The Value Of A Father In The Home
www.firstthings.org. References for all statistics are provided on the website:
http://firstthings.org/page/research/father-facts.
Father Presence Studies reveal that even in high-crime inner-city neighborhoods, well over 90% of children from safe, stable, two-parent homes do not become delinquents.
Researchers have linked father presence with
improved fetal and infant development. Father-child interaction was shown to promote a
child's physical well being, perceptual abilities and competency for relatedness with others, even at a young age.
When both boys and girls are reared with involved fathers they demonstrate "a greater ability to take initiative and evidence self-control."
A just released National Fatherhood Initiative analysis found that of the 102 prime-time network TV shows in 1998, only fifteen featured a father as a central character. Of these, the majority portrayed the father as uninvolved, incompetent or both.
Education Fatherless children are
twice as likely to drop out of school.
Young children in single-mother families tend to have
lower scores on verbal and math achievement tests.
School children from divorced families are
absent more, are more hostile, withdrawn and less popular than their peers from intact families.
Crime
"The likelihood that a young male will engage in criminal activity doubles if he is raised without a father and triples if he lives in a neighborhood with a high concentration of single-parent families."
72% of adolescent murderers, 60% of America's rapists and 70% of long-term prison inmates grew up in homes without fathers.
70% of juveniles in state reform institutions grew up in single or no-parent situations.
Children's Sexual Development Compared with girls with intact nuclear families, girls who lost their fathers by divorce were overly responsive to males, were more likely to be sexually involved with males in adolescence, married younger, were pregnant more often before marriage, and became divorced or separated from their eventual husbands more frequently.
76% of teens said that their fathers were very or somewhat influential in their decision to have sex.
Poverty Almost 75% of American children living in single-parent families will experience poverty before they turn 11 years old. Only 20% of children in two-parent families will do the same.
"...The likelihood that a family would fall below the poverty line doubles during the first four month period of the father's absence, increasing from 18.5% to 37.6%."
Children who live away from their fathers are
4.3 times more likely to smoke cigarettes when they are teenagers are than children who live with their fathers.
Children living with a never-married mother are more likely to have been treated for
emotional problems.
Three out of four teenage suicides occur in households where a parent is absent.
Father Time The average father spends less than 10 minutes a day one on one with his child.
Of children living with their mothers - whether as a result of non-marital birth or divorce - 35% never see their fathers, and 24% see their fathers less than once a month.
Children with involved Dads are less susceptible to peer pressure, are more competent, more self-protective, more self-reliant and more ambitious.