Fatherlessness in Connecticut -- Who Cares?

January 24, 2008

Specious public-policy proposals usually receive a warm reception from Connecticut’s government officials. From single-payer healthcare to a “peak oil” strategy, “smart growth” mandates to universal preschool, Governor Rell, legislators, and state bureaucrats consistently push “solutions” to complex societal and scientific challenges, with little regard for the unintended (and often quite destructive) consequences of their schemes.

So it’s refreshing -- if a bit shocking -- when a prominent legislator advocates the use of tax revenue to study a promising approach to a problem that drives a substantial portion of Connecticut’s runaway budget.

State Sen. Gary LeBeau (D-East Hartford) offered such a proposal last year, when he drafted a bill to create a task force charged with studying fatherlessness in Connecticut, “including selfishness, irresponsibility, the culture we live in, television and other media, [and] state programs that encourage fathers to abandon their families.”

At first glance, LeBeau doesn’t appear to have taken much of a risk by proposing his bill. The growing left-moderate-right consensus on the devastating consequences of fatherlessness would seem to inoculate him against violations of sexism, “insensitivity,” or other violations of political correctness.

According to research compiled by the nonpartisan National Fatherhood Initiative, fatherless kids are five times more likely to be poor than their counterparts in stable homes. Infant mortality rates for fatherless children are higher. The smoking rate for single mothers is higher, as is their incidence of depression. Child accidents, abuse, and neglect are more prevalent in fatherless homes. The adult lives of children who grew up without fathers are often quite grizzly -- higher rates of incarceration, substance abuse, and teen pregnancy. And educational achievement by fatherless kids is dismal.

Race is certainly no reason to eschew an analysis of fatherlessness. As the Heritage Foundations’ Robert Rector observes, “the out-of-wedlock childbearing rate is 25 percent for whites, 45 percent for Hispanics, and 68 percent among blacks.” (The white illegitimacy rate is now as high as the black rate was in the 1960s, when the late politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan authored his landmark study “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”)

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University reports that young people across racial and ethnic lines embrace fatherlessness as no big deal: “According to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey, more than half of high school seniors agree with the statement ‘having a child out of wedlock is experimenting with a worthwhile lifestyle and not affecting anyone else.’ According to another survey, close to 60 percent of 15-17-year-old teenage girls approve of unwed childbearing. That figure rises to 73 percent among teen girls ages 18-19.”

But LeBeau’s attempt to examine these scary statistics never came to fruition. His task-force bill sailed through the legislature’s Select Committee on Children during the 2007 session, but failed to get a vote before the full Senate or House of Representatives. And LeBeau, in a recent email interview, revealed that he is “going to hold off on any further legislation until I can be more grounded and specific.”

It’s difficult to understand the senator’s newfound reticence, in light of his clear commitment to creating the task force just one year ago. Was LeBeau taken to the woodshed by the state’s powerful social-services complex? It’s a plausible explanation, given the complete lack of interest in fatherlessness on the part of state agencies, nonprofit providers, and activists.

One searches in vain for any mention of the problem on the state’s Department of Social Services website. The Connecticut Department of Children and Families is also mum. There’s nothing to be found on fatherlessness on the Connecticut Commission on Children’s website. Ditto for the state’s “child advocate.” The state’s most militant liberal lobbying organization, “Connecticut Voices for Children,” would rather bray about racism and “income inequality” than ask tough questions about how irresponsible mothers and reckless fathers make life hellish for the children the group claims to defend.

How do state programs and policies foster fatherless homes? Should Connecticut consider what many social conservatives advocate -- the elimination of no-fault divorce for couples with children under 18? Should taxpayer-funded marriage education and counseling be as available as subsidized birth control? A task force on fatherless could have sparked a statewide conversation on these and related questions. But for now at least, it’s not going to happen.

The human and fiscal burden of fatherlessness in Connecticut is incalculable. Too bad no one in Connecticut government is interested in studying it -- much less doing anything about it.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and public-policy researcher. He can be reached at muskacolumn@cox.net.

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