Here's Bob Herbert of the New York Times with an op-ed about the plight of the nation's kids (New York Times, 11/28/09).  His taking-off point is the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade down Central Park West with its astonishing array of huge helium-filled cartoon figures and animals.  Herbert describes the kids staring wide-eyed at the extravaganza.

He's rightly concerned for their futures.  Herbert describes an economy that's savaged the working class at the same time it finds seemingly infinite largesse for investment banks that did more than their share to bring about the current recession.  He points out that even before this debacle, the top 1% of Americans owned more wealth than did the bottom 90%.  And that's only gotten worse.  Herbert's unhappy about that, and it's impact on children is a lot of the reason why.

He also criticizes the educational system as being "hideously dysfunctional," and foreign wars that drain the treasury while providing little apparent benefit to the nation.

Interestingly, although Herbert's concern for children takes him from Iraq to Afghanistan to the elementary school down the block, to the executive suites of Wall Street, it never takes him to family court.  The benefits of connecting fathers to children, documented to a virtual certainty by decades of sociology, is seemingly unknown to Herbert.  And since he doesn't seem to know the value of fathers to the children he's so concerned about, he never mentions the many ways in which state legislatures, family courts and child welfare agencies bend heaven and earth to separate the two.

Herbert's main concern is the economy, which is hardly surprising, particularly in these times.  But the astonishing incidence of single motherhood escapes him.  Mountains of sociology point out the obvious - that single parents tend to have less money than do two-parent families.  That shortage of money is far from the only reason the children of those families tend to do worse than the children of intact families, but it's a big one.  So with economics playing such a big part in his view of children's problems these days, you'd think Herbert might mention single-parenthood, but he doesn't.

Clearly, Herbert's concern for children is genuine.  But his worldview seems to have blinded him to the obvious - that if you want to improve the lot of children, you have to do everything in your power to ensure that they have two parents to bring them up. 

I suspect that Herbert is like a great many people in this country.  He's swallowed hook, line and sinker the notion that fathers are at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous to children.  To read and understand the vast array of data that directly contradict that notion would upset a worldview to which he's become attached.  Like so many Americans, Herbert lives in thrall to a false image of happy, prosperous, well-adjusted, productive children...without fathers.

He's like a child at the Thanksgiving Day parade, mesmerized by the beautiful figures of fiction in the sky.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 9:45 am and is filed under Fatherhood, Children's Rights.