Delivered on the occasion of IIFWP Assembly 2000: "Renewing the United Nations and Building a Culture of Peace"
Sociologist David Poponoe argues that the success of every society depends upon its ability to produce a large number of adults who are good citizens and who uphold high standards. The central task of a democracy, therefore, is for older generations to devote themselves to socializing infants into adults, a process which transforms self-interested private individuals into public-spirited citizens. Democracy is heavily dependent for its success upon those institutions that socialize infants into adult citizens. What is so easily forgotten is that democratic society is fragile. It is like a garden: it takes a lot of care and cultivation. Ben Franklin captured this idea when, as he was leaving the Constitutional convention. He said: “We have ourselves a republic, if we can keep it.”
Preserving democracy requires far more than merely maintaining the machinery of elections, lawmaking and public administration--the kinds of things that seem to dominate our public conversation. Far more important is the substantive content of democracy. American democracy requires individuals in large numbers who possess a capacity for self-governance. Democracy, in short, requires democrats. The founders mentioned little about the social building blocks of democracy. It appears that they merely assumed that succeeding generations would take pains to cultivate character and maintain strong character, shaping institutions such as families and communities.
The Family and Civil Society
The topic of this talk centers on the question of how people come by their capacity for self-mastery and citizenship. By what means does the human person proceed from infancy to a caring, conscientious adult? By what process do they acquire democratic habits, skills, and values? How is moral conscience, so vital for a civil and humane society, formed? The short answer to that is “civil society” and all of the life-enhancing institutions that make it up.
The term civil society is generally understood as a social sphere than encompasses the entire web of voluntary associations that dot our landscape: families, neighborhoods, civic associations, charitable enterprises, and local networks “of a thousand kinds,” as Alexis de Tocqueville put it. Tocqueville was amazed at the power and vitality of American democracy and spared no effort to attribute its success to the health of this rich voluntary sector, which set the conditions for human flourishing.
These voluntary associations are often referred to as “mediating structures” because they stand as a buffer between the individual and the large impersonal structures of the state and the economic market. Civil society is not an economic sphere where self-interested persons compete for advantage, nor is it the political sphere where individuals and factions gather to gain power; it is a sector where individuals are drawn together into horizontal relationships of trust and collaboration.
The weaker this layer of civic association, the stronger the vertical relationship of the individual and the state relationship characterized not by voluntary action and cooperation but by power, authority and dependence When civil society atrophies, the individual is left more and more isolated in a politicized and conflicted society in which all roads lead to the lawyers office, to the courts, or to social agencies, which are increasingly called upon to exercise a custodial function over vulnerable individuals and fragile families.
These institutions of civil society are important, not only because they perform innumerable functions in localities every day, but also because they generate individual character and the civilized habits and dispositions upon which democracy depends Tocqueville maintained that these habits of the heart were gained first through family and then through wider associations in society. They enabled private individuals to develop social sympathies and concern for the common good.
These institutions the basis of American greatness, already contained seeds of corruption, as Tocqueville observed during his visit to American during the 1830s. They generally fell in the categories of extreme individualism materialism, and privatism the desire to simply be left alone to pursue one’s “paltry pleasures.” Recent academic studies warn of a nation in civic decline, “bowling alone,” and becoming a nation of spectators. The ideology of autonomy reduces every decision to a matter of private, personal choice, leaving communities with almost no claim on the individual.
If there is any single concern that animates the American people as we face a new century, it is the concern that our social institutions are in trouble. Given the extraordinary success of this nation, one would expect the 21st century to be greeted with high hope and expectation, but instead the national mood reveals a remarkably persistent doubt about the state of our society.
The public mood is bullish when it comes to the state of America’s economy, its scientific and technological achievements, and its standing in the world. But the people are puzzled and deeply dismayed that in the midst of extraordinary prosperity and success, some of the worst problems a society could have persist: crime, drugs, teen pregnancy, family fragmentation, and a host of ills affecting children and youth. They are baffled that prosperity does not translate necessarily into a more civil and humane society.
Americans are deeply worried that we are doing too poor a job of passing along character to the young. Pollster Daniel Yankelovich reports that “public distress about the state of our social morality has reached nearly universal proportions: 87 percent of the public fear that something is fundamentally wrong with America’s moral condition.” He reports on a decades-long trend toward a widespread feeling of moral decline, which is consistent across gender, age, race, or geographic area.[1] When a polling firm asked Americans to identify the part of our society where “an effort to do better” would make the biggest difference, the most frequently chosen answer was ”strengthening the family.”[2]
The conditions that concern Americans the most are difficult to measure and categorize. The words used by citizens themselves reveal a vivid image of tissue tearing or of a body fracturing. Words like fraying, fracturing, fragmenting are frequently used. One citizen writes,
“What chills me the most about the future is a general sense of the transformation of our society from one that strengthens the bonds between people to one that is, at best, indifferent to them. There is a sense of an inevitable fraying of the net of connection between people at many critical intersections. Each fraying accelerates another. A break in one connection such as attachment between parents and children puts pressure on the other connections... With this fraying, individuals lose that sense of membership in the larger community which grows best when it is grounded in a small one.”
This description of membership in the small community reminded me of Edmund Burke’s description of the family as “little platoon.” Tocqueville said we must be attached to these little “subdivisions” that we belong to in society, which are the ”first link” in a series by which we proceed toward a love of our country and of mankind generally.
They are the foundation on which “the progress o fall the rest depend.” In it and through these “subdivisions of society” feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed” by the reciprocal influence we have on one another.” Is it possible that the maintenance of our democratic regime falls largely to families? Tocqueville certainly seemed to imply that. He observed that the basic democratic prerequisites, “the habits of the heart,” as he put it, would be nourished and transmitted from generation to generation through the family.
I want to discuss what happens when these small webs of connection are fractured. It is through these most intimate bonds of human affiliation in the family and among kin, where we learn to grow and struggle with people who love us passionately--which then enables us to move beyond familiar ties to civic ties where we learn to trust, respect and even appreciate those with whom we disagree. Disagreement and conflict are manageable because we are bound together in some larger whole.
Family is often celebrated as a place of love, warmth, and affection, which of course it is, or at least should be; but it is also an arena of conflict where we are locked into struggle with each other. It is that struggle, not its absence, which causes us to grow. One gets the picture of concentric circles of trust, starting with the most intimate and durable, and moving out to the less personal and less secure.
The case for the family is well known. We Americans have been talking and arguing about the family for decades now, and it has often been a rather bumpy road. Recently, however, the debate has matured as a far wider consensus has begun to take shape. Many, many changes have come to the family, and certainly not all them are negative. For example, most appreciate the shifting and expansion of roles for both men and women across the spheres of home and workplace. We have decided that some things are worse than family dissolution, for example, when abuse takes place among its members.
One consequence of family change, however, which is decidedly not positive and which has increasingly come to occupy our concern, is that fewer and fewer children are being raised by committed, involved fathers.
The Problem of Fatherlessness
I am the founder and chairman of the National Fatherhood Initiative, a national non-partisan, non-sectarian civic initiative which is attempting to build a society-wide movement to renew of the commitment of fathers to their children. It is our belief that fatherlessness is a social problem that deserves our serious attention, for it contributes directly and powerfully to a host of negative outcomes among children.
Some will assert that fatherlessness has always been a problem, and it is certainly true to some extent. Societies, including our own, have always had a certain percentage of father absence in various forms. Fathers have always left home for work or war, sometimes for long periods of time, sometimes never returning.
Moreover, we have always had a certain amount of divorce and non-marital births. And in all too many cases, dating back to the beginning of recorded human history, there have been fathers who have been largely dysfunctional: perhaps physically present, but in all other respects disengaged. The family has always been under stress to some degree and always will be. But what American society now has to cope with is radically different, both in its scale and its nature. Whereas father absence has always been a challenge, it was once the exception to the rule, while today it is rapidly becoming the rule, and this is not good for children.
University of Chicago professor Don Browning, who is one of the nation’s leading family scholars, writes, “Father absence is an unprecedented reality in our society. It is not a manufactured issue. The problem of vast numbers of children being raised without resident fathers has not been fabricated by political conservatives, alarmist social scientists, or the media... Furthermore, the phenomenon is unprecedented; it has never happened in this fashion and to this degree before.”[3]
The number of children living only with their mothers in 1960 was 5.1 million. Today, the number of children going to bed in a household in which the biological father does not live is pushing 24 million, or almost 40 percent of all children. Thirty-two percent of the children born today are to non-married, father-absent households, and one in every two will spend a portion of his or her lifetime apart from their fathers.[4]
There was a time when many concluded that fathers did not make a unique, gender-specific contribution to the nurturance of children, implying that any number of possible substitutes would be fine. There was a time when many entertained the idea that children were more resilient in cases of family breakup than they actually are, which almost always meant far less time with the father. Many influences, both cultural and economic, contributed to the change.
One must accept that social outcomes have multiple explanations, especially in a society as complex as ours. The proposition that attracts almost no opposition from policy and social science experts is that family fragmentation and fatherlessness are leading contributors to many forms of maladjustment among children. The debate has really become what we can do about it.
Over the past decade, a voluminous body of data has documented the ill effects of growing up without a father. Fatherless children, for example, are five times more likely to live in poverty, three times more likely to fail in school, two or three times more likely to experience emotional or behavioral problems, and three times more likely to commit suicide.
One important caveat must be introduced at this point. What research does not suggest, and what is not being said here, is that children who are raised in single-parent households are bound by some immutable law to fail in school, turn to drugs, or commit crime. Kids from father-absent households can and do become merit scholars, all-star athletes, and professional successes, and even many of those who don’t excel grow up to be fine citizens. Good single mothers and good non-residential fathers can make a huge difference. Society must affirm the important contribution that single parents make every day under highly challenging circumstances.
But, having said that, neither can we deny the basic evidence confirming that a host of bad outcomes for kids are strongly tied to the presence or absence of fathers. According to Urie Bronfenbrenner, controlling for factors such as low income, children growing up in father-absent households “are at greater risk for experiencing a variety of behavioral and educational problems, including extremes of hyper-activity and withdrawal; lack of attentiveness in the classroom; difficulty in deferring gratification; impaired academic achievement; social misbehavior; absenteeism; dropping out; involvement in socially alienated peer groups; and the so-called 'teen-age syndrome’ of behaviors that tend to hang together--smoking drinking, vandalism, violence and criminal acts."[5]
Perhaps no factor is more powerful or disturbing than the undeniable tie of father absence to poverty. A father-absent society is a society in which growing numbers of children are poor. Poverty has many root causes, but none so decisive or powerful as father absence.
According to the National Commission on Children, almost 75 percent of America’s children who live in single-parent families will experience poverty before turning eleven years of age, whereas the majority of kids from father-present families will never experience poverty. Child poverty rates would be one-third lower today if family structure had not changed so dramatically since 1960.[6]
Equally troubling is the contribution fatherlessness makes to anti-social activity. American society is paying a huge price for having failed to heed the warning issued by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965 when he stated, “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken homes, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any expectation about the future--that community asks for and gets chaos.”[7]
Male acting out against the social order is widespread and comes in numerous forms, from behavior that is merely obnoxious to that which is socially menacing. Evidence of its impact can be found in every sector of American society, and not just from the perpetrators of violence in our cities and small towns. It includes world-famous athletes and entertainment celebrities.
Consider the case of Howard Stern, the “shock jock” radio host who looks for new ways to titillate and offend each day, usually through degrading sexual references to women. Stern talked about his father recently in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine: “The way I was raised, my father was always telling me I was a piece of [expletive], I think I will go to my grave not feeling very positive about myself or that I’m very, very special.”[8] Or consider the case of Dennis Rodman, the profane and outrageous NBA basketball player. Rodman attributes his often perverse performance as a sports celebrity to the example of his father, who fathered twenty-seven children to numerous women, while otherwise largely ignoring his offspring.[9]
Bill Stephney, who runs an entertainment company in New York and tracks trends and issues within the music industry, reports that the vast majority of gang members and violent rappers live out their lives of rage because of missing fathers. In fact, he reports that the theme of anger toward the father who was never there is emerging as a major new trend in rap music. In a rap song “Father,” LL Cool J sings, “all I ever wanted, all I ever needed, was a father.”[10]
The most socially destructive form of aggressive acting out which is tied powerfully back to father absence is crime. Seventy-two percent of adolescents serving sentences for murder are from fatherless households; 60 percent of the rapists and over 70 percent of the long-term correctional facility inmates are from father-absent households.[11]
Noted social scientist James Q. Wilson has said, “Every society must be wary of the unattached male, for he is universally the cause of numerous social ills. The good society is heavily dependent on men being attached to a strong moral order centered on families, both to discipline their sexual behavior and to reduce their competitive aggression.”[12] Curbing the aggressive impulses of young males is perhaps the greatest challenge that falls to fathers. As the national news regularly reports, there is today in American society an unusually large number of young people who seem to be very, very angry, who appear wound up like a tightly coiled spring, waiting to explode at the slightest provocation.
The nation has been served a stream of shocking reports of brutal schoolyard shootings by young males. In defiance of stereotypes all of the shootings have occurred in small rural communities by young white males from average, middle class backgrounds. Shawn Johnson, a California-based forensic psychologist who has conducted over 6,000 evaluations of adult and juvenile criminals states, “This is the price we are paying as a society for the number of fathers who have bailed out on their children.”[13] Obviously, only a small minority of troubled kids will turn to slaughtering others in cold blood, and certainly father absence is not the only factor behind this growing epidemic. Nevertheless the alienation among youth and even young children today is widespread.
Our sons and daughters need to see examples of confident males turning their energies toward affirming life and nourishing character, not the pseudo-masculinity of power or domination. Those who have studied masculinity have remarked about its basic fragility. It is all too easy for masculinity, which is held together tenuously by societal norms, to fall out of kilter, when too few fathers are there to model it out in all of its complexities of strength and tenderness, initiative and restraint. When these supports are not in place, society suffers, not from too much genuine masculinity, but from far too little of it.
A society of too few mature fathers ends up with what Dr. Frank Pittman calls “toxic masculinity,” where essentially weak, insecure, and poorly fathered men chase after a socially destructive masculine mystique. Men who have not fully felt the love and approval of their fathers are men who live in masculine shame. Says Pittman, “Men without models don’t know what is behind their shame, loneliness, and despair, their desperate search for love, for affirmation and for structure, their frantic tendency to compete over just about anything with just about anybody. These men are in a battle not with women, whether their mothers, wives or girlfriends, as much as with their own fathers."[14]
Says Pittman, boys who want to become men have to “guess at what men are like, “which usually turns out what he calls a pathologically exaggerated masculinity.” Whatever the challenge, these men are never “man enough.” What is the way out of this trap of shrunken shame-filled masculinity? “Ultimately," says Pittman, "we’re not going to raise a better class of men until we have a better class of fathers.” The answer, he says, is the forgotten profession of fatherhood.[15]
The tendency in focusing on what one expert termed “the male problematic” is to neglect the consequences of father absence in the lives of girls and young women. As any experienced, caring father knows, one of the most vulnerable persons in the world is the adolescent girl in her early teens. Poorly fathered girls often fall victim to poorly fathered young men who prey on the vulnerabilities of girls who carry within them a hunger for the father’s affection and who confuse it with false and costly alternatives. Girls from father-absent households are 164 percent more likely to have children out of wedlock, often starting in their teens.
Fathers and Socialization
It is not enough to describe the consequences of father absence without detailing the positive contributions fathers make in nurturing children. What relevance, might we ask, does fatherhood have to the cultivation of those positive ingredients of citizenship such as trust, cooperation, and social generosity among citizens? To what extent, in other words, is the restoration of father-involved families integral to the renewal of American civil society?
The family benefits society by producing what scholars call “social capital.” James Goleman, who popularized the term, utilized it to describe a range of personal strengths that are cultivated in the family, especially the ability to form ties of cooperation and to work toward common purposes. Social capital refers to personal capacities, such as the important civic capacities to be helpful, trustful, and respectful in relationship to one’s associates. These are clearly affected by patterns of trust and interdependency learned in families. For example, a generation that has over-invested in itself and under-invested in its children can be said to have borrowed social capital that it has not replaced creating intergenerational social deficits. Deficits in social capital created in our families quickly come to affect the social health of the nation.
For example, much has been made of the fact that large majorities of the American people are distrustful of their public institutions. Now we have discovered the unsurprising fact that American citizens are more and more distrustful and suspicious of each other. Contrary to convenient myth, our discontents are not confined to governmental malfeasance and feckless politicians. A more likely source of our cynicism is the rupture of our primary relationships within the family, of our marriages, and homes, and especially of the connection of children to fathers.
Trust is nurtured in the family. In bonding to the children, the parent puts in place the rudiments of trust: a process which, according to Urie Bronfenbrenner, conveys strong, mutual, irrational, emotional attachment offered through a person who is committed to the child’s well-being and development preferably for life. Much like economic capital, social capital can be drawn down.
Who can doubt that children will be less trusting or cooperative as an adult if they has experienced a painful loss of trust in the person in whom they thought they could surely place their trust--his or her own father? Disillusionment with our primary relationships leads to distrust of kin and community.
Or consider the phenomenon of youth alienation. The George Gallup organization conducts an annual youth survey to reflect what is happening with “real teens” as a group. Wondering why so many American teens feel depressed or alienated, the Gallup youth survey proceeded to search for answers to this questions by constructing an “alienation index." Gallup concluded that a deprived family life seems to be the key “cause” indicator of alienation. Often there is simply a huge disconnect between the lives of parent--little to talk about, little in common, extreme busyness. In many cases, one of the parent--most frequently the father--is simply not there for them.
Never before have children been so far removed from the things that give life a sense of direction meaning and purpose, such as one’s heritage, place, and people. In no case is this alienation deeper than in the fraying of family bonds and the separation of children from their fathers.
As inherently social and meaning-seeking creatures human beings possess a need for membership in human community for connection, cohesion, and coherence. When these needs are not met, individuals experience painful isolation and society suffers ours is an anonymous, fast-paced and increasingly impersonal society, but a leading cause of uprootedness among the young are not these factors, but rather the declining reliability of a growing number of parents to preserve the bonds of affection and trust with their own children.
If adults in the home are caring, fair, and faithful under all circumstances, then that is what the child will likely expect from, and be capable of displaying in, the world beyond the home. Conversely, if the experience the child had of home was one of abuse, neglect, or betrayal, it is not surprising that he or she will project attitudes of cynicism and hopelessness toward the broader society. It is hard to imagine attitudes of general trust taking shape toward more remote political and social institutions when a child is abandoned or betrayed by a mother or father.
Or consider the issue of authority. Fathers are the first encounter kids have with male authority and perhaps authority generally. How interaction with that intimate form of authority takes shape will likely determine the child’s success at navigating his or her way through the more challenging territory of authority and conflict in the school, on the playground, or at the mall. In many ways, healthy fathers serve as a bridge between the more protected life of the home and the more demanding environment of the world beyond. Fathers raise their children mostly with an eye toward their inevitable encounter with the rules and norms of the world beyond the nest. Good fathers tutor their children toward developing positive habits of self-control and respect toward others.
Finally, let me mention impulse control as a core ingredient of civil society. This is one of the most important functions that fathers carry out in the socialization of children. Wade Horn, prominent child psychologist and President of the National Fatherhood Initiative, points out that proper socialization requires the development of the ability to delay or inhibit impulse gratification.
According to Horn, “Well-socialized children have learned not to strike out at others to get what they want; under-socialized children have not. Well-socialized children have learned to listen to and obey the directions of legitimate authority figures, such as parents and teachers; under-socialized children have not." He notes that studies which demonstrate the differences between the way fathers and mothers parent indicate that fathers are essential to helping the young develop impulse control, and hence to be socially cooperative.
Renewing Fatherhood as a Social Norm
If the renewal of father-involved families is central to the restoration of civil society, we cannot afford to be agnostic on several related questions that concern not just whether fathering takes place, but how and under what circumstances it is likely to be carried out.
It is nearly impossible to discuss the renewal of fatherhood in isolation from other social and cultural realities that are now common in America. For example, the vagueness of our recent discussion of family reflect our need to accommodate a steep rise in separated, divorced, blended, and never-formed families headed in the vast majority of cases by single mothers. To some, family now means little more than a collection of adults bound together by temporary needs and agreements. This relativization of the family also fits comfortably with the broadly felt desire among adults to embrace the dramatic expansion of private lifestyle choices. As pointed out earlier, this exaltation of choice has not served everyone equally well, particularly children.
It is important that a discussion of fatherhood be addressed to all fathers. Even though many fathers are removed from the households in which their children are being raised, we must acknowledge their desire to care for their offspring and the importance of such care, even under circumstances that are extremely difficult. This is important especially in urban America where non-marital births are the large majority and where fathers, if they are engaged at all, are involved through arrangement with the mothers of their children.
Having said this, however, it is necessary to point out that embracing an elastic notion of family out of a legitimate desire to improve fathering may have the unintended consequence of making the job harder to accomplish in the future, raising the likelihood that more children will be raised without fathers. To put the problem plainly, the immediate consequence of this relativization of the definition of the family is that fathers are the first to be written out of the family script. When the cutting and pasting begins on the ever-changing family portrait, it is the father who is typically cut out. In the vast majority of cases, children from fragmented families live apart from their fathers and in many cases see him infrequently.
Reasserting a basic family norm of two parents, preferably the biological parents, preferably parenting cooperatively in the context of marriage, depends largely on the validity of the claim that fathers are essential in the contribution they make. Historically, societies did not have to worry that mothers might fall short of fulfilling their biologically determined role.
Voluntary mother absence has not occurred broadly across time and human societies. This is obviously not true with fathers. Fathering, says family sociologist John Miller, is a cultural acquisition to an extent that mothering is not. Given the fact that there are few biologically compelling reasons for the male to care for his offspring, a set of overlapping largely cultural developments is required. When a culture “ceases to support a father’s involvement with his own children (through its law, mores, symbols, models, rituals) powerful natural forces take over in favor of the mother-only family.”[16]
Conclusion
Democratic character flows not from formal constitutions or Congressional acts, but from vital, character-shaping institutions in society, of which the family is the most foundational. According to Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon, “Governments must have an adequate supply of citizens who are skilled in the arts of self-government.” These arts consist of “deliberation, compromise, consensus-building, civility and reason-giving.”
The decline in fathering, whether through the growing prevalence of physical absence by some or merely emotional disengagement by others, contributes to socially underdeveloped citizens who often lack the necessary disposition for healthy participation in society. Fathers can be powerfully positive in making better citizens.
In sum, liberal democratic values flower when rooted in the sub-soil of virtuous and vibrant institutions. Periodically in American history, citizens have reacted to the general disregard of social standards and obligations and, with the help of society-wide social reform movements, moved individuals toward restraint and social obligation. In the 19th century, for example, society witnessed an explosion of voluntary associations and organizations aimed at social reform and moral uplift. Spiritual awakenings, temperance movements, and many private and public efforts were made to strengthen character and responsibility. These were dynamic movements that transcended politics and partisanship.
James Q. Wilson, who has tracked social reforms, says, “Throughout history, the institutions that have produced effective male socialization have been private, not public.” If this is true, he says, “then our policy ought to identity, evaluate and encourage those local, private efforts that seem to do the best job at reducing drug abuse, inducing people to marry, persuading parents, especially fathers, to take responsibility for their children, and exercising informal social controls over neighborhood streets.”[17]
The renewal of fatherhood and the renewal of civil society go hand in hand. Fathers have much to offer in strengthening communities, and community-based institutions can be mobilized to strengthen fathers, reinforce their importance, offer training and assistance, and help them pass on to their children a strong fathering heritage.
Notes
1. Daniel Yankelovich, “Trends in American Cultural Values," Criterion 35, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 2-9.
2. Peter D. Hall and Robert Teeter, Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, December 5-8, 1996, p. 24.
3. Don Eberly, “Fatherhood the Academy, and the Liberal Churches,” in The Faith Factor in Fatherhood (forthcoming).
4. Wade F. Horn, Father Facts (Gaithersburg, MD: National Fatherhood Initiative, 1996), p. 1.
5. Urie Bronfenbrenner, “Discovering What Families Do,” in Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family, David Blankenhorn, S. Bayne, and J.B. Elshtain, eds. (Milwaukee 1990), p. 29.
6. Horn, p. 37.
7. David Brode, “Beware of the Unattached Male,” Washington Post, February 16, 1994.
8. Interview in Rolling Stone, February 10, 1994, pp. 28-53.
9. Perspectives, Newsweek, September 9, 1996, p. 25.
10. Veronica Chambers, “Family Rappers,” Newsweek, January 19, 1998, p. 42.
11. Horn, pp. 32-33.
12. See Brode.
13. Elizabeth Kasto, “When Kids Kill,” The Washington Post, in Lancaster Sunday News, Lancaster PA, April 5, 1996, p. 1.
14. Frank Pittman, Enough, Fathers, Sons and the Search for Masculinity (New York: The Berkeley Publishing Group, 1993), p. xx.
15. Pittman, p. xxi.
16. John Miller, Biblical Faith and Fathering: Why We Call God Father (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), p. 2.
17. James Q. Wilson, “Culture, Incentives, and the Underclass,” in Values and Public Policy (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1994), p. 74.