How do you even address something like that? Even if you paid each father $10k to stick around to age 18, that doesn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t become domestic abusers, suicide victims, or would even be good role models. It’s possible that father presence for kids is only so valuable because the only fathers that stick around are the ones that care.
> only so valuable because the only fathers that stick around are the ones that care.
Last time I looked at data about this, it appeared that even a poor father who was present was better than no having a father in the home. If I remember right it was measuring the likeliness of a teenager to end up in prison. If there was a segment of fathers that were worse than not having a father, I don't think it shows up in any study I've seen.
Gilder's Wealth and Poverty book cites a lot of studies and examples showing how society has changed in ways making it harder for dads to stick around with everything from how drug policies are enforced to the way that welfare resources are allocated.
> Last time I looked at data about this, it appeared that even a poor father who was present was better than no having a father in the home. If I remember right it was measuring the likeliness of a teenager to end up in prison. If there was a segment of fathers that were worse than not having a father, I don't think it shows up in any study I've seen.
I think their point is that those bad fathers don't show up, because they don't care about their children.
> It’s possible that father presence for kids is only so valuable because the only fathers that stick around are the ones that care.
Even if this would be the case, we should allow those fathers to spend more time with their kids. For example, it is very difficult for a man to find a part-time job. Most companies take "I also want to spend some time with my kids" as "I don't really care about the work I do". You can care about the work without wanting to devote your entire life to it.
4 day work week, should be more common for this case here. If it were offered, I would take it, even if just for a few years while the kids are little.
You're looking myopically at the issue; absent fathers is less likely to be a choice, but an economic consequences of income inequality, along with the other economies that arise because of this.
You're looking at the drug war, high school graduation rates, ability to find a job, attached to teenage pregnancy, lack of commute options, and below living wage - likely connected to public health issues including water treatment, sewage, inneficient or unsafe homes (hook worms, sceptic, HVAC)
So instead of a 1 time $10k (which is delusional) think marijuana being legal, healthcare and childcare being affordable, public transport - or at least not a food desert in a walkable community, and $15+/hr 30+ hour weeks at a single employer.
It used to be done by promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce. Now, that has obvious costs for the parents in many cases and certainly isn't always the right approach because of problems like domestic abuse.
But the good of the children is part of why past societies have incentivized keeping parents together to care for their children and maybe we've gone a bit too far in the other direction, away from a happier medium.
> It used to be done by promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce.
Stigmatizing divorce does absolutely nothing to make fathers emotionally invested in their kids. If anything, it can make them resentful of their kids.
The article was about how boys need emotional support from their father. A father who is present and married but still demands that his son "man up" and bottle up every problem is of no help.
It's really hard to be emotionally invested when you're totally absent from most of their lives, though. It doesn't work the other way, i.e. it won't fix a bad father, but there are plenty of guys who could do better by literally just showing up.
There are plenty of men who have no gross moral fault, who are still excluded from their kids' lives by a wife who divorces him and gets custody. Stigmatizing divorce would help that. In divorces that occur in the US, close to 80% of the time it's by women; close to 90% when the woman is college-educated. The vast majority of divorces are not predicated on a gross moral fault by the man, but on unhappiness by the woman, growing apart, found a new guy, whatever. The woman in those cases is thus putting her own happiness above the wellbeing of her kids. So a stigmatization of divorce by society could work very well. It worked very well historically. Women are not more important than children. In fact, half of children are girls who also need fathers. And a woman-centric view of defining morality is just another demonstration of the problem of society's current disregard for men, boys, and the male experience.
