by Rebecca O’Neill
September 2002
John Stuart Mill famously called for ‘experiments in living’ so that we might learn from one another. For about 30 years we have been conducting such an experiment with the family. The time has now come to appraise the results.
‘As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them.’
In this passage from On Liberty (1859) the nineteenth-century champion of freedom, J.S. Mill, argued that there could be a public benefit in permitting lifestyle experimentation. His reasoning was that, just as we distinguish truth from falsehood by the clash of opinion, so we might learn how to improve human lives by permitting a contest in lifestyles. However, Mill did not expect such experiments to go on for ever. ‘It would be absurd,’ he said:
‘to pretend that people ought to live as if nothing whatever had been known in the world before they came into it; as if experience had as yet done nothing towards showing that one mode of existence, or of conduct, is preferable to another.’
In the 1970s and 1980s many people argued that the traditional family – based upon a married biological father and mother and their children – was outdated. Under the guise of ‘freedom of choice’, ‘self-fulfilment’, and ‘equal respect for all kinds of families’, feminists and social rebels led a campaign to experiment with different family structures. Sometimes it was claimed that women and children did not need men, and were, in fact, often better off without them. On occasion it was said that families were not breaking down, they were just changing; that the most important thing for children was their parents’ happiness and self-fulfilment; and that children were resilient and would suffer few negative effects of divorce and family disruption. The idea of ‘staying together for the children’s sake’ was often derided. Some parents embraced the new thinking, but not all of those who took part in the ‘fatherless family experiment’ were willing subjects. As the idea that mothers and children did not need fathers took hold, many social and legal supports for marriage weakened. Some mothers and children were simply abandoned. Some fathers were pushed away.
Mill’s argument formed part of his wider case for avoiding social control unless the interests of other people were harmed. People were entitled to act on their own opinions ‘without hindrance, either physical or moral, from their fellow-men’ so long as it was ‘at their own risk and peril’. This last proviso, he said, was ‘of course indispensable’. He insisted that:
‘When … a person is led to violate a distinct and assignable obligation to any other person or persons, the case is taken out of the self-regarding class, and becomes amenable to moral disapprobation in the proper sense of the term.’
He specifically mentions the responsibility of a father for his children:
‘If, for example, a man, through intemperance or extravagance, becomes unable to pay his debts, or, having undertaken the moral responsibility of a family, becomes from the same cause incapable of supporting or educating them, he is deservedly reprobated, and might be justly punished; but it is for the breach of duty to his family or creditors, not for the extravagance.’
After three decades of experimenting with the fatherless family, we are now in a position to evaluate the results.
Summary
The Experiment
- Fewer children live with both their mother and their father
- Routes into the fatherless family
- Divorce
- Births outside marriage
- Changes in marriage and cohabitation
- Is the married two-parent family a thing of the past?
- Most people still believe in the ideal of marriage and do, in fact, get married
The Results: How does the fatherless family affect adults, children and society?
- Lone mothers
- Are poorer
- Are more likely to suffer from stress, depression, and other emotional and psychological problems
- Have more health problems
- May have more problems interacting with their children
- Non-resident biological fathers
- Are at risk of losing contact with their children
- Are more likely to have health problems and engage in high-risk behaviour
- Children living without their biological fathers
- Are more likely to live in poverty and deprivation
- Have more trouble in school
- Tend to have more trouble getting along with others
- Have higher risk of health problems
- Are at greater risk of suffering physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.
- Are more likely to run away from home
- Teenagers living without their biological fathers
- Are more likely to experience problems with sexual health
- Are more likely to become teenage parents
- Are more likely to offend
- Are more likely to smoke
- Are more likely to drink alcohol
- Are more likely to take drugs
- Are more likely to play truant from school
- Are more likely to be excluded from school
- Are more likely to leave school at 16
- Are more likely to have adjustment problems
- Young adults who grew up not living with their biological fathers
- Are less likely to attain qualifications
- Are more likely to experience unemployment
- Are more likely to have low incomes
- Are more likely be on income support
- Are more likely to experience homelessness
- Are more likely to be caught offending and go to jail
- Are more likely to suffer from long term emotional and psychological problems
- Are more likely to develop health problems
- Tend to enter partnerships earlier and more often as a cohabitation
- Are more likely to divorce or dissolve their cohabiting unions
- Are more likely to have children outside marriage or outside any partnership
- Effects on the Social Fabric
- Increased crime and violence
- Decreased community ties
- A growing ‘divorce culture’
- Cycle of fatherlessness
- Dependence on state welfare
- Why all these effects?
- Poverty
- Reduced parental and paternal attention
- Conditions before, during and after divorce
Evaluating the Results
The weight of evidence indicates that the traditional family based upon a married father and mother is still the best environment for raising children, and it forms the soundest basis for the wider society.
To read the full report, Download pdf