I’ve been at Princeton for the past couple of days attending a seminar on social science and gender, marriage, and sex . It’s sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute and directed by a young star sociologist at the University of Virginia, Brad Wilcox. In today’s Wall Street Journal , Brad has a column about fatherhood in America .
Here’s the opening:
For millions of children across the U.S., this Sunday will not be a cause for celebration. Because of dramatic increases in divorce and nonmarital childbearing, about 28% of our nation’s children — more than 20 million kids — now live in a household without their father, up from 10 million kids (14%) in 1970, according to a recent Census Bureau report. Moreover, because most of these boys and girls see their dads infrequently (once a month or less), Father’s Day will offer cold comfort to many of these children.
Our nation’s epidemic of fatherlessness is just the most salient indicator of what University of Chicago theologian Don Browning has called the “male problematic” — the tendency of men to live apart from their children and to invest less emotionally and practically in their families than women do.
This situation has not gone unnoticed in America’s houses of worship. Religious leaders, particularly evangelical Protestant ones, have expressed their alarm. “As I review the latest research on family disintegration, I am repeatedly confronted with the same disturbing issue,” recently wrote Dr. James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family. “Boys are in trouble today primarily because their parents, and especially their dads, are distracted, overworked, harassed, exhausted, disinterested, chemically dependent, divorced, unable to cope or simply not there.”
But how successful have churches and synagogues been in getting the men in their congregations to put family first?
Read the entire piece to find out.
In the column, Brad mentions a report he wrote for the Institute for American Values on fatherhood and religion. It was released this week and is available here .
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