The Opposite Sex

"A man in the home is worth two in the street."

- Mae West

Twice the Resources

Mothers and fathers working together offer a clear advantage over single mothers going it alone. Raising children is always a challenge, and two parents should have about twice the resources for the job as one parent alone. Two heads, two hearts, two sets of hands, and the possibility of two pocketbooks provide a real benefit over just one of each. By almost any measure, children tend to do better with fathers and do worse without them.

40% of American children are born to single women.

Over half of American teenagers now live
with only one parent, usually the mother,
turning the traditional two-parent family into an alternative lifestyle.

Origins

Snowy owls, for example, are wonderful parents. Mothers and fathers work together and share hardships equally, and allow their body weights to drop as much as a third in order to provide more food for their ravenous youngsters.

Among primates, however, only about 6% of species bond together as mating pairs. Our most acrobatic apes, the Gibbons, show the beginnings of true fatherhood.

Our hominid ancestors began bonding together about 1.7 million years ago, according to anthropologists, and the bonded pair has been the most prevalent arrangement in the hundreds of thousands of years since then. As our ancestral brains grew gradually from the one-pound mini-calculator similar to a chimpanzee to the three-pound wonder brain that is standard equipment among modern humans, infants became increasingly helpless at birth and took longer to mature. Parenting a child required at least two of us working together —one to manage the infant and the other to carry the groceries and camping gear.

Progress

While a father and mother working together should provide about twice the resources as a mother going it alone, the cumulative result were considerably more than that. If a mother could subsist on her own, the extra resources a second parent provides are available for comfort, security, and most importantly, for innovation.

The inclusion of the father into the family provided a winning edge, yoking a man to the support of his wife and her children, and later to agriculture and its abundant food production, increased specialization and trade, on to civilization, and eventually to the material abundance of the industrial revolution. Fatherhood has been a sterling win for men, women, children, material comfort, social stability and cultural advance.

Stable pairings also vastly expanded the social network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, sibling, and endless cousins. The recognition of fatherhood strengthened the mutual obligations and the cooperation between kin.

The tremendous advantages established the father as an integral member of the traditional family.

The Tilt against Fathers

Today, the fabric of the traditional nuclear family is rapidly unraveling. As of 2009, fully 40% of American children are born to single women. Add unwed mothers together with custodial moms, and we see that over half of our children will be raised by mothers without the biological father in the primary family. So the matriarchal family is now the norm in our confusing times, while the so-called traditional family of a mother and father together with their children is now merely another alternative lifestyle.

Given how much fathers contribute, we might expect fathers to be highly respected and strongly supported (joke). Yet women today are much more prosperous than in earlier years and our social programs support single mothers, making fathers optional. And our chivalrous institutions strongly support the rights of women and mothers but overlook the rights of fathers, who are by now considered expendable.

The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs

In an Aesop fable, a man and his wife had a goose that laid a golden egg every day. In spite of their good fortune, they began to think they were not getting rich fast enough. Imagining the bird must be made of solid gold, they slaughtered it, but found the goose to be like any other goose inside.

Fatherhood has been the goose that laid the golden eggs, contributing the benefits of civilization and the prosperity that allow our society to support single mothers and to toss fatherhood asunder. Fatherhood has provided the very benefits that allow its grandchildren to turn against it.

By now, perhaps, we may have enough golden eggs stored up in our silos somewhere to sustain us for another decade or so. But do we really want to chance it? Do we really want to butcher the goose that laid all those golden eggs, and see if we might squeeze a few more individual rights and privileges out of the stupid goose? Are we willing to abandon our fundamentals while other nations catch up to us and sail on past us?

Fashioning Fathers

Motherhood is a biological imperative, and most mothers bond naturally with their children and remain involved. Fatherhood is more of a social convention, and we rely upon several conditions to turn men into fathers.

A continuing partnership with the mother in an intact family vastly increases the chances a sperm contributor will mature into a real father and remain a real father. Unfortunately, the converse is also true. Men who provide sperm but do not partner with women and do not reside with the children seldom become participating fathers in the usual social relationship sense of the word.