👨‍👩‍👦 Family, Divorce & Providers

⬅️ Hub: Boy Crisis MOC

Divorce, marriage dynamics, the provider role, and the dad deficit.

Divorce

• Men often lose their family, home, income, and children in rapid succession post-divorce.
• Reeves argues that the child support and custody systems are outdated and anti-father.
• Fathers, especially unwed ones, must separately prove paternity and fight for custody rights.
• He calls for:
  • Presumption of equal custody
  • Programs to keep divorced dads involved in their children’s lives
  • A shift from punitive child support to pro-fatherhood systems
• Divorce and Custody: Post-divorce, many men find themselves further removed from their children’s lives due to custody arrangements that might not favor equal parenting time. The book discusses how even when men want to be involved, the legal and social systems can make it challenging, leading to what is described as “dad deprivation.”

Family & Marriage

• Men without college degree, between 30-50, 50% have a child. For women, its 80%. Used to be 80%+ for men.

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  For Steinem, as for most feminists of her generation, marriage was a relationship of crippling dependency. Her message to the young women on the lawn at Smith was to make their own way in the world and to be able to pay their own bills. “Dependence represents a lack of alternatives,” wrote Margaret Mead, a few years after Steinem’s speech. “A woman equipped to earn her own living need never feel trapped… . Independence begins with economic independence.”

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Until the 1970s, the typical female college graduate had become a wife within a year of graduation.4 Among today’s Smith graduates, only about half are married by their mid-30s.

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(1) the male role has long been culturally defined as that of a provider, and based on the economic dependence of mothers on men; (2) this traditional role has been dismantled by the securing of economic independence by women; (3) culture and policy are stuck on an obsolete model of fatherhood, lagging way behind economic reality; and (4) this is resulting in a “dad deficit,” with men increasingly unable to fulfill the traditional breadwinner role but yet to step into a new one.

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liberalization of divorce law

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40% of births in the U.S. now take place outside marriage, up from just 11% in 1970.

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decline in shotgun marriages

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According to the General Social Survey, three quarters (74%) of U.S. adults now agree that working mothers can establish as “warm and secure” a relationship with their children as a stay-at-home mother, compared to 48% in 1977.

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In an influential 1980 essay, “Why Men Resist,” William Goode observed that “the underlying shift is toward the decreasing marginal utility of males.”

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For many couples, marriage now serves primarily as a “capstone” to a series of educational, social, and economic achievements, as Andrew Cherlin puts it.33 Fewer than one in five American adults think that marriage is essential to living a fulfilling life, and of those who are married, just one in seven say that financial reasons were a major factor in the decision to tie the knot.

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Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker.38 Drug-related deaths among never-married men more than doubled in a decade from 2010.39 Divorce, now twice as likely to be initiated by wives as husbands, is psychologically harder on men than women.40 one of the great revelations of feminism may turn out to be that men need women more than women need men.

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In 2017, the Pew Research Center asked Americans a difficult question: What is the meaning of life? Specifically, they asked respondents an open- ended question, “What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling, or satisfying? What keeps you going, and why?” one of their most striking discoveries was that women find more meaning in their lives, and from more sources, than men. Women and men are equally likely to say that their job or career provides “a great deal of meaning and fulfillment” (33% and 34%).42 But in almost every other domain, there was a marked gender gap: 43% of women across all age groups mentioned children or grandchildren as a source of current meaning, for example, compared to just 24% of men.

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In 1979, there was almost no difference in marriage rates by social class. Today there is a wide gap.29 The marriage rate of men aged 40–44 with a high school education or less has dropped by more than 20 percentage points over the past 40 years, compared to 6 percentage points for those with college education.30 As my colleague Isabel Sawhill has written, “Family formation is a new fault line in the American class structure.”

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Most births to women with only a high school diploma now occur outside marriage (59%), but the same is true for just one in ten births to women with a 4-year college degree.

Providers

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Concluding a sweeping survey of a number of cultures from the Mediterranean basin to Tahiti to South Asia, published in Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, David Gilmore writes, “To be a man in most of the societies we have looked at, one must impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin… . We might call this quasi-global personage something like ‘Man-the- Impregnator-Protector-Provider.’”

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Men are expected to put others before themselves in a variety of ways, including by giving up resources to the group, as well as risking injury or even death in its defense.

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important to note, however, that life has not always been rosy for men in traditional families.

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Witness the quiet desperation of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, who has to “suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation” and who can only fulfill his role as breadwinner, in the end, by taking his own life.13 Men’s freedom has often been stifled by patriarchy too, with tightly prescribed roles and oppressive expectations.

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Women are now the main breadwinner in 41% of U.S. households.16 Some of those are single mothers, but by no means all; three in ten wives now out-earn their husbands, twice as many as in 1981.

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Mothers have also received growing support from the welfare system, allowing even those with low or no earnings to be freer of the need for a breadwinning husband

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The economic numbers have changed. The social norms have not. Four out of five American adults (81%) with a high school education or less still believe that “for a man to be a good husband or partner, being able to support a family financially is very important” (compared to 62% of those with a bachelor’s degree).26 So the very men who are least able to be traditional breadwinners are the most likely to be judged by their breadwinning potential. What this means is that men who fare poorly in the labor market are also likely to suffer in the marriage market, especially in the working class.27 Husbands without jobs are at much higher risk of seeing their marriages end today than in the past, according to work from Alexandra Killewald. “expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded,” she concludes, “but the husband breadwinner norm persists.”

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“Our estimates imply that aversion to having the wife earn more than the husband explains 29 percent of the decline in marriage rates over the last thirty years,” they write.29 (It is worth noting that the aversion was found among both men and women.) In other words, as women have earned more, relative to men, they have become less likely to marry. Sociologist Steve Ruggles estimates that 40% of the drop in marriage among Americans aged 25 to 29 from 1960 to 2013 can be explained by the fall in male earnings relative to men of the previous generation.30 Notably, this dampening effect on marriage was strongest among those with less education.

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Dench worried that without the traditional provider role, men would “struggle to get full acceptance and risk anomie and short-termism.”31 Given the difficulties of many men today, this fear cannot be dismissed as scaremongering. The success of the women’s movement has not caused the precariousness of male social identity, but it has exposed it. The question is where we go from here.

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Men who are not providers, or at least do not see themselves as such, work less. After an in-depth study of working class men in New Jersey, published as The Dignity of Working Men in 2000, Michèle Lamont concluded that “being hardworking is a mode of expressing manliness.” Work signaled the fulfillment of the central male role of “providing for and protecting the family” and was part of the “disciplined self” that constitutes mature masculinity.36

Sacrificing Time with Children to be a Provider

• Traditional Role of Provider: The book emphasizes that men are often culturally and economically pressured into prioritizing their role as financial providers over being actively involved in raising their children. This stems from historical and societal expectations where men’s primary value was seen as their ability to earn money, support the family financially, and protect them.
• Economic Necessity: Men are depicted as having to work long hours or take on dangerous jobs to ensure the financial stability of their families. This often means less time for nurturing, bonding, or even daily interaction with their children.
• Divorce and Custody: Post-divorce, many men find themselves further removed from their children’s lives due to custody arrangements that might not favor equal parenting time. The book discusses how even when men want to be involved, the legal and social systems can make it challenging, leading to what is described as “dad deprivation.”

A Dad Deficit

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Within 6 years of their parents separating, one in three children never see their father, and a similar proportion see him once a month or less.

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Among fathers who did not complete high school, 40% live apart from their children, compared to just 7% of fathers who graduated from college.47 In 2020, one in five children (21%) were living with a mother only, almost twice as many as in 1968 (11%).

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Eighty-two percent of women aged 25–34 say that “it is okay for an unmarried female to have and raise a child,” and 74% of their male peers agree.

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The result is that the separation of men from women too often means the separation of fathers from children. This is bad for men, bad for women, and bad for children. Just as women have largely broken free of the old, narrow model of motherhood, so men need to escape the confines of the breadwinner model of fatherhood. Fathers matter to children even if— perhaps especially if—they are not married to their mother. The social institution of fatherhood urgently needs an update, to become more focused on direct relationships with children. Along with the obvious challenges there is a big opportunity here too, for an expansion in men’s roles.