Unit-7lifewithoutfather.doc

Life without father1The United States is becoming an increasingly fatherless society .a generation ago, a child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father .today, a child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of childhood.2This astonishing fact is reflected in many statistics, but here are the two most important: tonight, about 40 percent of U.S. children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live. More than half of our children been voluntarily abandoned by their fathers .never before in this country have so many children grown up without knowing what it means to have a father. 3Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation. It is the leading cause of the decline in the well-being of children .it is also the engine driving our most urgent social problems, from crime to adolescent pregnancy to domestic violence. Yet, despite its scale and social consequences, fatherlessness is frequently ignored or denied .especially within our elite discourse; it remains a problem with no name.4Surely a crisis of this scale merits a name and a response .at a minimum, it requires a serious debate: why is fatherhood declining? What can be done about it? Can our society find ways to invigorate effective fatherhood as a norm of male behavior? Yet, to date, our public discussion has been remarkably weak and defeatist. There is a prevailing belief that not much can or even should be done to reverse the trend.5As a society, we are changing our minds about mens role in family life. Our inherited understanding of fatherhood is under siege. Men are increasingly viewed as superfluous to family life: either expendable or part of the problem, masculinity itself often is treated with suspicion and even hostility, in our cultural discourse. Consequently, our society is unable to sustain fatherhood as a distinctive domain of male activity.6The core question is simple: does every child need a father? Increasingly, our societys answer is no. few idea shifts in this century are as consequential as this one. At stake is nothing less than what is means to be a man, who our children will be and what kind of society we will become.7My criticism is not simply of fatherlessness but of a culture of fatherlessness. For ,in addition to fathers, we are losing something larger:our idea of fatherhood.unlike earlier periods of father avsence in our history, such as wartime, we now face more than a physical loss affecting some homes. The 1940s child could say :my father had to leave for a while to do something important,the 90s child must say :my father left me permanently because he wanted to.8This is a cultural criticism because fatherhood, much more than motherhood, is a cultural invention; its meaning is shaped less by biology than man into certain ways of acting and understanding himself.9Like motherhood ,fatherhood is made up of both a biological and a social dimension .yet ,across the world,mothers are far more successful than fathers at fusing these dimensions into a coherent identity.is the nursing mother playing a biological or a social role?feeding or bonding?we can hardly separate the ptwo .so seamlessly are they woven together.but fatherhood is a different matter.a father makes his sole biological contribution at the moment of conception,linked only indirectly to biological paternity,a connection cannot be assumed, the phrase”to father a child” usually refers only to the act of insemination,not the responsibility for raising the child .what fathers contribute after conception is largerly a matter of cultural devising.10Moreover, dispite their other virtues,men are not ideally suited to responsible fatherhood.men are inclined to sexual promiscuity and paternal waywardness .anthropologically , fatherhood constitutes what might be termed a necessary problem. Ti is necessary because child well-being and societal success hinge largerly on a high level of paternal investment :mens willingness to devote energy and resources to the care of their offspring .it is a problem because men frequently are unwilling or unable to make that vital investment.11Because fatherhood is universally problematic , cultures must mobilize to enforce the father role, guiding men with legal and extralegal pressures that require them to maintain a close alliance with their childrens mather and invest in their children.because men do not volunteer for fatherhood as much as they are conscripted into it by the surrounding culture, only an authoritative cultural commitment to fatherhood can fuse biological and social paternity into a chherent male identity.for exactly this reason ,anthropologist Margaret Mead and others have observed that the supreme test of any civilization is whether it can socialize men by teaching them to nurture their offspring .12The stakes could hardly be higher .our societys conspicuous failure to sustain norms of fatherhood reveals a failure of collective memory and a collapse of moral imagination. It undermines families, neglects children, causes or aggravates our worst social problems and makes individual adult happiness, both female ,and male, harder to achieve.13Ultimately ,this failure reflects nothing less than a culture gone awry, unable to establish the boundaries and erect the signposts that can harmonize individual happiness with collectibe well-being .in short ,it reflects a culture that fails to “enculture” individual men and women ,mothers and fathers .14In personal terms, the main result of this failure is the spread of a me-first egotism hostile to all except the most puerile understandings of personal happiness ,in social terms, the results are a decline in childrenswell-being and a rise in male violence,especially against women .the most significant result is our societys steady fragmentation into atomized individuals , isolated from one another and estranged from the aspirations and realities of common membership in a family, a community, a nation ,bound by mutual commitment and shared memory.15Many voices today , including many expert voices, urge us to accept the decline of fatherhood with equanimity. Be realistic, they tell us . divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing are here to stay. Growing numbers of children will not will not have fathers .nothing can be done to reverse the trend itself .the only solution is to remedy some of its consequences: more help for poor children. More sympathy for single mothers .better divorce .more child-support payments .more prisons.more programs aimed at substituting for fathers.16Yet what avraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature always have guided us in the opposite direction, passivity in the face of crisis is inconsistent with the American tradition . managing decline never has been the hallmark of American expertise . in the inevitable and valuable tension between conditions and aspirations-between the social “is ” and the moral “ought” our birthright as Americans always has been our confidence that we can change for the better.17Does every child need a father? Our current answer hov