THE CULTURAL LEFT IS TIRED of getting beat up for being anti-family. So, a small but influential number of academics, social critics, and policy types have come up with a new gambit: They are anti-marriage but pro-parenthood.
They are pro-parenthood because they are unable any longer to deny that parents are important to the well-being of children. They are anti-marriage because they are deeply committed to denying any privileged status to the traditional family, with its two parents of opposite sexes who are married to each other.
Parents, according to this new line of thought, can be single, divorced, married, “cohabiting,” gay, lesbian, whatever. The result will be the same, provided that they are committed to the child; children need parents, but the existence and nature of any commitment to each other is beside the point.
This argument recently attracted attention when American Psychologist published “Deconstructing the Essential Father,” a study that attempted to prove that “a wide variety of family structures can support positive child outcomes.” The authors, Louise B. Silverstein and Carl F. Auerbach, professors at Yeshiva University, were candid about their intentions: “We do not believe that the data support the conclusion that fathers are essential to child well-being and that heterosexual marriage is the social context in which responsible fathering is most likely to occur.”
Public policy that favors the traditional family, Silverstein and Auerbach argue, “discriminates against cohabiting couples, single mothers, and gay and lesbian parents.” The authors are therefore “interested in encouraging public policy that supports the legitimacy of diverse family structures, rather than policy that privileges the two-parent heterosexual, married family.”
Fundamental to their argument is the belief that there is nothing unique to mothering or fathering. Therefore, men and women are interchangeable in their relationship to children. As evidence, Silverstein and Auerbach cite the apparently exemplary behavior of marmosets, the South American monkeys. “Male marmosets behave like full-time mothers.” Which is possible, they explain, because marmosets live in a “bioecological context” which allows men to act as primary caregivers. So, if humans would just expand their bioecological contexts, they would find that two men can parent as well as two women, as well as one woman, as well as a cohabiting man and woman, as well as a married man and woman.
Throughout their work, Silverstein and Auerbach attack the fatherhood movement and the “neoconservative” belief that absentee fathers are responsible for a host of social ills. David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America, and David Popenoe, who wrote Life Without Father, are repeatedly denounced for spreading this “dramatic oversimplification.” In their attempt to correct our understanding, the Yeshiva professors detail the “potential costs of father presence.” Fathers in one study they cite spent all the family’s money on gambling, booze, and cigarettes, and, as a result, the wayward men “actually increased women’s workload and stress level.”
But, while “Deconstructing the Essential Father” may be regarded as propaganda, it should not be dismissed. “Ten years ago, it would have been laughable,” says Wade Horn, president and founder of the National Fatherhood Initiative. “Today it is dangerous.” According to Popenoe, director of the National Marriage Project, “This is the new theme emerging from the left. They want to move from a marriage contract to a parenting contract.”
Examples are plentiful. Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science and policy adviser to prime minister Tony Blair, argues that we might as well give up on marriage. In his book The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, he writes, “The proportion of children born outside marriage probably won’t decline, and lifelong sexual partnerships will almost certainly become increasingly uncommon. Contractual commitment to a child could thus be separated from marriage, and made by each parent as a binding matter of law, with unmarried and married fathers having the same rights and the same obligations.”
The critic Barbara Ehrenreich floats a similar notion in Harper’s magazine. Asked for “a picture of the future,” Ehrenreich responded, “In my utopia I would expect that marriage would change a lot. Couples would make a contract, not with each other, because I think these relationships don’t last forever, but make a contract to be co-parents forever. I think we might formalize that and maybe make some beautiful ceremonies around the co-parenting contract.”
So, if marriages are doomed anyway, why bother trying? Why not replace the “outmoded” concept of marriage with a more convenient contractual arrangement?
Because nothing gives a child more advantages than two married parents who live under the same roof. Cohabitation, separation, and any situation in which adults would need a “parenting contract” precludes the very best option for kids. The assumption that parenting contracts could somehow replace marriage is wholly unrealistic. As Wade Horn points out, there are not simply one or two areas in which the benefits of a traditional family are observable: These benefits are present “on every single measure of child well-being.”
For example, married parents do the best job of protecting a child from poverty. In 1995, only 10 percent of children under 18 in families with two married parents lived in poverty. Contrast that with the 50 percent who lived with an unmarried mother. Numerous studies have found that, without fathers, young boys are more likely to engage in criminal activity and girls to engage in early sexual activity. Other measurable areas — education, physical health, emotional health, substance abuse — all favor the family with two married parents.
If so, then wouldn’t a parenting contract be an improvement on the all-too-common situation in which one parent is totally uninvolved? “In principle, a parenting contract is not a bad idea,” says Lionel Tiger in a phone interview. “At least you’re ahead of ‘Okay, we’ve had sex, see you later.’ Any contract is an element of social control.” Which raises a crucial question.
How would a parenting contract be enforced? If the contract were no more than a handshake, sticking to it would be a matter of individual honor — not exactly money in the bank. Anthony Giddens suggests that co-parenting arrangements could be made a matter of law, but, as he acknowledges, “enforcing parenthood contracts wouldn’t be without its problems.” So, “other modes of seeking to balance risk and responsibility could also be instituted.”
But what kind of parents will we have if men and women are not following the desire to nurture their own, but carrying out government-enforced obligations? As Harvey Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard, puts it, such an artificial arrangement would not be “strong enough on a day-to-day basis. Who’s going to take the child to the park?”
Ultimately, parenting contracts are a clever way to liberate adults from commitments made before God, the law, and one’s friends and family. Instead of marriage, which would best suit the needs of a child, parents can make up their own rules, tell themselves to abide by them, and justify it all with theories that say the kids will turn out all right in the end.
Liberation-minded lefties are not alone in this effort to disengage marriage from parenting. In a recent article in the American Enterprise, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe warn that the fatherhood movement, in which both authors have played major roles, has been drifting in the direction of marriage-free parenthood. The movement has been coopted by fathers’ rights activists, government-funded programs, and advocates for low-income dads, all of whom are sympathetic to the divorce culture that Whitehead and Popenoe have lamented. Under these new influences, the movement now promotes so-called responsible fatherhood.
This amounts to helping divorced and unwed fathers who are separated from their children become involved in their lives. It is parenthood without any nagging about the importance of marriage. “Responsible fatherhood,” White-head and Popenoe make clear, “is daddy defined down to his minimum legal requirements: a name on a birth certificate, a signature on a child support check, some unspecified expression of emotional care — a birthday card, weekends together, whatever. Call it daddy lite.”
This of course would suit Silverstein and Auerbach just fine. Consider one of their stated goals: “Social policy is needed that removes the impediments to paternal involvement for never-married and divorced fathers. Rather than privileging the institution of heterosexual marriage at the expense of other family structures, it is essential to strengthen the father-child bond within all family contexts, especially non-married contexts.”
But the inconvenient fact remains that children benefit from married “contexts.” After all, the human family is a bit more intricate than the marmoset household.
Pia Nordlinger is an editorial writer at the New York Post.
