Families need fathers Essay Example for Free

Families need fathers Essay The debate, Families need fathers is one in which there are many issues that need to be considered when looking at the question. Family poverty, domestic violence, the effect on children and family stereotypes by society all need to be considered in the debate. Recent surveys have shown that fathers also need families and therefore making the matter more complicated. Fathers still remain important in our society because family poverty is still largely prevented by the existence of a male, full time workers wage in a household. Due to the patriarchal nature of our society, women find it difficult to obtain appropriate work to fit in with custody of children. In a Social Trends survey the rise in mothers working part time form 49 percent in 1973 to 64 percent in 1994. This often means working in low paid, part time jobs with little chance that mothers earnings alone will be able to cover the cost of subsistence for themselves, never mind there children. Those who do work full time do not necessarily escape from economic dependence, choosing to work and pay for childcare may well prove uneconomic for large numbers of the working class. There is very little publicly provided care which fits the needs of working mothers: most pre school care is part time and infused with the ideology of education, rather then care and education. A large proportion of their income is spent on childcare and as childcare in Britain is the most expensive in Europe, lack of affordable childcare prevents the lone mother entering the labour market emphasising the need for fathers, or a male wage in the family. Married men work harder, earn more and are more likely to have a job then other men, according to Rowthorn and Ormerod, therefore preventing family poverty, although the modern woman is striking back. Nowadays it is easier to be a single mother. Welfare benefits, job opportunities, and the support of nurseries, playgroups and schools make it easier for single mothers to provide for their families alone. The Family Futures Report conducted by Graeme Leach predicts that by the year 2020 women will have become the main earners in at least half of all households. The feminisation of the work place will force companies to create a mother-track career as many companies will prefer the work of women to men meaning that affordable childcare will become available and the 20 percent pay gap will have disappeared. Even now, womens contributions through earnings are important in reducing the familys vulnerability to poverty. Families with 1 or 2 children were at the greatest risk of poverty without the earnings of the wife. In 1990, for example, people in households where the husband worked but the wife did not, had a 4 to 6 times higher risk of being in the bottom income quintile then those where both parents were working. Gittins (1993) states that more divorced men remarry showing that women have more independence and less need for a relationship, the family does not need a father or male figure to survive. The effect on children growing up without a father is one of the main focuses on the debate as there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that this has an enormous impact on the emotional and physical health of the child. Dennis and Erdos (1993) argued that research into the effect of fatherless families showed that unless a child is brought up in the constant atmosphere of human beings negotiating, co-operating, controlling their anger, affecting reconciliations, he (sic) cannot learn what it is to be an effective member of a social group for this he needs the presence of two adults in close interaction constantly in his immediate environment. Fatherless families are seen as contributing to the rise of educational failure, welfare dependency, and involvement in crime and drug abuse among young people, especially young boys from council estates. Indeed, only a quarter of persistent young offenders lived with two parents and that included step parents and mothers boyfriends, 4 out of 5 children going into care have lone parents and on American and British council estates it was found that the higher the percentage of lone parent households, the higher the percentage of crime and burglary. These statistics show that it is not just families that need fathers; society also needs them as well. The concern for the effect of divorce on children is being researched more and more as divorce rates are becoming higher, one in three marriages now end in divorce and the effect on children is being examined closely. Rowthorn and Ormerod state that on every measure of achievement and emotional condition, children living with their married parents usually do better then other children although it is often hard to distinguish between the effects of marriage and divorce and other factors such as poverty and racism. Nevertheless, divorce often means poor exam results, damaged health and stress and four times the risk of needing psychiatric help as a child. Dr Richards took 17,000 children from the National Child Development Survey and monitored their lives at intervals until they were 35. He discovered that children, whose parents had divorced before they were 16, were on average less emotionally stable, left home earlier, and divorced or separated more frequently. However, this study was concerned with children of the middle class in 1958, and from then till now, social attitudes have changed as divorce is much more acceptable then it was in the fifties and therefore children are less affected by it, but most studies show the more involved the father; the better developed the child intellectually and socially. This view that children are affected by the absence of a father in the family is one to be contested. The latest research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that the absence of one or other parent figure from a household is not the aspect of separation which most effects the childs development. Children are not necessarily harmed by divorce providing the parents split in an amicable fashion and good regular contact with the absent father can reduce some of the ill effects of divorce.