How Bad Are the Statistics? What Are the Casualties?
According to social scientists Larry Bumpass and James Sweet’s 1984 study, “About half of all children born between 1970 and 1984 are likely to spend some time in a mother-only family” (David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America, BasicBooks, 1995, p. 295). However this statistic on fatherless children continues to increase as the percentage of illegitimate births has skyrocketed since 1984, growing 82 percent from 1980 to 1991! “Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin, revising Sweet and Bumpass’s estimate, calculated in 1991 that `for children born in the 1990s, the figure [of children living without their fathers] could reach 60 percent if the divorce rate remains high and non-marital childbearing continues its upward trend’ (Fatherless America, p. 235). In his excellent book, Fatherless America, David Blankenhorn argues that we should focus more attention to the leading indicators on the state of fatherhood instead of statistics on the numbers of business failures, rate of inflation or othe
