Facts compiled by the National Fatherhood Initiative

Fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of school then their classmates who live with two parents
  
Seventy-two percent of all teenage murderers grew up without fathers
 
 Fatherless children are eleven times more likely then are children from intact families to exhibit violent behavior.
  
Eighty percent of adolescents in psychiatric hospitals come from fatherless homes.
  
Seventy percent of the kids now incarcerated in juvenile corrections facilities grew up in a single-parent environment
  
Three out of four teen suicides occur in single-parent families
  
Compared to girls raised in homes where both parents are present, the daughters of single parents are 164-percent more likely to become pregnant before    marriage compared to girls raised in homes where both parents are present, 
  
53 percent are more likely to marry as teenagers
  
Compared to girls raised in homes where both parents are present, 92 percent more likely to dissolve their own marriages

The absence of a biological father increases by 900 percent a daughter's vulnerability to rape and sexual abuse (often these assaults are committed by stepfathers or the boyfriends of custodial mothers).

Children whose fathers are absent consistently score lower than the norm in reading and math tests. 

Children who live apart from their fathers experience more accidents and a higher rate of chronic asthma, headaches, and speech defects.

Facts compiled by the Department of Justice

63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes
90% of all homeless and runaway youths are from fatherless homes.
85% of children who exhibit behavioral disorders are from fatherless homes.
71% of high school dropouts are from fatherless homes.
70% of youths in State institutions are from fatherless homes.
75% of adolescent patients in substance abuse centers are from fatherless homes.
85% of rapists motivated by displaced anger are from fatherless homes.






From Drug Free Kids:Why Fathers Make a DifferenceBy Randell D. Turner, PhD

Research tells us that a father influences his children in many ways. Most notably a father exerts influence in the following areas: 
The intellectual ability of his children,
The behavior his children will model,
The genetic background his children will receive,
His children's ethnic heritage and their position in the family structure,
The occupational choices his children make,
The material resources his children are left with when he is gone,
The ways his children will behave toward their offspring.

1. Studies on a father's influence on his child's pro-social behavior reveals that:  Even in high-crime, inner-city neighborhoods, well over 90 percent of children from safe, stable, two-parent homes do not become delinquents.

2. Whether the outcome variable is cognitive development, sex-role development, or psychosocial development; children are better off when their relationship with their fathers is close and warm.

3. When both boys and girls are reared with engaged fathers, they demonstrate "a greater ability to take initiative and maintain self-control." 

4. Children with an involved father are exposed to more varied social experiences and are more intellectually advanced than those who only have regular contact with their mother.

5. Attempts to understand the 'active ingredient' in father's play that promotes peer competence have revealed that children learn critical lessons about how to recognize and deal with highly charged emotions in the context of playing with their fathers.

Fathers, in effect, give children practice in regulating their emotions and recognizing others' emotional cues. Teaching adolescents to develop personal and social skills through the cognitive-behavior approach to substance abuse prevention has proven to be effective when facilitated by teacher, counselors and mentors. And we now know that a loving father who remains actively involved has a positive effect on his child's social, cognitive and intellectual development and self-esteem. Then, logic dictates that a substance abuse prevention program must be designed to incorporate fathers and their influence on their children.



Patrick Moynihan, 1966, America Magazine

"... there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future--that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder. . .are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved."




The Family as the Seedbed of Democratic Citizenship  By Don Eberly, Founder and Chairman, National Fatherhood Initiative, USA     September 14, 2000  Delivered on the occasion of IIFWP Assembly 2000: "Renewing the United Nations and Building a Culture of Peace"

Bill Stephney, who runs an entertainment company in New York and tracks trends and issues within the music industry, reports that the vast majority of gang members and violent rappers live out their lives of rage because of missing fathers.  In fact, he reports that the theme of anger toward the father who was never there is emerging as a major new trend in rap music. In a rap song "Father," LL Cool J sings, "all I ever wanted, all I ever needed, was a father."[10]

The most socially destructive form of aggressive acting out which is tied powerfully back to father absence is crime. Seventy-two percent of adolescents serving sentences for murder are from fatherless households; 60 percent of the rapists and over 70 percent of the long-term correctional facility inmates are from father-absent households.[11]

Noted social scientist James Q. Wilson has said, "Every society must be wary of the unattached male, for he is universally the cause of numerous social ills. The good society is heavily dependent on men being attached to a strong moral order centered on families, both to discipline their sexual behavior and to reduce their competitive aggression."[12] Curbing the aggressive impulses of young males is perhaps the greatest challenge that falls to fathers. As the national news regularly reports, there is today in American society an unusually large number of young people who seem to be very, very angry, who appear wound up like a tightly coiled spring, waiting to explode at the slightest provocation.

The nation has been served a stream of shocking reports of brutal schoolyard shootings by young males. In defiance of stereotypes all of the shootings have occurred in small rural communities by young white males from average, middle class backgrounds. Shawn Johnson, a California-based forensic psychologist who has conducted over 6,000 evaluations of adult and juvenile criminals states, "This is the price we are paying as a society for the number of fathers who have bailed out on their children."[13] Obviously, only a small minority of troubled kids will turn to slaughtering others in cold blood, and certainly father absence is not the only factor behind this growing epidemic. Nevertheless the alienation among youth and even young children today is widespread.

Our sons and daughters need to see examples of confident males turning their energies toward affirming life and nourishing character, not the pseudo-masculinity of power or domination. Those who have studied masculinity have remarked about its basic fragility. It is all too easy for masculinity, which is held together tenuously by societal norms, to fall out of kilter, when too few fathers are there to model it out in all of its complexities of strength and tenderness, initiative and restraint. When these supports are not in place, society suffers, not from too much genuine masculinity, but from far too little of it.

A society of too few mature fathers ends up with what Dr. Frank Pittman calls "toxic masculinity," where essentially weak, insecure, and poorly fathered men chase after a socially destructive masculine mystique. Men who have not fully felt the love and approval of their fathers are men who live in masculine shame. Says Pittman, "Men without models don't know what is behind their shame, loneliness, and despair, their desperate search for love, for affirmation and for structure, their frantic tendency to compete over just about anything with just about anybody. These men are in a battle not with women, whether their mothers, wives or girlfriends, as much as with their own fathers."[14]

Says Pittman, boys who want to become men have to "guess at what men are like," which usually turns out what he calls a "pathologically exaggerated masculinity." Whatever the challenge, these men are never "man enough." What is the way out of this trap of shrunken shame-filled masculinity? "Ultimately, says Pittman, we're not going to raise a better class of men until we have a better class of fathers." The answer, he says, is the forgotten profession of fatherhood.[15]

The tendency in focusing on what one expert termed "the male problematic" is to neglect the consequences of father absence in the lives of girls and young women. As any experienced, caring father knows, one of the most vulnerable persons in the world is the adolescent girl in her early teens. Poorly fathered girls often fall victim to poorly fathered young men who prey on the vulnerabilities of girls who carry within them a hunger for the father's affection and who confuse it with false and costly alternatives. Girls from father-absent households are 164 percent more likely to have children out of wedlock, often starting in their teens.

Toxic masculinity and pathologically exaggerated masculinity described by Wade Horn, Ph. D

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