Married Fatherhood

The importance of married and actively engaged fathers is not just a luxury belief.

Under a dark sky illuminated by brilliant lightning and thunder strikes, driving on a crowded highway through a torrential downpour is not for the faint of heart. Yet my destination made the arduous, stormy journey worth every fretful moment.

I was part of a caravan of married fathers, all traveling 200 miles to a weekend baseball tournament to coach and cheer on our eleven and twelve-year-old sons. Spending time with my own son reaffirmed the age-old wisdom of the importance of fathers’ presence, especially for boys.

Yet what was equally fulfilling was watching the boys' reactions when they saw they were supported by a community of fathers who had no other purpose than to encourage them. Even young men from single-mother households or who had fraught relationships with their own fathers seemed to get a lift from the engagement of these dedicated dads.

I can only describe what the boys seemed to be experiencing as a collective safety net—deriving the benefit themselves directly and hopefully learning how to pass the torch on to future generations when they reach manhood and fatherhood. 

As we celebrate another Father’s Day, this communal good of married fathers should add a new dimension to what we already know about the indispensable role of an active, engaged married father being present in the home. 

This is especially important now as competing visions of fatherhood emerge that will have different impacts on kids. 

Richard Reeves, the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has gained traction by arguing that society needs to reimagine fatherhood as an institution independent of marriage and cohabitation. In Reeves’ own words, his “goal is to bolster the role of fathers as direct providers of care to their children, whether or not they are married to or even living with the mother.”

I imagine everyone would agree that we should find more ways to help strengthen the direct relationships between fathers and children, perhaps especially when they are not in a healthy or otherwise relationship with the child’s mother. However, this vision of fatherhood in which men don’t need to be married to the mother of their children, nor even living with either, does not bode well given the dismal outcomes for the young men in society who have already experienced growing up with fathers not married to their mothers nor living with either of them.

This misguided prescription is a quintessential luxury belief: an idea that confers status on the privileged who don’t need to subscribe to that idea, but that idea takes a toll on the less privileged.

Take, for example, the role of fathers and marriage in the black community. In a much-cited New York Times article highlighting what they called the Punishing Reach Of Racism For Black Boys, they state that “Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds.” The provocative headline posits race as the causal factor driving these outcomes.

However, the study conducted by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the Census Bureau suggests a far more nuanced, inclusive recognition of family structure as a key contributor to these racial disparities and the likely factor driving upward mobility among black boys. The study states that “higher rates of father presence among low-income black households are associated with better outcomes for black boys...Black father presence at the neighborhood level predicts black boys' outcomes irrespective of whether their own father is present or not, suggesting that what matters is...community-level factors associated with the presence of fathers, such as role-model effects or changes in social norms.”

As far as the impact of black fathers in the home, as the below chart from the Statista data platform shows, the poverty rate for black married couples has remained in the single digits for nearly thirty consecutive years.  

While this data is race-specific, boys and girls of all races benefit from engaged, married fathers in the home and the neighborhood.

Yet, in too many parts of American society that are struggling, fatherhood is an institution already entirely divorced from marriage and cohabitation. Unwed childbearing remains the greatest driving force behind single motherhood, as opposed to divorce or paternal death. 

The good news is that, in what is arguably one of the greatest public health achievements of all time, teen births for kids aged 15-19 have dramatically lowered over the last thirty years. Yet, slightly up the age scale for young women aged 20-24, non-marital births have skyrocketed over the same timeframe. 

When I think of boys and girls growing up today, I worry about these trending attitudes and behaviors around motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, and future family formation. To combat these trends, teenagers on the path to young adulthood must be taught in middle and high school that 97% of Millennials who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34). Marriage must become known as the institution that first bonds the father to his spouse, the original commitment, even before children are present. 

For young men on Father’s Day, this is the takeaway message: Marriage is the social institution, however imperfect, that imposes a moral obligation—and privilege—on a father that no other institution can replicate to be a strong role model for their children and, even as the collective presence of married fathers at my son’s baseball game showed, for other children as well.

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