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ShatteredMen

Abused Men: the hidden half of domestic violence. Men have few resources in which to obtain help. In many places men are the ones arrested even if they are the only ones battered. If we do not look at both sides, we will not resolve any of this. There is seldom a conflict between two adults where both do not add to it. Shattered Men looks at BOTH sides with a focus on men.

Monday, November 08, 2004

FATHER FACTS

Father Facts: Top Ten Father Facts:

From: THE NATIONAL FATHERHOOD INITIATIVE(NFI)

http://www.fatherhood.org/fatherfacts_t10.aspGET THE ENTIRE BOOK with a NFI T Shirt FREE when joining the NFI
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 ofwedlock.

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

5. Over 3.3 million children live with an unmarried parent and the parent'scohabiting partner. The number of cohabiting couples with children has nearlydoubled 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 bestpredictor of father presence is marital status. Compared to children born withinmarriage, children born to cohabiting parents are three times as likely toexperience father absence, and children born to unmarried, non-cohabitingparents 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 theirfather at all during the past year; 26 percent of absent fathers live in adifferent state than their children; and 50 percent of children living absenttheir father have never set foot in their father's home.

8. Children who live absent their biological fathers are, on average, at leasttwo to three times more likely to be poor, to use drugs, to experienceeducational, health, emotional and behavioral problems, to be victims of childabuse, and to engage in criminal behavior than their peers who live with theirmarried, biological (or adoptive) parents.

9. From 1960 to 1995, the proportion of children living in single-parent homestripled, from 9 percent to 27 percent, and the proportion of children livingwith married parents declined. However, from 1995 to 2000, the proportion ofchildren living in single-parent homes slightly declined, while the proportionof children living with two married parents remained stable.

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

Father Factshttp://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'sperceptions 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 FatherLove:
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 Well being 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 thepregnancy, either financially or in other ways (such as transportation).

73% of mothers reported that the chances that they will marry the baby's fatherare "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 lessthan 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 ChildWellbeing Study Baseline Report. The Center for Research on Child Wellbeing(Princeton University) and the Social Indicators Survey Center (ColumbiaUniversity), 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. FederalInteragency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Washington, DC: GPO, 1997.

Crime

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

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

Drug and Alcohol Use

Even after controlling for the effects of gender, age, race-ethnicity, familyincome, and residential mobility, teens in single-parent and stepparent familieswere 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 FamilyStructure and Adolescent Drug Use." Journal of Marriage and the Family 60(August1998): 633-645.
Education

Even after controlling for differences in income, children who were born out ofwedlock and either remained in a single-parent family or whose mothersubsequently married had significantly poorer math and reading scores and lowerlevels of academic performance than children from continuously marriedhouseholds.
Source: Cooksey, Elizabeth C. "Consequences of Young Mothers' Marital Historiesfor Children's Cognitive Development." Journal of Marriage and the Family 59(May1997): 245-261.

Poverty

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

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

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

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