www.dailysignal.com
The Government Failed at Fatherhood
The government spent decades trying to make fathers unnecessary. The failure of that experiment put society on the long-term path to collapse.
Father’s Day is Sunday. It’s much less popular than Mother’s Day for a sad reason. Fewer fathers are involved in their children’s lives. That’s caused by two main factors, the first being children born to single moms. In 2022, almost 40% of births were to unmarried women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The second reason is the prevalence of divorce.
Statistically, children raised without a father face a bleak future. Homes led by a single mother are more than four times as likely to live in poverty compared to married couples. Poverty is associated with a host of problems, including lower academic achievement. Children without fathers around are more likely to go to prison. They’re less likely to attend college. Children without dads are more likely to act out and have substance abuse problems. Tragically, teenage girls without a father present are seven times more likely to become pregnant. And thus, the cycle repeats itself.
“A broken family is one of the biggest reasons why our children are committing crimes,” Nevada’s Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said in a video promoting Dads in Schools. “Fatherless—no father at home is a huge deal. It has a huge impact on a child’s life.”
Given this, promoting fatherhood should be a societal priority. It hasn’t been.
Welfare once “went to mothers so long as no male was boarding in the household,” Harvard professor Paul Peterson wrote in a 2015 article for Education Next. He continued, “Marriage to an employed male, even one earning the minimum wage, placed at risk a mother’s economic well-being.”
Put together, these handouts were generous. “Analysts estimated that in 1975 a household head would have to earn $20,000 a year to have more resources than what could be obtained from Great Society programs,” Peterson wrote.
In today’s dollars, that’d be more than $115,000. Little wonder marriage collapsed. Even today, some couples still face a tax penalty for getting married.
This is backward. Marriage provides major societal benefits.
But most people don’t think so. Last year, Pew asked if “society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority.” Among supporters of President Donald Trump, 59% agreed. That’s a low number. But among supporters of former President Joe Biden, before he dropped out, just 19% thought so. Among all voters, it was 39%.
Those are depressing numbers. It foreshadows the long-term decline of society. Most obviously, a country that doesn’t reproduce shrinks. Look at Japan and South Korea. The U.S. birth rate has also fallen well below the replacement rate. Immigration can boost population numbers, but can also create its own problems, as the country experienced under Biden.
More fundamentally, societies, even powerful ones, aren’t eternal. Just ask the Roman Empire. Oh wait. It doesn’t exist anymore.
If a country imports people who don’t share its fundamental principles, that society can quickly become unrecognizable. Look at the pro-Hamas protesters calling for “death of America” while in America.
A healthy society would grapple with and debate these issues. Sure, there’d be disagreements, but discussions would likely expose areas of agreement and potential solutions. But woe to those who mention how out-of-wedlock births have devastated the African-American community. Or that all global cultures aren’t equal. If you point these things out, Democrats will quickly strawman your argument to accuse you of racism.
That may be good politics in the moment, but its results aren’t. It’s one reason why the fatherlessness crisis, along with its negative downstream effects, continues to fester.
COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post The Government Failed at Fatherhood appeared first on The Daily Signal.
New Posts (Home)
ChatBox
Popular Posts 
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
