When the father isn’t in the picture, boys suffer. When 12 million boys are growing up in homes without their biological fathers, America suffers.
There are a hundred reasons a child might grow up without a father in the house, and most boys in such a circumstance turn out fine, thanks to a heroic mother, a stepfather, adoptive parents, or just plain resilience and luck. But the odds are against the boys without their biological fathers present, as the Institute for Family Studies laid out in a recent brief titled “‘Life Without Father’: Less College, Less Work, and More Prison for Young Men Growing Up Without Their Biological Father.”
Boys are already less likely than girls to finish high school, go to college, or graduate from college, and that gap is even greater for children from fatherless homes. Looking at men ages 28 to 34, more than a third of those raised with their biological father had college degrees, while only 14% had a degree among those raised without.
The correlation holds up, the IFS authors state, “even after controlling for race, family income growing up, maternal education, age, and an AFQT score (a measure of general knowledge).”
Meanwhile, that raised-fatherless group of men was twice as likely to have spent time in prison (21%) as those raised with their biological fathers (10%).
Not unrelated to the college gap and the prison gap is the idleness gap. Men in their late 20s in neither a job nor school hail disproportionately from households without their biological father present.
At a time when the traditional family is seen as a system of the patriarchy, the lesson here is needed. If you want our young men to be better trained, formed, and educated, and you’d rather have them in a job or college rather than prison, you’d better find a way to strengthen the traditional family and get more fathers back in the business of raising their own children.
