National Fatherhood Initiative helps link
kids and dads while rebuilding families, society
Washington, D.C. is well known as the seat of government in United States. But, in recent years it has also shared a much more notorious “capital” title with other American cities including Detroit and East St Louis – that of murder capital.
The violence and crime of such American inner cities may have a complex pathology, but a major root cause has become abundantly clear to social researchers: fatherlessness. Violent criminals are overwhelmingly males who grew up without fathers, including 72 per cent of adolescent murderers and 70 per cent of long-term prison inmates.
In fact, child abandonment and illegitimacy are so prevalent in many large U.S. cities that families headed by a male have become the exception rather than the rule. Black families, often the majority in many U.S inner cities, suffer rates of fatherlessness as high as 90 per cent in some cities.
The absence of fathers in the home is also a key determinate of whether children grow up in poverty, have low educational achievement, use drugs, suffer health problems and participate in crime. These children are also much more likely to repeat the broken family-cycle once they are adults. In the U.S. today, 34 per cent of children live with their biological fathers absent.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Fatherhood Initiative, from 1960 to 1995, the proportion of children living in single-parent homes tripled, from nine per cent to 27 per cent, and the proportion of children living with married parents declined. However, from 1995 to 2000, the proportion of children living in single-parent homes slightly declined, while the proportion of children living with two married parents remained stable.
Don Eberly, a White House adviser, formed the National Fatherhood Initiative in 1994 to attempt to reverse the cycle. NFI’s mission is to improve the well-being of children by increasing the proportion of children growing up with involved, responsible, and committed fathers. (See the website at www.fatherhood.org for more details.)
The organization is not a lobby group and does not spend its time seeking legislative change. Rather, it attempts to engage the culture through educational outreach and advertising, specifically in some of America’s most fatherless inner cities.
NFI operates on a relatively modest $5 million annual budget, but has multiplied its impact by obtaining donated advertising space for its public service announcements. Since the organization first opened its doors, it has taken advantage of over $250 million of donated radio, television, billboard and print advertising. The ads have tag lines such as, “Each night millions of kids go to sleep starving. For attention from their dads,” “Easter Bunny. Tooth Fairy. Daddy. Eventually kids stop believing in things they don’t see,” and “Dear daddy, my mommy can’t be my daddy too.”
NFI communication director Heather Thurman says, “While the effectiveness of public service announcements is hard to measure, we know advertising works, or corporations wouldn’t spend billions pushing Coke or Pepsi.”
Anecdotal feedback indicates the ads have had major impacts on some children’s lives. “For example, one father called us to say he was planning to move far away to take a job, but because of our ads, his kids convinced him to stay. The children saw one of our ads with a tag line that four out of 10 children are raised without a father, and they told him, ‘Dad, we don’t want to be part of that statistic,'” Thurman says.
NFI also partners with organizations such as churches, schools and the YMCA, to reach out to dads with educational materials encouraging responsible fatherhood.
Despite the daunting task that reversing such a significant social trend represents, Thurman believes things are slowly improving. “We started in 1994, battling a culture resounding with a message that fathers are superfluous. It was the Murphy Brown era, where kids didn’t need a dad. Moms could do it all by themselves.
“Now, the numbers of kids living in fatherless homes is levelling off. Cultural attitudes are changing. There are more TV shows where the dads are involved, and there are no more of the single mom shows,” she says.
“Another big change has been in the welfare system. The old system provided a disincentive to marriage. It paid more to unmarried mothers than to married couples. We need public policy that is family-friendly and that promotes fatherhood,” she says.
Encouraging positive father role-models in corporate advertising has also been an activity of NFI. “We acknowledge corporations that emphasize the relationships of dads with children – for instance, the Home Depot ad where a father builds a treehouse for his children, or the Chevy truck ad where the father and son are working together on the farm,” Thurman says.
While fatherlessness is less of an issue in Canada, it is still a problem here too, according to research director Derek Rogusky of Focus on the Family Canada. He says that, “70 per cent of Canadian families are headed by a married couple. But that means 30 per cent are either single-parent families or common-law situations.”
Rogusky says common-law situations usually result in fatherless children as well. “Statistics Canada’s Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth has found that by age 10, 63 per cent of children born into a common-law situation watch their parents separate, as opposed to 13 per cent of children in married homes. Family breakdown almost always means the father is out of the picture,” he says.
On the Canadian scene, Quebec is particularly troublesome in regard to family formation. “Fully one-quarter of couples there are common-law,” he says. “Quebec demonstrates what happens when you start to devalue marriage.”
