There is “strong evidence that father absence negatively affects children’s social-emotional development, particularly by increasing externalizing behavior. These effects may be more pronounced if father absence occurs during early childhood than during middle childhood, and they may be more pronounced for boys than for girls.” (The Causal Effects of Father Absence)
Divorce from or abandonment by a father is an unhappy occurrence. There is nothing controversial about saying so. What takes courage is an unflinching look at why this happens.
Divorces in particular are not random events. No one divorces lightly; It is a harrowing experience. It is, however, not the beginning of trouble in the home; It is an important marker on a journey that started well before. We cannot trace this well documented factor in the problem with men and boys back to this point and then stop with an unsubstantiated (and somewhat inane) suggestion that women should just decide not to be abandoned or divorced.
Divorce is not a cause of bad father relationships, it is a symptom. In my case it was also a cure; Relieving my ex-husband of the burdens of fatherhood allowed him to include our daughter in many happy leisure activities at times of his choosing. Not every mother can support a household without financial assistance from the children’s father, however, so for many the stress, although reduced by divorce, remains.
When people refuse to change divorce is better than staying in a dangerous situation. In the US overall one in six situations of intimate partner violence begin during a pregnancy. In Alberta, Canada it is one in four. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) describes the widespread and dangerous occurrence of intimate partner violence (IPV) during pregnancy, reporting that “the severity of violence may sometimes escalate during pregnancy or the postpartum period. Homicide has been reported as a leading cause of maternal mortality, with the majority perpetrated by a current or former intimate partner.” (Intimate Partner Violence, ACOG, Article Number 518 (Reaffirmed 2022)).
Finally, according to DomesticShelters’ “Profile of an Abuser”, one of the characteristics of an abuser is “Inability to admit fault, take blame. This also looks like blame-shifting. Everything is someone else’s fault or the blame is constantly shifted to a partner. Abusers often think the world is against them and they are a victim of their circumstances.”
Mona seems to agree with abusers that a woman’s insufficiently respectful attitude toward men is to blame for his behavior. She asserted this yet again during this episode, giggling with Charlie that this would be controversial. I think she misunderstands where the controversy lies; It is not with identifying sons of divorce or father abandonment as more likely to misbehave, rather it is with why that divorce or abandonment happened in the first place. And no, it is not because these boomers were themselves the product of fatherless homes.
Susan - I am going to read this post but I am commenting mostly to say that I live near one of the defunct DEW line installations, on Cape Cod. In fact, that is the name of one of the roads here.