: The Importance of Paternal Bonding In the Law of Family Relations
by Geoffrey
P. Miller, from New York University School of Law, Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series, Working
Paper 5, 1999. The paper discusses the perceptions and reality of the involvement of fathers during
pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood.
Judicial passivism turning fathers into deadbeats
Judges refuse to enforce Divorce Act section that embraces equal access to child
The Edmonton Journal, Grant A. Brown, Freelance, Saturday, June 17, 2006
When mothers lose in court, they are not made to pay court costs -- again on the premise that this would only take money away from the children. But payment of penalties and costs is merely a transfer between parents, and only prejudice supports the proposition that fathers would be less generous toward their children than mothers, given the time and financial ability to do so.
Contrast the endless lame excuses judges use not to impose remedies for access denial with their attitude toward making and enforcing child-support orders. More ..
How "Daddy" affects your job: psychologist
Reuters, U.S.A., By Ellen Wulfhorst Fri May 12, 2006
NEW YORK, U.S.A. (Reuters) - Successes or failures of employees in the workplace can be traced to what kind of father they had, a psychologist argues in a new book.
In "The Father Factor," Stephan Poulter lists five styles of fathers -- super-achieving, time bomb, passive, absent and compassionate/mentor -- who have powerful influences on the careers of their sons and daughters. More ..
Put kids first, judge tells parents
His family court sees conflicts daily
Complex reasons why dads absent
The Toronto Star, ANDREA GORDON, FAMILY ISSUES REPORTER, Jan. 16, 2006.
Children pay a big price when they grow up without fathers, but it's unfair to blame it all on men who walk away, says a North York family court judge.
Harvey Brownstone says he welcomes recent public discussion about the risks faced by kids who don't have a father in their lives.
But Brownstone, who has seen thousands of support, custody and access cases during his 11 years on the bench, says there are many misperceptions about why it's happening. And most often it's because parents can't get along or want nothing to do with each other.
"You would be shocked how many men say, `I didn't know I had a child until I got these court papers,'" he says in an interview at his office in the provincial court building.
And, when they find out, almost all of them take steps to become involved in their child's life, even if it's years after the child was born, Brownstone says. More ..
Boys harmed by fathers' absence
The Age (Melbourne, Australia), By CHLOE SALTAU, Tuesday April 3, 2001
Boys are disadvantaged without the emotional presence of a man in their lives, according to a social researcher who is interviewing men about relationships with their fathers.
Patra Antonis, a psychologist, counsellor and Swinburne University masters student, says men should "be around the herd" and bond with their sons in an inherently male, "rough-and-tumble" way. Her theory is likely to reignite the debate about the impact of absent fathers on the development of their sons.
Ms Antonis is undertaking the research at a time when she says increases in the divorce rate and the rise of out-of-wedlock childbearing have changed families and the role of parents within them. More ..
Calgary Herald, Charles W. Moore, July 29, 1999
Feminist "analysis" dismissive of fathers
Charles W. Moore goes after quack psychologists busy "deconstructing" fatherhood
I am beginning to wonder if being a card-carrying lunatic facilitates getting published in journals of the American Psychological Association (APA)
A report, recently published in the APA's Psychological Bulletin, by Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman, asserted that the "negative potential" of child sexual abuse has "been overstated." The authors rationalized that while "child sexual abuse is harmful," supposedly consensual "child -adult sex" is not necessarily harmful and may, in some cases, even be "beneficial." More..
Research proves that fatherhood really matters
Tallahassee Democrat, KNIGHT RIDDER TRIBUNE, USA, By Roland C. Warren, April 20, 2002 More..
Dad's 1m fight for his child
Coventry Evening Telegraph, City News, U.K. by Liz Hazelton, July 27, 2004 More..
Landmark Ruling Grants Father Custody of Children
The Scotsman, PA News (U.K.),ead, July 3, 2004 More..
Children who have contact with their fathers following a family break-up suffer fewer behavioural problems, academics said today.
The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, May 26, 2004, Manchester Online, U.K. More..
Fathers 'have key role with children' after families split
The Telegraph, London, U.K., By Sarah Womack, Social Affairs Correspondent, May 26, 2004 More..
New Canadian Study of Fathers
Study aims to salvage image of fatherhood. First of its kind in Canada: 'Fathers are often treated as buffoons in our public images' More..
Letter to the editor:
Generations lost to 'fatherlessness'
The StarPhoenix, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, David A. Giles, March 11, 2004, More..
Fathers are not out of fashion
Don't believe the hype - we are facing a crisis of female fertility, not fatherhood, says Jack O'Sullivan
The Guardian U.K., January 28, 2004 More..
Fathers no longer required: Fertility chief signals an IVF revolution
The Independent, UK, By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, January 21, 2004 More..
Suzi Leather: 'It's the
relationship's quality that counts, not people's sex'
Interview: Head of fertility watchdog says writing fathers out of the rules will extend the chance of
treatment to all women
The Independent, UK, By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, January 21, 2004 More..
Research proves that fatherhood really matters
Tallahassee Democrat, KNIGHT RIDDER TRIBUNE, By Roland C. Warren, April 20, 2002 More..
Transforming the Culture of Fatherlessness
by Rev. Robert A. Sirico, Acton President, May 23, 2001, Acton Commentary More..
The Truth About Deadbeat Dads
Reader's Digest Canada, April, 2001, by Gladys Pollack More..
Study denouncing fathers sends danger signals
By Kathleen Parker, Published in The Orlando Sentinel, USA, on July 18, 1999
Now is the time for all good fathers to come to the aid of the family.
But you'd better hurry; your days are numbered. In fact, if you happen to be a heterosexual male (further doomed by Caucasian pigmentation), your days are already over, according to a cover article in the June issue of American Psychologist, published by the American Psychological Association.
In their article, "Deconstructing the Essential Father," researchers Louise B. Silverstein and Carl F. Auerbach challenge one of the core institutions of our culture -- fatherhood. More or less, fathers, as we've known and loved them, are obsolete.
The article makes numerous breathtaking assertions, but basically the researchers state that:
Fathers aren't essential to the well-being of children. More..
