There’s something significant in this story…Now I have to figure out what it is…
This article from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette lays out the fact behind a trend of more single fathers raising children:
Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden may have been the quintessential single father in 1972: A widower, raising his children in a world surrounded by families with mothers.
Today, he wouldn’t be so alone, and the stereotypical image of the single father as a widower has diminished somewhat as more divorced fathers seek custody of their children and single men seek to adopt.
The number of single fathers has risen dramatically in the U.S. and more than tripled in Allen County in less than two decades, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.
Single fathers number more than 2.5 million in the U.S., an increase from about 856,000 in 1990, according to the census.
I think the reason I plucked it from the wires is it reminds me of the articles you’ll find in the “social consequences” part of the library to the right that describe the shifting personal relationships arising from the gender imbalances (and new earning power for women). Most of the coverage, you will see, focuses on the wealthy of Manhattan, perhaps because The New York Times has done the best reporting on this. But the Times also published this article, which I consider some of the best reporting ever done on this issue. Forgotten in all this are the blue collar men who can’t find women to marry them because their education backgrounds make them unattractive as mates. I can’t help but wonder if that phenomenon is a player in the dynamics laid out in this story from Fort Wayne.
I’m probably reading too much into this story, but it does raise the question of whether men and women will increasingly go their own way, choosing either to not have children as discussed in this recent Census story, or raising children separately.
