
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 18, 1995                   TAG: 9506170020
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ENDANGERED, BUT NOT EXTINCT

FATHER'S DAY should remind us: Real fathers - those who love, nurture, responsibly support and help raise their progeny - are not as extinct as the dodo bird. There are still plenty of good fathers around, notwithstanding the media drumbeat about ``superfluous fathers'' and ``deadbeat dads.''

This is not to say we shouldn't take seriously what's been described by David Blankenhorn, author of ``Fatherless America,'' as this nation's ``most urgent social problem'': the disappearance of the father from the lives of millions of kids, with often disastrous consequences.

Blankenhorn's is one of a swelling chorus of voices bringing to public notice the dangerous sags and cracks in American society's foundations as result of the missing-dad syndrome. The following are noted from a variety of sources:

Sag: At least 19 million children lived in families without fathers present in 1994. That's 24 percent, up from 6 percent in 1950.

Sag: Nearly half of all children living apart from their fathers have not seen them in the previous year.

Sag: More than 30 percent of all children today are born to unmarried women. In most cases, the father is never legally identified.

Crack: Fatherless children are five times more likely to live in poverty than those in two-parent families. Fatherless kids are twice as likely to drop out of school, and much more likely to resort to violent and delinquent behavior.

Crack: Seventy percent of the juveniles in state reform institutions grew up in single- or no-parent situations.

Crack: Broken-home backgrounds contribute to three in every four teen suicides.

Crack: Girls who are raised in single-parent families are three times more likely to become unwed teen mothers than girls who grow up with two parents.

Well, what's to be done? Return to shotgun marriages? Jail the Murphy Browns, self-sufficient single women who aren't on welfare, if they have a baby? Execute deadbeat dads? Legally force couples to stay married, no matter how disastrous the marriage, for the sake of the kids?

Frankly, we don't know the answer, though we have some ideas. We'd certainly bet it's none of the above.

Part of the problem is that cultural trends are hard to reverse. ``This isn't something that an institution can do, or the government can do,'' observes Blankenhorn.

If no one has an easy answer, there is still the hope that good ideas will catch on: Marriage deserves more old-fashioned respect. Divorce, when children are involved, shouldn't be as easy as paying a parking ticket.

And fathers are not superfluous. Good fathers deserve honoring.

by CNB