👨👦 Fatherlessness
⬅️ Hub: Boy Crisis MOC
The evidence on father absence — the core causal claim.
Fatherlessness
- Scott cites research from Richard Reeves, noting that the loss of a male role model (e.g., in single-parent homes, which are 92% mother-led in the US) is a critical “first domino” leading to negative outcomes for boys. Boys from fatherless homes are 300% more likely to engage in criminal behavior like carrying guns or dealing drugs.
- In the US, 25% of boys grow up without a father, a figure that doubled from 11% in 1968 to 21% in 2020.
- Logan and Scott note a decline in male teachers (from one in three to 24% in schools) and male involvement in after-school programs, leaving boys without positive male influences.
- Mental Health: Boys without active father figures are more prone to depression, anxiety, and suicide.
- Behavioral Issues: Increased risks of delinquency, substance abuse, and criminal behavior are linked to father absence.
- Educational Outcomes: Boys tend to struggle more in school without the involvement of fathers, who might provide different perspectives on learning, discipline, and motivation.
- Father-less families
1. Births to unmarried women U.S. percentage 1980-2022 | Statista
2. Damage to daughters
1. Sexual to keep men
2. Teenage Pregnancy
3. Don’t know how to trust males
1. Scared men will reject them
3. Damage to sons
1. Economic
1. Unemployment
2. Succeeded up the ladder
3. Children who were born poor and raised by both married parents had an 80 percent chance of moving to the middle class or above; conversely, children who were born into the middle class and raised without a married dad were almost four times as likely to end up considerably poorer. Richard V. Reeves, “Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American Dream,” Brookings Institution, Brookings Essay, August 20, 2014. See video: http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/saving-horatio-alger.
4. The Moynihan Report concluded that in a majority-black community the main predictor oI growing up poor was not race but being born to parents who are not married. Why? A predictable outcome oI no marriage was no father involvement.
1. While the Moynihan Report identified the quarter oI black children born outside marriage as a crisis with a solution in 1965, today the percentage oI white children born outside marriage is 36 percent
2. Perhaps it was because in 196 the percentage of white children born outside marriage was only 3.1 percent. The 36 percent rate today represents a nearly twelvefold increase. Among non-college-educated white women under thirty who have children without marrying, the current 51 percent figure is double what it was among blacks when the Moynihan Report alerted us to the crisis. Unfortunately, moms of Hispanic origin have followed the same pattern.
2. Emotional intelligence
3. Intelligence
1. 71 percent of high school dropouts have minimal or no father involvement.
2. doubled a child’s chance oI dropping out of high school.
4. Marital potential
5. Slower maturation
6. Poorer social skills
7. Targeted by sexual predators
1. The film Spotlight helped the world see how the 6 percent of Catholic priests who molested children homed in on dad-deprived boys.
2. Children between ten and seventeen living without their biological dad were more likely to be victims of child abuse, major violence, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Heather A. Turner, “The Effect of Lifetime Victimization on the Mental Health of Children and Adolescents,” Social Science & Medicine 62, no. 1 (January 2006): 13–27.
8. Suicide
1. Living in a home without a dad is more highly correlated with suicide among children and teenagers than any other factor.
9. Drugs
1. Father involvement is at least five times more important in preventing drug use than closeness to parent, parental rules, parent trust or strictness, and is a stronger determining factor than the child’s gender, ethnicity, or social class.
10. Homelessness
2. Around 90 percent of runaway and homeless youths are from fatherless homes.
11. Bullying
1. The American Psychological Association found in its review of 13 studies that father absence predicts the profile of both the bully and the bullied: poor self-esteem, poor grades, and poor social skills.
12. Post-posed gratification
13. lack of empathy
14. Lack motivation
15. Depressed
16. ADHD
17. Obese
18. Addictions
4. In modern nations, idea that marriage isn’t necessary for survival
Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.99 (file not included in this release)
boys suffer more from family instability, especially from the exit of biological fathers. Boys raised by single parents, especially single mothers, have worse outcomes than girls (including their own sisters) at school and lower rates of college enrollment, in part because of bigger differences in behavioral problems in the classroom. “Boys do especially poorly in broken families,” write Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan.