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 Father
Absence Article #2: Study Finds
Teen Pregnancy
and Crime Levels Higher In Home With Father Absent Kids
Children reared in fatherless homes
are more than twice as likely to become male adolescent delinquents
or teen mothers, according to a significant new study by two
economists at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Llad Phillips and William S. Comanor based their research on data
from random surveys of 15,000 youths conducted annually by the
Center for Human Resources at Ohio State University.
Their findings suggest that current
proposals to provide tax credits and exemptions for single mothers
and to collect more child support from absent fathers will have
little effect on the problem of delinquency among teenage boys.
"Both measures tacitly accept the father's absence from the home and
seek to ameliorate its consequences by increasing the income
available to mother and child.
However, it requires an increase in
family income of approximately $50,000 to counter the father's
absence," the economists wrote in a report outlining the results of
their study, which were presented at the Western Economics
Association meeting in San Francisco on July 1.
Phillips and Comanor designed their study to account for the
influence of income, and found that in the case of boys, a minimum
of $54,000 in additional family income is necessary to counter the
harmful effects of absent fathers. For girls, the figure is much
lower-$17,000 a year.
The researchers also found that
while absent mothers have a negligible impact on male adolescent
delinquency, motherless homes are 56 percent more likely to result
in teen pregnancy among girls.
"The absence of either parent has a significant effect on the kids
having one kind of pathology or another, but the absence of a father
tends to have a more significant effect, and it seems to more
seriously affect the sons," said Phillips, whose research also
indicates that step-fathers may in fact contribute to the problem.
"The effect of the presence or absence of moms and dads on
childbearing at a young age among girls are more equal than their
effect on delinquency by boys."
Phillips and Comanor are about to embark on a study of delinquency
among teenage girls, which is on the rise despite being far less
prevalent than delinquency among adolescent boys.
"A lot of kids get involved in crime long before they are able to
make rational choices about crime vs. legitimate work," Phillips
says. "And that's our motivation in doing this research-finding out
the importance of the family in the whole process."
SOURCE: "Men's HOTLINE" (men
AT menhotline.org)
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