Why Antipoverty Efforts Must Not Neglect Fathers

Speaking in June at an arts and recreation center in Washington, President Obama announced his new “Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative,” designed to help the estimated 24 million children in the United States who do not live with their fathers. He also called on Congress to pass legislation based on an idea he had earlier suggested: a $500-million “Fatherhood, Marriage and Families Innovation Fund,” which would make grants to programs that help men become more responsible husbands and fathers.

Not long ago, proposals such as these from most public figures—let alone a President of the United States—would have been controversial. And few in the philanthropic world would have supported programs that sought to enable men to become better fathers. But, as James T. Patterson, the Brown University historian recounts in his new book, Freedom Is Not Enough, our understanding of the causes of poverty and other social problems has been changing and now points toward the importance of fostering more stable families.

Mr. Patterson’s story begins 45 years ago, when a then little-known U.S. Department of Labor official, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, produced a report asserting that the growing number of female-headed families in the “Negro” community presented a significant obstacle to achieving racial equality. The study, entitled “The Negro Family,” helped shape Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 commencement address at Howard University, during which he called for a new phase of the civil-rights movement, one designed to overcome the social and economic disadvantages faced by African-Americans.

But the “Moynihan report” (as it became popularly known) also attracted vitriolic criticism from prominent civil-rights leaders, scholars, editorial writers, and many others.

They faulted it for “blaming the victim” rather than focusing on the legacy of discrimination, which critics believed was still the fundamental problem. Despite Mr. Moynihan’s goal to make “The Case for National Action” (as the report’s subtitle put it), the controversy his analysis generated ensured that neither the Johnson administration nor subsequent ones did much, although the Nixon administration, in which Mr. Moynihan served as a domestic-policy adviser, made an attempt.

Much of what the report said was actually hard to dispute. Without adequate support at home, Mr. Moynihan wrote, children will have difficulty succeeding in school, work, and other aspects of American life. Many will be at greater risk of physical or mental illness and imprisonment. As adults, they will be less likely to establish stable families of their own. And government or philanthropic programs to help them overcome or compensate for the disadvantages of their home lives will have a harder time doing so.

However, what provoked Mr. Moynihan’s critics were two other parts of his argument. First, he said, families headed just by women were apt to confront more problems than did two-parent ones, headed by men. In addition, because of the lingering effects of slavery and other reasons, black families were more likely to be headed by women than white ones were, he said.

Using a mixture of statistics and pointed analysis, he contended that this combination was creating “a tangle of pathology” that was increasing in scope and likely to undermine the opportunities for social and economic progress that the civil-rights movement had created for black Americans.

Mr. Patterson presents a thorough and balanced assessment of the four-decade-long debate that followed. Some scholars, Mr. Patterson notes, took issue with Mr. Moynihan’s depiction of African-American families, claiming he had ignored their strengths and, especially, their reliance on extended kinship networks to support children when one or both biological parents were absent.

Others maintained that the lack of progress Mr. Moynihan blamed on the weaknesses of “the Negro family” was really caused by continuing racial discrimination in employment, housing, and other areas. Still others, such as the Harvard professor William Julius Wilson, presented a more nuanced view that acknowledged that the changes occurring among African-American families had not been helpful but attributed them to social, economic, and public-policy causes more than racial ones.

Mr. Patterson seems inclined toward Mr. Wilson’s position, as do a growing number of other scholars today. Moreover, the fragile condition of African-American families that concerned Mr. Moynihan in 1965 has subsequently become even more worrisome.

Just 35 percent of African-American children lived with two married parents in 2006 (compared with 67 percent when the Moynihan report was written and 76 percent of non-Hispanic white children today). As Mr. Moynihan had predicted, whether measured by income, by educational achievement, or in other ways, equality between blacks and whites remains a long way off.

Increasing numbers of prominent black Americans are also now willing to talk or write forcefully about the connection between black family structure and socioeconomic progress.

Even before he became president, Barack Obama observed in his book The Audacity of Hope that “in their urgency to avoid blaming the victims of historical racism,” policy makers and civil-rights leaders “tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational poverty.”

Thus, the Obama administration’s support for pro-fatherhood efforts should not have come as a surprise. Yet apart from their small scale and deference to Washington’s current political fashions (the president’s speech stipulated a child could benefit from having two fathers, too), the question is whether either government or philanthropy really knows how to achieve the goal of encouraging more-stable families.

Past efforts to do so or to help lower-income men overcome the multiple obstacles they often face to becoming more responsible parents have had mixed, and some might even say disappointing, results. Although the 1996 welfare overhaul changed a public-assistance program that most believed weakened two-parent families, improvements in the ability of families to support themselves, care for their children, and avoid nonmarital births have been less noticeable than sharp reductions in the numbers of recipients.

Mentor programs have proven their effectiveness, but maintaining their quality, while expanding them to reach the large numbers of children in need, will be a major challenge.

Nonetheless, the willingness of national leaders to address the importance of strengthening family life is a major development—and potentially a watershed for government and philanthropic efforts to reduce poverty. As Mr. Moynihan understood, getting the real nature of the problem right is an essential step toward figuring out what to do about it.