Where Have All The Fathers Gone?

As many as 20 million American children live in families without a father. For many boys that means growing up without a male role model in their lives

Photo credit: Ed Yourdon

In the summer of 1995 I was living in Chicago where I was an ABC News correspondent assigned to the Midwest bureau. The 11th of September was a quiet Monday. I was in the office when my brother Keith called me from Los Angeles. In an anxious yet composed tone, he told me he was at the hospital where he had taken my father after he complained of shortness of breath. My mother was there too.

“It doesn’t look good,” Keith said.

“What does that mean?” I said. I knew what he meant. I wanted him to tell me what I knew wasn't true.

Keith said he’d call me back. 

When he called me back  - I have no idea how long it was — I already knew what he was going to say. Dad had died. I hurriedly made travel arrangements to fly to L.A. and a few hours later I was on a plane.

My dad and I a few years before he died.

My father, Earl Claiborne, was brilliant and thoughtful. He was kind. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He was wise. He taught me some of the most important things I know.

My dad loved us, Keith and I. He said it but, even more, he exuded it. His love was like a palpable thing that I could touch and pick up. I could hold it in my hand, turn it over and look at it. I could feel it. He was deeply proud of Keith and me. If, say, I got an A in arithmetic, to him it was as if I won the Nobel Prize in Mathematics. As a child and even later, this puzzled me. What had I done to deserve this? In time, I would come to understand it was just a reflection of his love.

My father grew up in the segregated South, in Charleston, South Carolina, and, of course, he did not escape the oppression, discrimination and degradations that came with that. He talked about it. I remember one story about him driving across the country after finishing medical school at Howard University in Washington, D.C. with one of brothers and a white kid - a teenager - at a gas station telling them, “We don’t sell no gas to no n****s.” I thought: how degrading, how humiliating that must have been. Yet, somehow, he never betrayed bitterness about the racism he faced and how it had limited his opportunities in life. He certainly could've been. Maybe he should have been. But he never showed it. Maybe he was protecting me and Keith because bitterness, like anger, is a cancer.

He didn’t drink (probably because there was alcoholism in his family.) He didn’t smoke. He never cursed — at least not in front of us. Yet he wasn’t censorious or priggish about any of this. It was just his way. Other people could do what they wanted.

He had a keen moral sense but without being moralistic. He never got mad at us - never. Not even when I took my brother’s car out for a spin when I was too young to have a driver license and I knew he was deeply disturbed by this. But whenever either of us did something wrong - which was not infrequently - he spoke to us about it quietly, firmly, without ire. He wore his disappointment like a mask, which was punishment enough.

For years after he died, I often dreamed about my dad. In some of these dreams, he would appear and I would be startled and say to him, "I thought you died?" He would say it was all a terrible misunderstanding. The dreams were so vivid, so real, that when I awoke, I would be disoriented and I would have to slowly discover all over again that he was dead, and experience that shock and pain all over again. Eventually, the dreams passed and the grief receded.

My father, mother, me, my brother Keith

As the years passed, I focused less on his loss than the fact that I had been very lucky to have had this man as my father. I was lucky to have a father, period. About 18 to 20 million children in the U.S. live in a household without a biological, step- or foster father. This is an American tragedy.

In 1968, 7.6 million, or 11 percent of children lived with their mother only. In 2020, that figure was 15.3 million, or 21 percent.

In 2020, 46.3 percent of Black children lived with only their mother. For Hispanic children, the figure was 24 percent. Studies have shown that in households where children live only with their mother, the mother is often a high school dropout with all the economic disadvantages that entails.

"The average fraction of years in which the biological father is present is on the wane while the average fraction of years in which no adult male is present is on the rise," wrote David Autor and Melanie Wasserman in a report titled Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education.

Compared to the rest of the world, America is an outlier. Only 15 percent of children in Canada, 3 percent in China, 4 percent in Nigeria and 5 percent in India live in single-parent homes, according to the Pew Research Institute.

An organization called National Fatherhood Initiative reports a depressing list of consequences for children who grow up without a father: a four-time greater risk of poverty, behavior problems at home, seven times more likely to become pregnant as a teen, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, twice as likely to suffer obesity, and a greater likelihood to commit a crime, go to prison and drop out of school.

"Monitoring these trends is important because children's living arrangements can have implications for children's outcomes, such as academic achievements, internalizing problems (e.g., depression and anxiety), and externalizing problems (e.g., anger and aggression," according to a 2021 report for the U.S. Census Bureau by Paul Hemez and Chanell Washington.

This applies to both girls and boys, but many experts say the absence of a father figure more acutely affects boys who suffer from not having a positive male role model in their home or their life.

Frank Williams, executive director of the City of White Plains (N.Y.) Youth Bureau

My friend, Frank Williams, is the executive director of the City of White Plains (N.Y.) Youth Bureau where, among his many duties, he deals with at-risk young people and designs programs to address their challenges and their needs. Frank has been with the bureau since 1987. He is also a co-founder of Grandpas United, a group of local grandfathers who serve as mentors to children, many of whom come from homes without a father.

"A father's presence in the home as husband, protector, supporter, encourager, helper and role model cannot be overstated," Frank told me recently. "We are currently in a space where there is a father crisis. Without positive male involvement, children and families suffer."

Frank also spent 11 years as a member of the White Plains Prison Reentry Program. He and his teams would visit a local prison to facilitate pre-release training programs for offenders out to return to society.

Frank said, "Many of the inmates did not have a father in their lives (as children) and would tell us if they only had a dad in their life, they believe they would have had a better life."

When I lived in Boston in the early 2000's, I was a Big Brother to a 15-year-old African-American boy I will call Gary. He lived with his mom and infant brother in a tiny apartment in a public housing project in the Dorchester neighborhood.

Gary's father had left his family some years earlier and moved to North Carolina where, as I understood it, he had started a new family. One of Gary's grandfathers had assumed the male parental role in his life but had recently gone to prison and would not be coming out for many years. 

Gary idolized his father. From afar. He talked about him all the time. His face would light up with warmth and pride when he spoke of him. But he hadn't seen him in years and his dad almost never spoke to him. Still, Gary harbored the belief that one day he would return to Boston and be with his father again. 

One day when I met with Gary he was visibly upset. It took a while to get the story from him. His father had, in fact, returned to Boston, but had not contacted him. He was deeply hurt.   

A few years later, I left Boston and lost touch with Gary.

Can a child overcome the disadvantages of growing up without a father? Of course. It happens all the time. There are many success stories of children raised by a single mom. A mother raising a child or children by herself may be one of the hardest responsibilities that exist. Millions of women do this and many do it well - testimony to the powerful influence that just one parent can wield by herself. Also, a negligent or absent parent, or a toxic parental relationship, has its own harmful effects on children. But I think it's unarguable that most children benefit from having two supportive parents, ideally in their home. 

Boy with his father on a New York City bus

Throughout my childhood and well into my teens, my dad would dispense wisdom and advice to my brother and me in the form of aphorisms and sayings - some his own, some he borrowed from elsewhere. He had dozens of them and Keith and I heard them many, many times.

 

"There was a man who had no shoes who felt sorry for himself until he met a man who had no feet."

"You have to live before you die."

"Youth is wasted on the young."

"Your reach should exceed your grasp."*

"Study like you'll live forever. Live like you'll die tomorrow."

"Don't make your future your past."

Some of these I couldn’t make much much sense of. Yet I clung to them all my life, pulling them up later and pondering them. Little by little, I began to understand what he meant. The meaning and lessons behind these seeming riddles began to reveal themselves to me, providing me insight into and better understanding of some of life's many mysteries, eccentricities and and cruelties. They taught me forbearance (not always practiced) and at times they gave me strength. But by the time these seeds bore fruit, my dad was long gone. I never got to thank him. That's okay. I believe he knew what he was doing. He was just being my father. 

* From a poem by Robert Browning