Some People Just Can't Celebrate Father's Day Without Bashing Poor Single Mothers

If you're lucky enough to have a dad involved in your life, I hope you remembered to send him a Father's Day card. But as terrific as dads are, isn't it time to kill off the ridiculous myth that the ones who aren't around cause their families to live in poverty?

The latest talking head to peddle this hurtful, false stereotype is prominent conservative Robert Rector, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. I give him credit for not beating around the bush, at least — the first paragraph of his essay immediately goes after the "enemy" (liberals, of course!) and makes his argument: "The mainstream media, liberal politicians, activists and academia bewail child poverty in the U.S. But in these ritual lamentations, one key fact remains hidden: The principal cause of child poverty in the U.S. is the absence of married fathers in the home.

Regular readers of Poverty in America probably know Rector's classic mistake: he can't tell the difference between causation and correlation. It's true that two-parent families are less likely to live in poverty than single-parent ones. They also typically have twice the income and the benefit of tax breaks for married couples, among other advantages. There's absolutely no basis to Rector's absurd assertion that "if poor single mothers were married to the actual fathers of their children, two-thirds would immediately be lifted out of poverty."

We all know that the contributors to poverty are numerous and cyclical. Children born into poor homes are more likely to receive substandard education and health care, making them more likely to live in poverty themselves as adults (and thus refuting Rector's claim that the absence of fathers makes kids more likely to be poor when they grow up). Unsurprisingly, Rector does not offer any specific benefits that fathers bring children to keep them out of poverty, just a vague reference to bringing "more to his home than just a paycheck."

This logic is insulting in more ways that I can count: the notion that mothers aren't capable of raising their children without a man around and the idea that a woman shouldn't leave an abusive or neglectful husband because she'll doom her children to miserable lives, just to name a couple. But it's also simply wrong. A 2009 scientific study (which Rector's paper isn't) by a human development expert (which Rector isn't) concludes that the key for healthy, well-developed kids is growing up in a stable home, not a two-parent one. So this weekend, let's celebrate our fathers without vilifying single mothers, ok?

Photo credit: dariuszka