The other dropout epidemic

A minister some time ago told a story about a popular greeting card company wanting to distribute Mother's Day cards at a small fee to inmates in various prisons. Much to their excitement, it proved to be one of the best ideas that they had come upon in a long time. Still in the throes of such excitement, the greeting card company decided to do the same with Father's Day. Long story, short version, this idea turned out to be the worst ever attempted. Why you ask, you can't send a card to a person who isn't there.
The statistics of fatherless homes in America and their impact are numerous, if you look at many of our nations negative statistics in light of absentee fathers.

1. 24 million children (34 percent) live absent their biological father.
   
2. Nearly 20 million children (27 percent) live in single-parent homes.
   
3. 1.35 million births (33 percent of all births) in 2000 occurred out of wedlock.
   
4. 43 percent of first marriages dissolve within fifteen years; about 60 percent of divorcing couples have children; and approximately one million children each year experience the divorce of their parents.
   
5. Over 3.3 million children live with an unmarried parent and the parent's cohabiting partner. The number of cohabiting couples with children has nearly doubled since 1990, from 891,000 to 1.7 million today.
   
6. Fathers who live with their children are more likely to have a close, enduring relationship with their children than those who do not. The best predictor of father presence is marital status. Compared to children born within marriage, children born to cohabiting parents are three times as likely to experience father absence, and children born to unmarried, non-cohabiting parents are four times as likely to live in a father-absent home.
   
7. About 40 percent of children in father-absent homes have not seen their father at all during the past year; 26 percent of absent fathers live in a different state than their children; and 50 percent of children living absent their father have never set foot in their father's home.
8. Children who live absent their biological fathers are, on average, at least two to three times more likely to be poor, to use drugs, to experience educational, health, emotional and behavioral problems, to be victims of child abuse, and to engage in criminal behavior than their peers who live with their married, biological (or adoptive) parents.
   
9. From 1960 to 1995, the proportion of children living in single-parent homes tripled, from 9 percent to 27 percent, and the proportion of children living with married parents declined. However, from 1995 to 2000, the proportion of children living in single-parent homes slightly declined, while the proportion of children living with two married parents remained stable.
10. Children with involved, loving fathers are significantly more likely to do well in school, have healthy self-esteem, exhibit empathy and pro-social behavior, and avoid high-risk behaviors such as drug use, truancy, and criminal activity compared to children who have uninvolved fathers.

These statistics were taken from http://www.fatherhood.org/fatherfacts_spl.asp, who are currently in the process of coming up with a Fatherhood Initiative to address the problem of absentee fathers.

As mentioned previously, the "dropout" problem can be linked with most of the negatives in our society. Several organizations have supplied the following data on some of these negative topics:

Child Abuse

The rate of child abuse in single-parent families is nearly twice the rate of child abuse in two-parent households.

Source: America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being. Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Washington, DC: GPO, 1997.

Crime

Even after controlling for family background variables such as mother's education level, race, family income, and number of siblings, as well as neighborhood variables such as unemployment rates and median income, boys who grew up outside of intact marriages were, on average, more than twice as likely as other boys to end up in jail.

Source: Harper, Cynthia C., and Sara S. McLanahan. "Father Absence and Youth Incarceration." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, August 1998.

Drug and Alcohol Use

Even after controlling for the effects of gender, age, race-ethnicity, family income, and residential mobility, teens in single-parent and stepparent families were 2 times more likely to use illegal drugs compared to teens in intact, two-parent married families.

Source: Hoffmann, John P., and Robert A. Johnson. "A National Portrait of Family Structure and Adolescent Drug Use." Journal of Marriage and the Family 60(August 1998): 633-645.

Education

Even after controlling for differences in income, children who were born out of wedlock and either remained in a single-parent family or whose mother subsequently married had significantly poorer math and reading scores and lower levels of academic performance than children from continuously married households.

Source: Cooksey, Elizabeth C. "Consequences of Young Mothers' Marital Histories for Children's Cognitive Development." Journal of Marriage and the Family 59(May 1997): 245-261.

Poverty

Single-parent families are five times as likely to be poor as married-couple families. In 1999, 6.3 percent of married-couple families with children were living in poverty, compared to 31.8 percent of single-parent families with children.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Current Population Survey.

Needless to say this is a deep-rooted program in our society with long-enduring implications. Let me know your view on this topic. If you are the product of a fatherless home, tell us the impact, if any, it has had on you personally. And last how can America as a nation effectively address this problem to help preserve this and future generations?