Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collection
Letter to the Editor, The American Psychologist from David Popenoe:

As the author of Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence that
Fatherhood and Marriage are Indispensable for the Good of Children and
Society (Free Press, 1996; Harvard University Press, 1999), I respond as
the
"neoconservative social scientist" whose book is singled out for
criticism as
"incorrect or oversimplified" by Louise B. Silverstein and Carl F.
Auerbach
in their recent article "Deconstructing the Essential Father" (June,
1999).
The central thesis of my book is that fathers are important in
childrearing
and that the best way to involve men in fathering is to have a strong
marriage system. Because we no longer have a strong marriage system in
America fatherlessness has been growing rapidly, with serious negative
repercussions for children. My thesis relies on hundreds of citations to
social and behavioral science research, a review of the new evidence
coming
from evolutionary biology, psychology and anthropology, and a lengthy
excursion into the history of the family.

Due to space limitations I can not go into the many ways in which
Silverstein and Auerbach have misunderstood, misconstrued, and distorted
my
views, but I do want to examine the evidence on which they rely. The
counter
argument they put forth suggests, first, that "fathers are not
essential,"
but second, to the degree fathers are important "responsible fathering
need
not be dependent on a marital relationship." In making their argument
they begin by seeking to overthrow the prevailing position of the
overwhelming majority of evolutionary psychologists that men and women
are different in
their mating strategies. The prevailing position is that male mammals
have
a tendency to mate more widely with many females whereas females tend to
invest more heavily in their young. Their challenge to this position
relies
entirely on a single -- yes, one -- empirical study that was published in
1992.
I was well aware of the study they cite-which focuses particularly on
marmosets--when I wrote my book, and found it to be not nearly as
conclusive
as Silverstein and Auerbach claim. They go on to rely on the same
empirical
study to challenge the prevailing view that males have a special concern
about "paternity certainty." Similarly, they cite just one empirical
study
to seek to disprove another well-accepted notion -- that "providing has
been a
universal male role." From these two empirical studies, plus references
to a
few review articles, they then conclude that "in summary, the
neoconservative
position [whatever that is] is simply wrong about the biological basis of
observed differences in parenting behavior." To have reached such a
conclusion in a purportedly scientific article, using such insubstantial
evidence, simply takes one's breath away.

When the article goes on to discuss human marriage behavior the use
of
evidence shifts from being inadequate to being simply wrong. Drawing
from a
recent Bureau of Justice Statistics report on "Violence by Intimates,"
they
find that "murders of women by their intimate partners decreased by 40%
between 1976 and 1996" and conclude that "as marriage has declined over
the
past two decades, so has intimate violence." Thus in their mind marriage
doesn't protect women from domestic violence, as most scholars have
concluded, but it actually promotes such violence. Yet what the report
actually shows is that the recent decline has been almost entirely among
black males; the incidence of intimate murder of white women by their
boyfriends or other nonmarital intimates has actually increased.

Similarly, they misinterpret data on child abuse from "The Third
National
Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect" (1996) to make it seem as if
the
greatest risk to children is their birth parents. The report finds that
78%
of children who suffered maltreatment, both neglect and abuse, were
maltreated by a birth parent. But of course the overwhelming majority of
children live with their birth parents. What one needs to know is not
the
percentage of children but the incidence of abuse--the chances or risk
factor
that a child living with a birth parent will be abused compared to the
chances of abuse living with a non-related parent. That calculation would
come up with an entirely different answer, and be in agreement with what
other scholars have found.

And after these few misinterpreted citations the authors reach
another of
their mind-boggling conclusions: "In summary, we do not find any
empirical
support that marriage enhances fathering or that marriage civilizes men
and
protects children."

Finally, Silverstein and Auerbach turn to the importance of fathers.
It
is difficult to overemphasize the carelessness of their reading of the
research in this area. In seeking to minimize the importance of
fatherhood
they even unearth a study that purports to find "the potential costs of
father presence in the home;" the study contends that with resident
fathers
"the consumption of family resources in terms of gambling, purchasing
alcohol, cigarettes, or other nonessential commodities, actually
increases
women's workload and stress level." What they overlook are decades of
solid
empirical studies showing that divorce often hurts children, that father
involvement is greater for fathers in two biological parent families, and
that biological fathers are more involved with their children
behaviorally
and emotionally than non-biological fathers. Their contention that, in
general, fatherless families may be better for children than fathered
families has to be considered one of the most misguided conclusions ever
to
issue from the social sciences.

It is clear that this article was cobbled together mainly-in the
authors'
own words-"to create an ideology that defines the father-child bond as
independent of the father-mother relationship." It is sad, even heart
rending, the lengths to which these authors go to distort the
overwhelming
evidence and undeniable truths about fatherhood in order to serve their
own
agendas. If the American Psychological Association wants to publish such
an
ideological piece, fine, but it should not believe that it is
contributing at
the same time to the advance of social science knowledge-much less to the
interests of our nation's children.

David Popenoe
Professor of Sociology,
Rutgers University
25 Bishop Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1181


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