Myers: Now more than ever, children need both parents

According to the Pew Research Institute, the United States has the world’s highest percentage of children living in single-parent households. Of children under the age of 18, 23 percent live with one parent and no other adult. This is more than three times the average of seven percent for the rest of the world. In the state of Pennsylvania 33.1% of families are headed by a single parent, most often mothers.

Although for the most part our laws look upon mothers and fathers as equals, the reality is that in many situations fathers who want to be involved in their children’s lives often face much greater obstacles to secure custody rights and time because of entrenched biases. The Dads’ Resource Center was founded to provide education, resources and advocacy for single fathers.

We recently conducted an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Every metric explored showed that on average, children with a father have done much better in life than those who did not.

Children who grew up without their fathers in their homes were 11 percent more likely to smoke, 20 percent more likely to have engaged in hard drug use and 33 percent more likely to have had sexual intercourse before the age of 17. They were 13 percent more likely to need mental health treatment, an astounding 71 percent more likely to have been convicted of a crime and 94 percent more likely to have used government programs such as WIC, SNAP and workers’ compensation.

Children raised in homes without their fathers present were on average seven percent less likely to graduate from high school, 43 percent less likely to graduate from college and earned 26 percent less annually ($43,938 vs $59,490) than those who grew up with their father in their home. The benefits of fathers being involved in the lives of children is overwhelming.

The absence of a father in the life of a child has an extraordinarily negative impact not only on them, but on our culture and society as a whole. Our civil, legal, governmental and human service systems far too often erect barriers to father involvement and thereby are responsible for much of the fatherlessness. To help us to better understand how this happens, the Dads’ Resource Center has done extensive research that shows biases in the determination of custody by the courts and the use of protection from abuse orders that impede countless responsible fathers from being able to be in the lives of their children.

We must eliminate these biases by dramatically transforming and modernizing the attitudes and practices of our court system, including judges, attorneys and guardian ad litems, and our governmental and human service agencies including Children and Youth Services. There needs to be an urgent commitment to guarantee that children have the opportunity to benefit from the active involvement of both parents.

As a society we should be doing all that we can to ensure that every child has the maximum chance for success and opportunity for a happy and fulfilling life. For children from divorced or separated families, this is less likely to happen until our courts, governmental and human services enact meaningful systemic reform that prioritizes the full engagement of both parents.

To help change this dynamic, the Pennsylvania Greater Father Family Involvement Campaign of which I am chair has recently worked with members of the General Assembly to introduce bills in both chambers that would create a fatherhood commission in the state. The passage of these bills would make Pennsylvania a national leader in bolstering father family involvement.