Chris Powell: Bring back fathers! A lesson from Truman

“Parental Advice,’’ by Belgian painter Josephus Laurentius Dyckmans (1811-1888)

MA NCHESTER, Conn.

For Father's Day the Connecticut Department of Children and Families publicized Connecticut's Fatherhood Initiative, a program that DCF runs with the state Department of Social Services that strives t men as involved with their children as those children are involved with welfare agencies.

The social science confirming that a father's involvement with his children is crucial long has been overwhelming and DCF laid it out well. Children involved with their fathers do better in every respect in life: educationally, emotionally and in physical and mental health and social development. They are far more likely to avoid poverty, to grow up happy, confident, and kind, and to find decent employment. They are far less likely to get in trouble.

"Children want to make fathers proud," the DCF stressed. Exactly!

The Fatherhood Initiative is great as far as it goes, but like so much else in government, it is remedial to the problem rather than what is most needed: prevention. That's because a third of U.S. children are living without a father in their home. Programs like the initiative will be lucky to reach a tiny percentage of them.

Especially required are changes to the welfare system to remove its perverse incentives, to stop it from discouraging family formation, from encouraging childbearing outside marriage, and from substituting economically for fathers. Indeed, if, as social science suggests, fatherlessness is the country's worst social problem, the root cause of most other social problems, then childbearing outside marriage is more anti-social than some things that are criminalized.

This needs to be taught in schools and all places where young people gather. But politically government is too scared to do it, lest it distress the many fatherless children who would hear the lesson and offend their single parents.

The lesson most needs to be taught in cities, where as many as 90% of children have no fathers in their home or lives. But that is where politics makes it least likely to be taught.

Before the start of "the War on Poverty," in the ‘60s, ago the prospect of having a child outside marriage terrified young men and women alike, for both moral and economic reasons, reasons that were essentially the wisdom of the ages.

But then public policy removed the economic reasons, hastening the erosion of the moral reasons. Government urgently should find ways of restoring the wisdom of the ages to welfare policy.

For as the country might have noticed by now -- from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York and to Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven -- fatherless places are miserable and violent.

xxx

Winsted, Conn., native Ralph Nader, the great advocate of civic activism, wrote this week that Connecticut U.S. Rep. John B. Larson is clamoring -- privately, apparently to minimize embarrassment within his party -- to get House Democrats to push their party's tenuous majority in the Senate to start doing something.

That is, Nader suggests, Larson wants Senate Democrats to play Dirty Harry and tell Senate Republicans: "Go ahead and filibuster -- make our day!"

Nader notes that with the Senate tied 50-50 and with 60 votes needed to terminate debate and bring legislation to a vote, the Republican Senate leadership has needed only to threaten a filibuster to induce the Democratic Senate leadership to put aside any legislation from the Democratic-controlled House.

But Larson is said to argue that the Democratic senators should bring House bills to debate anyway and cause the Republican senators to be seen opposing them and to spend much time and energy doing so. For even if the Republican filibusters succeeded, issues would be illuminated and public pressure might change some minds.

A former history teacher, Larson may know that in 1948 Democrat Harry Truman overcame huge odds and got elected president in his own right in part by calling a special session of Congress, which had a Republican majority, to consider his administration's agenda and then denouncing the "do-nothing" Republicans when they wouldn't act favorably.

Today's Democratic agenda is hardly perfect but the country deserves a debate on it and some work from the Senate for a change.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.