"A Father for Every Child"

From the book, "Fatherless America" by David Blankenhorn and published in 1996:

The most urgent domestic challenge facing the United States [today] is the re-creation of fatherhood as a vital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments -- not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools -- will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued societal recession.

Many 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 have fathers. Nothing can be done to reverse the trend itself. The only solution is to remediate 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 fathers.

Yet what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature have always guided us in the opposite direction. Passivity in the face of crisis is inconsistent with the American tradition. Managing decline has never been the hallmark of American enterprise. In the inevitable and valuable tension between conditions and aspirations -- between the social "is" and the moral "ought" -- our birhright as Americans has always been our confidence that we can change for the better.

Does every child deserve a father? Our current answer hovers between "no" and "not necessarily." But we need not make permanent the lowering of our standards. We can change minds. Moreover, we can change our minds without passing new laws, spending more tax dollars, or empaneling more expert commissions. Once we change our philosophy, we may well decide to pass laws, create programs, or commission research. But the first and most important thing to change is not our policies but our ideas.

Our essential goal must be the rediscovery in modern society of the fatherhood idea. Malinowski called it the "principle of legitimacey." For every child, a legally and morally responsible adult male. Others have described this idea as the imperative of paternal investment, achieved through a parental alliance with the mother. A more familiar name for such activity is married fatherhood.