DADS, DIVORCE, AND DELINQUENCY

By

Leigh Travis, Ph.D.

What are the known causes of juvenile delinquency? How can it be treated, or better yet, prevented?

Let me first address what appears to be an understandably incorrect assumption of a great many people, namely, the assumption that "poverty breeds delinquency," and, as a corollary, that a great deal of poverty and hence delinquency is at least indirectly "caused" by divorced fathers. The thinking appears to go: "dead beat dads" do not pay their child support, and thus their children are economically deprived and turn into juvenile delinquents to survive. So goes the "common sense" causal argument of many a "man (and woman) on the street."

However, this "common sense" logic, while intelligible, appears to be scientifically incorrect. The basic problem does not seem to be missing money, but rather a missing father: "upwards of 25 percent of children in our society do not have a father living at home," and it is this fact of father-absence that is manifestly crucial in the etiology of juvenile delinquency, not necessarily the absence of father-funds.

The importance of children having a father in their lives is difficult to overestimate. Consider one of the phenomenon that fatherless homes have produced since approximately 1960:

- births out of wedlock have increased more than 450 percent in 30 years.

This startling increase in antisocial behavior cannot be attributed to having a father at home; on the contrary:

- daughters from female-headed households are much more likely than daughters from two-parent households to themselves become single parents and to rely on welfare for support as adults.

And these daughters from fatherless homes have other delinquency problems as well:

- females raised in female headed families are 52 percent likelier to have teenage marriages, 111 percent likelier to have teenage births, 164 percent likelier to have premarital births, 92 percent likelier to experience marital disruptions.

Furthermore, these behavioral difficulties appear to be typical of fatherless sons as well as fatherless daughters:

- fatherless children are much more likely to develop psychiatric problems - boys three times as likely, girls four times as likely.

And there are other serious delinquency problems exhibited by fatherless children:

- children in single-parent families headed by a mother have higher arrest rates, more disciplinary problems in school, and a greater tendency to smoke and run away from home than do their peers who live with both natural parents - no matter what their income, race, or ethnicity.

"No matter what their income, race, or ethnicity:" thus, delinquency is not primarily a product of poverty:

- the percentage of single-parent households with children between the ages of 12 and 20 is significantly associated with rates of violent crime and burglary irrespective of whether or not the single-parent family is rich or poor, black, white or Hispanic. (Emphasis added)

Of course delinquency problems appear in economically deprived inner-city homes as well, but these homes are usually also missing a father:

- many of the members of disruptive [New York City groups and almost all of the street-gang members came from broken or severely disturbed and deprived homes. Many were from single-parent families where the mother had been unable to establish adequate behavioral controls over her male children.

Not surprisingly, boys from intact, two-parent, homes, fare better than their fatherless compeers:

- boys in single-parent households are much likelier to be delinquent than boys from intact families.

But contrary to "common sense wisdom," these fatherless boys do not automatically "grow out of it:"

- a high incidence of early father loss is consistent with . . . reports of an association between early father loss and adult depression and suicide.0

And children from fatherless homes do not do well in school:

- children of matrifocal families have significantly lower scholastic achievement than children raised in two-parent families. 1

Just how serious a sociological problem are the children from of single-parent (mother-custody) homes?

- Seventy-five percent of all federal juvenile offenders come from broken homes.2

Thus, cash is NOT the cure for juvenile delinquency, nor does approximately 30 (30) years of research show divorced "dead beat" fathers by any means significantly responsible for the creation of juvenile delinquents. To the contrary, the sociological and psychiatric research indicates that approximately 72% of juvenile crime is committed by the children of divorce (or of no marriage) who are raised in single-parent, mother-custody homes - children who rarely, if ever, see their fathers (or, for that matter, know who their fathers are).

This is of course not to say that "all" mother-custody homes are going to automatically produce juvenile delinquents, or that juvenile delinquency is not sometimes associated with two-parent or father-custody homes; however, it is clear that one of the critical causative roots of the juvenile delinquency problem in The United States is that the children from single-parent mother-custody homes are fatherless: children from fatherless home are seven times as likely to be emotionally disturbed and/or delinquent, or both, than are children from two-parent or single-parent-father-custody homes.3 Why this causality is almost invariably present in the family histories of juvenile delinquents, no one claims to know: that such is the case, however, no respectable researcher disputes.

One of the critical first steps in resolving the massive 4 problem of juvenile delinquency, I therefore submit, is to put the divorced father back in the "home" by getting him some form of custody, or into the daily lives of his children by getting him court-ordered, and enforceable, rights of specific visitation ("parenting time") to help his children become productive members of society, not non-productive and often self-destructive delinquents. This task appears to largely be a father's job: the inescapable "message" of my research shows that the presence of a father is absolutely essential to the mental and emotional health of children, no matter what their social status, race or ethnicity.

I therefore believe that The National Congress for Men and Children, with the cooperation of mental health, educational and law enforcement professionals, should forthwith create and implement specific intervention programs designed to curtail and eventually stop this tragedy of the preventable destruction of our children. It's our job: we are, after all, the national organization for fathers and children, are we not?