Favoring intact families (in spite of praise by the New York Times), the Institute for Family Studies posts a sobering report entitled:
‘Life Without Father’: Less College, Less Work, and More Prison for Young Men Growing Up Without Their Biological Father
How serious is the problem? Here is the data extracted from Census Bureau reports.
The percentage of boys living apart from their biological father has almost doubled since 1960—from about 17% to 32% today; now, an estimated 12 million boys are growing up in families without their biological father.1 Specifically, approximately 62.5% of boys under 18 are living in an intact-biological family, 1.7% are living in a step-family with their biological father and step- or adoptive mother, 4.2% are living with their single, biological father, and 31.5% are living in a home without their biological father.
And the results of this?
Economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman observed that “male children raised in female-headed households are less likely to have a positive male adult household member present,” are “particularly at risk for adverse outcomes across many domains, including high school dropout, criminality, and violence,” and, consequently, “the diminished involvement of the related male parent may magnify the emerging gender gap in educational attainment and labor market outcomes.”
COTTonLINE adds: It is reasonable to blame President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs for the much increased prevalence of fatherless-homes. These programs made single motherhood a viable "career track" which generations of poor women have found useful.
