Father Facts: Top Ten Father Facts, etc,:

Father Facts: Top Ten Father Facts, etc,:

Father Facts: Top Ten Father Facts: From: THE NATIONAL FATHERHOOD INITIATIVE (NFI)
http://www.fatherhood.org/fatherfacts_t10.asp
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1. 24 million children (34 percent) live absent their biological father.

2. Nearly 20 million children (27 percent) live in single-parent homes.

3. 1.35 million births (33 percent of all births) in 2000 occurred out of wedlock.

4. 43 percent of first marriages dissolve within fifteen years; about 60 percent of divorcing couples have children; and approximately one million children each year experience the divorce of their parents.

5. Over 3.3 million children live with an unmarried parent and the parent's cohabiting partner. The number of cohabiting couples with children has nearly doubled since 1990, from 891,000 to 1.7 million today.

6. Fathers who live with their children are more likely to have a close, enduring relationship with their children than those who do not. The best predictor of father presence is marital status. Compared to children born within marriage, children born to cohabiting parents are three times as likely to experience father absence, and children born to unmarried, non-cohabiting parents are four times as likely to live in a father-absent home.

7. About 40 percent of children in father-absent homes have not seen their father at all during the past year; 26 percent of absent fathers live in a different state than their children; and 50 percent of children living absent their father have never set foot in their father's home.

8. Children who live absent their biological fathers are, on average, at least two to three times more likely to be poor, to use drugs, to experience educational, health, emotional and behavioral problems, to be victims of child abuse, and to engage in criminal behavior than their peers who live with their married, biological (or adoptive) parents.

9. From 1960 to 1995, the proportion of children living in single-parent homes tripled, from 9 percent to 27 percent, 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.

10. Children with involved, loving fathers are significantly more likely to do well in school, have healthy self-esteem, exhibit empathy and pro-social behavior, and avoid high-risk behaviors such as drug use, truancy, and criminal activity compared to children who have uninvolved fathers.


Father Facts
http://www.fatherhood.org/fatherfacts_lb.asp
Late-Breaking Father Facts
Importance of Father Love for Child Well-Being In an analysis of nearly 100 studies on parent-child relationships, father love (measured by children's perceptions of paternal acceptance/rejection, affection/indifference) was as important as mother love in predicting the social, emotional, and cognitive development and functioning of children and young adults:
Having a loving and nurturing father was as important for a child's happiness, well-being, and social and academic success as having a loving and nurturing mother.
Withdrawal of love by either the father or the mother was equally influential in predicting a child's emotional instability, lack of self-esteem, depression, social withdrawal, and level of aggression.
In some studies, father love was actually a better predictor than mother love for certain outcomes, including delinquency and conduct problems, substance abuse, and overall mental health and well-being.
Other studies found that, after controlling for mother love, father love was the sole significant predictor for certain outcomes, such as psychological adjustment problems, conduct problems, and substance abuse.
Source: Rohner, Ronald P., and Robert A. Veneziano. "The Importance of Father Love: History and Contemporary Evidence." Review of General Psychology 5.4 (December 2001): 382-405.

Consequences of Divorce on Father-Child Relationships

In a longitudinal study of 2,500 children of divorce, twenty years after the divorce less than one-third of boys and one-quarter of girls reported having close relationships with their fathers. In contrast, seventy percent of youths from the comparison group of intact families reported feeling close to their fathers.

Source: Hetherington, E. Mavis, and John Kelly. For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002: 231.

"Fragile Families" Findings

Preliminary survey data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal study of 2,670 unmarried couples with children, suggests that most unwed fathers are highly involved shortly after the child's birth:
50% of unmarried parents were living together at the time of the child's birth, and another 33% were romantically involved but living apart.
80% of the fathers were involved in helping the baby's mother during the pregnancy, either financially or in other ways (such as transportation).
73% of mothers reported that the chances that they will marry the baby's father are "fifty-fifty" or greater; 88% of fathers reported that the odds of marrying the mother of their child are "fifty-fifty" or greater.
64% of the mothers and 75% of the fathers agreed with the statement, "it is better for children if their parents are married."
90% of unmarried mothers rated "husband having a steady job" and "emotional maturity" as very important qualities for a successful marriage.
37% of the mothers and 34% of the fathers lack a high school degree, and less than a third had any education beyond high school.
30% of the fathers were unemployed in the week before their child was born.
* Compared to a nearly perfect response rate from mothers, only 75 percent of fathers responded to the survey, resulting in a selection effect that most likely inflates the above percentages for fathers.

Source: McLanahan, Sara, Irwin Garfinkel, Nancy E. Reichman, Julien Teitler, Marcia Carlson, and Christian Norland Audigier. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study Baseline Report. The Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (Princeton University) and the Social Indicators Survey Center (Columbia University), August 2001.

Father Facts
http://www.fatherhood.org/fatherfacts_spl.asp
Sample Father Facts
Child Abuse

The rate of child abuse in single-parent families is nearly twice the rate of child abuse in two-parent households.

Source: America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being. Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Washington, DC: GPO, 1997.

Crime

Even after controlling for family background variables such as mother's education level, race, family income, and number of siblings, as well as neighborhood variables such as unemployment rates and median income, boys who grew up outside of intact marriages were, on average, more than twice as likely as other boys to end up in jail.

Source: Harper, Cynthia C., and Sara S. McLanahan. "Father Absence and Youth Incarceration." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, August 1998.

Drug and Alcohol Use

Even after controlling for the effects of gender, age, race-ethnicity, family income, and residential mobility, teens in single-parent and stepparent families were 2 times more likely to use illegal drugs compared to teens in intact, two-parent married families.

Source: Hoffmann, John P., and Robert A. Johnson. "A National Portrait of Family Structure and Adolescent Drug Use." Journal of Marriage and the Family 60(August 1998): 633-645.

Education

Even after controlling for differences in income, children who were born out of wedlock and either remained in a single-parent family or whose mother subsequently married had significantly poorer math and reading scores and lower levels of academic performance than children from continuously married households.

Source: Cooksey, Elizabeth C. "Consequences of Young Mothers' Marital Histories for Children's Cognitive Development." Journal of Marriage and the Family 59(May 1997): 245-261.

Poverty

Single-parent families are five times as likely to be poor as married-couple families. In 1999, 6.3 percent of married-couple families with children were living in poverty, compared to 31.8 percent of single-parent families with children.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Current Population Survey.

Father Facts: Research Notes
by Wade F. Horn, Ph.D., and Tom Sylvester
http://www.fatherhood.org/fatherfacts_rsh.asp

Ed

Ed Ward, MD
edward19(at)cox.net (at) = @ (for the @ crawlers) my email.
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