Thursday, October 12, 2006 Posted by H Donofrio
Wilcox Letter to the Editor, New York Times
To the Editor:
Re “Married and Single Parents Spending More Time With Children, Study Finds” (news article, Oct. 17):
Your sunny report on parental time with children is right to point out that children in married homes are now spending more time with their mothers and fathers than they did back in the 1960’s.
Moreover, research also indicates that children in and outside of married households in the United States are typically spending more time with their mothers than they did in the 1960’s.
But the picture is a lot less sunny when we focus on children’s time with their fathers. Because of increases in divorce and unwed childbearing, about half of American children will spend some portion of their lives living apart from their fathers.
As a consequence, American children do not, on average, spend more time with their fathers than they did in the 1960’s. This means that a large and growing minority of American children have not benefited from the emergence of the “new father” ethic to which this article calls attention.
W. Bradford Wilcox
