This issue has been brought to my attention in several different settings (church, friends, and now the news) in the last couple of weeks, and I thought it might make for interesting discussion fodder. Are absentee fathers / fatherless homes / single mothers / broken homes really as bad for kids as they appear to be? Here are some claims:
There’s this list of statistics (although I’m a bit more dubious about the source) as well:
So is all of this just men’s-rights misogynistic nonsense? Are they just spinning statistics to serve a narrative? Or is there really something to this claim that a missing father is really awful for kids? What’s the Straight Dope?
An absent parent doesn’t make a broken home per se. I have no doubt that kids in seriously dysfunctional families, no matter how many parents are in the picture, are susceptible to a variety of problems. How it turns out depends on the circumstances, sometimes the children of broken families turn out fine, they learn to be self-sufficient, they learn to overcome adversity. But those are the ones that beat the odds.
I think what we can take from with this is children whose father leaves or is never met are more likely to develop symptoms of depression, which can lead to other, worse things.
Quite possibly. But we have to be careful not to confuse correlation with causation. It may be that some of the factors that are causing the fathers to be absent are also causing the kids to be troubled (e.g. heritable mental illness).
My mother was a better father than my father ever was. It was always amusing to hear him pontificate about all of the “manly virtues”, that men were supposedly better than women at, and in every one of which Mom was better than him.
There is certainly valid reason to think that stable loving families overall are better for kids, but these cherry-picked data about the families of specific mass murderers are extremely fishy.
In the first place, as all beginning stats students learn, the statistically meaningful information isn’t what percentage of Extraordinarily Tiny Group A share Very Common Characteristic B. It’s what percentage of people with Characteristic B end up being members of Group A.
It is very common nowadays for a randomly selected American man not to have been “raised by his biological father since childhood”. In fact, probably less than two-thirds of American adults under 50 lived under the same roof with their biological father for their entire childhood.
But the overwhelmingly vast majority of these people don’t become mass murderers. So right away the claim that not spending one’s entire childhood with biodad present somehow significantly influences mass-murder propensities smells like bullshit.
There’s also the cherry-picking of the “27 deadliest mass shooters” category. The absolute number of victims isn’t a reliable indicator of how messed up or evil a shooter is, so it’s silly to draw a line under the top 27 and treat them as though they constituted some kind of meaningful category that the next 20 or 30 shooters on the list should be excluded from.
Finally, AFAICT the claim itself is flat-out false, irrespective of whether or not it’s even meaningful. By my count, based on your source’s linked list, both the Columbine killers, the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, and the Texas Tower shooter Charles Whitman spent their entire childhood in intact families with married birth parents. The San Ysidro shooter James Huberty appears to have been raised by his father to adulthood, though his mother left the family when he was around 10. The Vietnamese immigrant who killed 13 people in Binghamton in 2009 lived with both his parents in Vietnam for nearly the first 20 years of his life, and immigrated to the US together with them in the late 1980s.
I haven’t checked all the rest of the perpetrators, but already it appears that the claim that 26 out of the top 27 shooters in the “most deadly” category weren’t raised to adulthood by a biological father is purely and simply a lie.
A lot has to do with poverty and race. A single earning household is almosy always going to be poorer than a dual earning household. That’s simple math. Families that would be middle class with two earners can often sink to poverty levels with a single earner. The other factor is that black children are many times more likely than white or Hispanic children to be fatherless and there are many systemic factors besides fatherlessness that go into many statistics dealing with black families.
Of course, there’s likely some causation as well. Behaviour and beliefs are largely socially scripted from our environment, so having a stable male figure to script from is a positive, of course, having an unstable male figure to script from has it’s own issues. I think it’s pretty much undebateable that being raised in a financially and emotionally stable household with two parents who exhibit positive behaviours leads to better outcomes than being raised in an impoverished, single parent household with a likely overwhelmed parent.
…with the exception of Tashfeen Malik (who worked in partnership with her husband) all the shooters were men. Perhaps before examining all the other possible commonalities maybe you should start with the obvious one.
Perhaps I didn’t make this clear in the OP, but I didn’t really want to make this thread about the school shooters or school shootings. That was just one data point (an apparently inaccurate one, which I thank Kimstu for taking the time to track down and fact check) out of three, that I had run across in the last couple of weeks about the harm of fatherlessness. I’d recommend we set the first cite about school shooters aside, since we know it’s not accurate (again, thanks to Kimstu), and focus on the other, broader symptoms of fatherlessness (not sure if that’s even a word, or the right word) outlined in the OP.
Not a very good one. This 2011 Pew Report says that 33% of American adults aged 18-29, and 23% of ones aged 30-49, have at least one stepparent. From there, I’m seat-of-the-pantsing with the facts that about 1 in 2 first marriages end in divorce, that about a quarter of all children live with a single mother, that mothers are far more likely to be custodial parents than fathers, and that the average length of a first marriage is 8 years and 60% of divorces involve people aged 25 to 39, to guesstimate that around a third of under-50 Americans either never had a resident biodad or stopped having one sometime before they reached adulthood.
I think that sounds like a reasonable ballpark figure, but I’m not claiming any more for it than that it seems probable. What is definitely factually certain, however, is that not having had a resident biodad for the entire period from birth to adulthood is not in any sense a rare phenomenon. It’s incomparably less rare than becoming a mass murderer.
Recognizing though I do that part of the debate is meant to be the veracity of HurricaneDitka’s citations in the first place, note that his second cite includes this nugget:
That suggests that 1/3 is indeed a reasonable ballpark figure.
Its a chicken and egg issue. A fatherless home creates dysfunction, but dysfunction also creates fatherless homes.
Impoverished homes, homes with low levels of education, people who got pregnant too young, people who aren’t smart enough to use birth control (to avoid unwanted pregnancies), people from marginalized groups, etc. are more likely to end up fatherless.
There is no reason to believe the children of any particular ‘missing’ father would be better of with him involved.
Men who are not eager to take an active part in raising their children probably do not make good fathers. Women are less likely to separate from men who are good fathers; that is probably the case for men, too, now that I think.
I think it depends a lot on why is there “an absent father”. Dad travels a lot for business/military duty/is a fisherman/sailor/truck driver… is very different from Dad skipped town or Dad is in jail. Dad died is also different. There is no Dad, there was a semen donor is, again, different. And focusing on biological fathers exclusively, as the first cite in the OP does, defines adoptive families as broken families. Really? Whomever wrote that thinks my Newest Nephew is less my nephew than the Oldest Nephew? Let him come here, I’ll rant his ears flat!
