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FATHERLESS FAMILIES
MAY 3, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report" engages David Popenoe, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, author of Life Without Father.
DAVID GERGEN, U.S. News & World Report: Dr. Popenoe, in your new book, you make the case that since the 1960's America has experienced a dramatic social revolution. In 1960, 17 percent of the children in America went to bed at night without their natural father at home. Today, we're up to 36 percent who are fatherless, and you say that by the turn of the century, if current trends continue, we'll be up to 50 percent. Now, your book says these are the result of two trends, the continuing high divorce rate, 50 percent, as well as the increase in the illegitimacy rate which is now up to one out of three babies are born out of wedlock. But you go on to say that this has significant consequences for children, very damaging consequences. Let's start there. What are those consequences?
DAVID POPENOE, Author, Life Without Father: The best evidence is that children coming from non-intact families have a risk factor of two to three times various problems befalling them as they become teenagers and young adults, compared to children from intact families. And that means juvenile delinquency. It means dropping out of school. It means having a bad marriage when they become adults. It means for girls having teenage pregnancy. That means if you have, let's say 10 percent of the kids from intact families becoming delinquents, to pick a percentage--this may not be quite accurate--you have from non-intact families, single-parent families and fatherless families 20 or 30 percent, so that's really a staggering difference.
MR. GERGEN: Yeah. It doesn't happen in all families, as you say, but it was interesting, you used the idea it's comparable to taking the risk of smoking two to three packs of cigarettes a day.
DAVID POPENOE: Exactly. I mean, I've heard that if a man, for example, has two choices, to stop smoking or to stay married, by far the best thing is to stay married if he wants to live a healthy, rich life.
MR. GERGEN: Right. Right. Well, that was the other interesting point. You came to the conclusion this was not only damaging for the children but for the men, themselves, who do not have a spouse, do not stay around with their kids, that they too suffer consequences.
DAVID POPENOE: Indeed. I mean, that's one of the overlooked dimensions of this whole thing. I mean, in general, I think you can say that a society that has a lot of single men running around without family responsibility. You got to worry about that society, and that's more or less what we're becoming.
MR. GERGEN: That marriage, in effect, has a civilizing impact--
DAVID POPENOE: Absolutely--
MR. GERGEN: --on the man.
DAVID POPENOE: --civilizing, yeah. I just read the other day adults--it's not that adults produce children, it's that children produce adults.
MR. GERGEN: It's a nice idea, but men who are single tend to live a shorter life, tend to be less happy, and they tend to have less--less satisfying sexual lives.
DAVID POPENOE: You know, the data are just overwhelming now about that, and, and surprising. Most people don't know that.
MR. GERGEN: Right. Now, as you well know, from the academic community where a lot of your work, of course, is controversial, there are a good many feminists who disagree. They think that this case is overstated, that a woman can do as good a job, a single woman can do as good a job raising a child as she can with a man around. You know, it goes back--it starts with a Gloria Steinem argument--
DAVID POPENOE: Right.
MR. GERGEN: About men are not necessary these days.
DAVID POPENOE: Right.
MR. GERGEN: Steinem said, you know, men--a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
DAVID POPENOE: That's right.
MR. GERGEN: You know, they're just not very necessary.
DAVID POPENOE: Right.
MR. GERGEN: But it goes on to make the argument that women can play the same roles that men can play.
DAVID POPENOE: Right.
MR. GERGEN: This is all social construction. You disagree.
DAVID POPENOE: Absolutely, I do, and there's a whole chapter in the book that goes into just what fathers do for children that are often overlooked, and that's sort of a long story, but basically, you know, men and women are different, and the differences don't show up much in the workplace, and a lot of the differences have been exaggerated, so what's happened in the last 30 years has been useful, certainly for women, but when you get in the family scene and you have the man and the woman working hard there day to day, with kids, these differences show up, and the differences that men bring to children are, are similar to the kinds of characteristics that men have as men. Namely, they're more aggressive, they're more competitive, they take more risks, they're arguably more oriented to the outside world, whereas women tend to be, of course, more nurturing, more emotional, more talkative, and these kinds of traits are passed on to the child. And certainly no one person can--you know, it's very difficult to combine those two things in one person.
MR. GERGEN: I loved your metaphor that the woman provides the roots and the man provides the wings.
DAVID POPENOE: That's a standard one. The roots and wings, and I think it's an apt one, maybe a little bit corny, but--
MR. GERGEN: But come back to the argument, though, that many women experience these difficult marriages. You have daughters. Now, let's say one of your daughters was married in their late 20's, as you suggest is a good time to marry. She marries someone who seems very respectable and responsible. She then has a couple of children. And four or five years, she comes to you and says, dad, you know, my husband drinks too much, he's got a drug problem, he becomes verbally abusive, my children would be a lot better off if they--instead of being in this marriage--they were being raised by me alone, because I'm very caring and can look after them.
DAVID POPENOE: And that may be the case if that's the fact. We are never going to get the divorce rate down to zero. We're never even going to get it down to 25 percent. How about getting it down to 33 percent? It's now 50 to 60 percent. And the fact is that a lot of these divorces do not today involve these very serious problems when the women really should take the kids and run. There, you know, minor, relatively minor things--
MR. GERGEN: Too casual, in effect.
DAVID POPENOE: Too casual, and the level of stress at which marriages break up by all accounts are much, you know, lower today than they have been in the past.
MR. GERGEN: So there's not the commitment to marriage that was once there.
DAVID POPENOE: Commitment is so important. If people just go into a marriage committed, and especially if they're going to have children, that this is for life, that can carry you an awful long way. And, of course, that's partly where religion comes in. I mean, it's also where the marriage ceremony comes in. I mean, everybody says these things when they marry, but it's just that they don't carry them out as much as they used to.
MR. GERGEN: Well, it was interesting to me how much of an emphasis you placed upon this high divorce rate and the high illegitimacy rate as being the product of a changing culture, as you say a radical individualism that's taken hold, and that--so that the answers, in your judgment, come in changing the culture first, rather than changing our laws.
DAVID POPENOE: Well, I think you probably have to change both. It's, you know, one sort of follows the other, but there has to be a cultural shift, and then we have to back away from the kind of expressive individualisms, one term, or me generation. There's no doubt in my mind, looking at the data, that we've gone too far in that direction. And, by the way, we've pulled away--we're pulling away from all institutions now. We don't like government. We don't like, you know, labor unions. We don't like the banks. We don't like religion. You know, everything, marriage is one of these, and you can't have a society in which people are just going to go off and do their own thing.
MR. GERGEN: Now let's talk about what can be done legally. There's a lot of controversy in this country today about divorce laws. You would advocate having a two-tier divorce law system.
DAVID POPENOE: Well, of course, some states have that now. Many foreign countries do, at least to the point that you have longer--at least--have longer waiting periods for people who have children. I mean, it's a big difference if it's two people with no kids and people with kids, and for the people with kids, you ought to have a longer waiting period, you may want to have counseling available for them. Counseling has come a very long way in this country, and there's so much that can be done. I'm not sure everybody realizes that.
MR. GERGEN: Yeah.
DAVID POPENOE: And up to now, you know, we've sort of been counseling for a good divorce, as if that's the way to go, but how about counseling for the marriage?
MR. GERGEN: My wife happens to be a family counselor and therapist, and she argues now, after looking at a lot of these cases, that people ought to have marriage check-ups, that every year they, in effect--
DAVID POPENOE: A great idea.
MR. GERGEN: --as they have health check-ups, they ought to go in with counseling, either from a religious organization--
DAVID POPENOE: Exactly.
MR. GERGEN: --mothers--and then they ought to have check-ups every year.
DAVID POPENOE: I mean, marriages take a lot of work, and, you know, in a sort of me generation society, you don't think about that. It's just sort of love, you fall in and out of love, but this is an institution you really have to put the time in, and, and the kids, of course, are the ones to a certain extent, one of the reasons you're doing it.
MR. GERGEN: Anecdotally, I'm wondering if you see some of the same evidence I do, and that is that there is now--I see a reaction starting to set in to all the single motherhood, that many younger people want to marry earlier, they want to have more commitment to the marriage, they want to have children, that they've rethought some of the ideas of the 60's.
DAVID POPENOE: I think there is a sort of mini shift in two senses. One is that the baby boomers now are all aging and have kids and they're not like they used to be. They've become more family-oriented, and they're taking out against TV and so on, but, but also the younger generation, you know, you have the sense that they don't want to go through what the last generation has just put them through. And the only trouble is that, that's scary, is that the children of divorced and broken homes statistically have a much worse chance of success in their own marriages, so you have this kind of very worrisome snowballing effect that could be happening.
MR. GERGEN: But you do think we can turn it around?
DAVID POPENOE: Well, I hope so. I mean, I'm optimistic, personally so certainly.
MR. GERGEN: Thank you very much.
DAVID POPENOE: Thank you.
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