WASHINGTON - President Bush believes that one of the main problems with the American family today is that too many fathers are not fulfilling their responsibilities to their children.
Children whose fathers do not live with them, as David Blankenhorn in "Fatherless in America" and others have shown, are more likely to live in poverty, fall behind in school, get involved with alcohol and drugs, get pregnant and get in trouble with the law.
In America today, 36 out of 100 children grow up in fatherless homes. The president has proposed that we spend $64 million on his responsible fatherhood initiative, which would be about a quarter of a $258 million funding package. The funding would go to faith-based and local organizations.
Mr. Bush is hardly alone in calling on fathers to be responsible parents. Numerous Democrats, including the new Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, have taken a similar stance.
Mr. Bayh has co-sponsored the "Responsible Fatherhood Act." This law would take many measures, including programs and media campaigns to promote fathering "best practices," stable marriages, employment for unemployed fathers and payment of child support. The president has supported the bipartisan legislation.
Many of the fathers Mr. Bush and Mr. Bayh are concerned with either left their homes already or fathered a child and never lived with the child's mother.
There is a serious problem with their approach to promoting responsible fatherhood.
A problem of irresponsible fatherhood arises in many of the 64 percent of families which are not fatherless and which most likely will not become fatherless. Moreover, most of these homes are white, while a disproportionate number of the fatherless homes, which really drives the Bush/Bayh agenda, are black.
The problem in the majority of American homes is that most fathers do not have enough interaction with their children. Mothers, as a rule, are still the primary caretakers, even when both parents work full-time. These fathers, who may be good economic providers, are often emotionally absent from the lives of their children. And emotionally absent from their marriages, too.
Before the rise of the fatherless home, many progressive and feminist theorists criticized the traditional nuclear family because the men were not nurturant and intimate husbands or fathers. Moreover, these traditional men were criticized for upholding a social system that denied women entry into the workplace and the halls of political power.
