[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 86 (Thursday, June 17, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7162-S7164]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      NATIONAL FATHER'S RETURN DAY

  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, for most of us, Father's Day, which of 
course is this coming Sunday, is a special day of love, family, 
appreciation, a customary time for giving ties and, if you will allow 
me, for renewing ties of a different sort. But for a staggering number 
of American children, there will be no ties of either kind to celebrate 
this Sunday. The sad reality is that an estimated 25 million children--
more than 1 out of 3--live absent their biological father, and 17 
million kids live without a father of any kind. About 40 percent of the 
children living in fatherless households have not seen their dads in at 
least a year; and 50 percent of children who don't live with their 
fathers have never stepped foot in their father's home.
  This growing crisis of father absence in America is taking a terrible 
toll on these children who are being denied the love, guidance, 
discipline, emotional nourishment, and daily support that fathers can 
provide. As dads disappear, the American family is becoming 
significantly weaker and less capable of fulfilling its fundamental 
responsibility of nurturing and socializing children and conveying 
values to them. In turn, the risks to the health and well-being of 
America's children are becoming significantly higher.
  Children growing up without fathers, research shows, are far more 
likely to live in poverty, to fail in school, to experience behavioral 
and emotional problems, to develop drug and alcohol problems, to be 
victims of physical abuse and neglect and, tragically, to commit 
suicide. It is, of course, not just those children individually who are 
suffering but our society as a whole. Many mothers and fathers are so 
busy today that they are less involved in their children's lives than 
in the past. But this absence is particularly consequential when it 
comes to fathers, for they play such a critical role in socializing and 
providing boundaries to children, particularly to boys.
  The devastating consequences of father absence for communities--and 
particularly urban communities--has been broadly documented in a report 
released just this week by the Institute For American Values and the 
Morehouse Research Institute. The report was titled ``Turning the 
Corner on Father Absence in Black America.'' It was discussed in a 
powerful column by Michael Kelly, which appeared in Wednesday's 
Washington Post.
  I ask unanimous consent that the entirety of Mr. Kelly's column be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                          A National Calamity

       So now we are four, as along comes Jack, 8 pounds, 4 
     ounces, to join Tom, who for the record welcomes this 
     development; and now I know what my job will be for the 
     remainder of my days. I will be the man sitting behind the 
     driver's wheel saying: Boys, listen to your mother.
       This is a good job, and one of the better things about it 
     is the nice clarity it lends to life. Fathers (and mothers) 
     relearn that the world is a simple enough place. They 
     discover that their essential ambitions, which once seemed so 
     many, have been winnowed down to a minimalist few: to raise 
     their children reasonably well and to live long enough to see 
     them turn out reasonably okay. This doesn't seem like a great 
     deal to ask for until you find out that it is everything to

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     you. Because, it turns out, you are everything to them.
       We know this not just emotionally but empirically. We 
     know--even Murphy Brown says so--that both fathers and 
     mothers are essential to the well-being of children. 
     Successive studies have found that children growing up in 
     single-parent homes are five times as likely to be poor, 
     compared with children who have both parents at home. They 
     are twice as likely (if male, three times as likely) to 
     commit a crime leading to imprisonment. They are more likely 
     to fail at school, fail at work, fail in society.
       What, then, would we say about a society in which the 
     overwhelming majority of children were born into homes 
     without fathers and who grew up, in significant measure, 
     without fathers? We would say that this society was in a 
     state of disaster, heading toward disintegration. We would 
     say that here we had a calamity on a par with serious war or 
     famine. And, if that society were our own, we would, 
     presumably, treat this as we would war or famine, with an 
     immediate and massive mobilization of all of our resources.
       Of course, this society is our own. Of black children born 
     in 1996, 70 percent were born to unmarried mothers. At least 
     80 percent of all black children today can expect that a 
     significant part of their childhood will be spent apart from 
     their fathers.
       Millions of America's children live in a state of 
     multiplied fatherlessness--that is, in homes without fathers 
     and in neighborhoods where a majority of the other homes are 
     likewise without fathers. In 1990, 3 million children were 
     living in fatherless homes located in predominantly 
     fatherless neighborhoods--neighborhoods in which a majority 
     of the families were headed by single mothers. 
     Overwhelmingly, those children were black.
       These figures, and most of the others that follow, come 
     from a report, ``Turning the Corner on Father Absence in 
     Black America,'' released to no evident great concern this 
     week by the Morehouse Research Institute and the Institute 
     for American Values.
       As the report notes, things were not always thus. In 1960, 
     when black Americans lived with systemtic oppression, 78 
     percent of black babies were born to married mothers, an 
     almost mirror reversal of today's reality. In the 1950s, a 
     black child would spend on average about four years living in 
     a one-parent home. An estimated comparable figure for black 
     children born in the early 1980s is 11 years. According to 
     the research center Child Trends, the proportion of black 
     children living in two-parent families fell by 23 percentage 
     points between 1970 and 1997, going from 58 percent to 35 
     percent.
       The disaster of black fatherlessness in America is part of 
     a larger crisis. In every major demographic group, 
     fatherlessness has been growing for years. Among whites, 25 
     percent of children do not live in two-parent homes, up from 
     10 percent in 1970. Overall, on any given night, four out of 
     10 children in America are sleeping in homes without fathers. 
     (True, in the past few years, the number of out-of-wedlock 
     births has begun to fall, but that trend is too nascent and 
     too modest to much affect the situation.)
       Some people think all of this matters. One is David 
     Blankenhorn, a liberal organizer who learned realities as a 
     Vista volunteer and who 11 years ago founded the Institute 
     for American Values, co-author of this week's report. It is 
     Blankenhorn's modest suggestion that fathers are necessary to 
     children, that their abdication on a large scale is 
     calamitious to the nation and that the people who run the 
     nation should do something serious about this.
       The man who currently runs it is not a factor here; he does 
     not do serious. What about the men who would run it? Al Gore 
     says nothing; he is too busy fighting the loss of green 
     spaces in Chevy Chase. Bill Bradley preaches about racism but 
     is silent about the ruination of a race. George W. Bush is 
     full of compassionate conservatism, but he won't say quite 
     what that is. And so on. History will wonder why America's 
     leaders abandoned America's children, and why America let 
     them do so.

  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I want to say just a few words on the 
jarring statistics from that report and column for my colleagues. Of 
African American children born in 1996, 70 percent were born to 
unmarried mothers. At least 80 percent, according to the report, can 
expect to spend a significant part of their childhood apart from their 
fathers.
  We can take some comfort and encouragement from the fact that the 
teen pregnancy rate has dropped in the last few years. But the numbers 
cited in Mr. Kelly's column and in the report are nonetheless 
profoundly unsettling, especially given what we know about the impact 
of fatherlessness, and indicate we are in the midst of what Kelly aptly 
terms a ``national calamity.'' It is a calamity. Of course, it is not 
limited to the African American community. On any given night, 4 out of 
10 children in this country are sleeping in homes without fathers.
  At the end of this column, Michael Kelly asks: How could this happen 
in a Nation like ours? And he wonders if anyone is paying attention.
  Well, the fact is that people are beginning to pay attention, 
although it tends to be more people at the grassroots level who are 
actively seeking solutions neighborhood by neighborhood. The best known 
of these groups is called the National Fatherhood Initiative. I think 
it has made tremendous progress in recent years in raising awareness of 
father absence and its impact on our society and in mobilizing a 
national effort to promote responsible fatherhood.
  Along with a group of allies, the National Fatherhood Initiative has 
been establishing educational programs in hundreds of cities and towns 
across America. It has pulled together bipartisan task forces in the 
Senate, the House, and among the Nation's Governors and mayors. It has 
worked with us to explore public policies that encourage and support 
the efforts of fathers to become more involved in the lives of their 
children.
  Last Monday, the National Fatherhood Initiative held its annual 
national fatherhood summit here in Washington. At that summit, Gen. 
Colin Powell, and an impressive and wide-ranging group of experts and 
advocates, talked in depth about the father absence crisis in our 
cities and towns and brainstormed about what we can do to turn this 
troubling situation around.
  There are limits to what we in Government can do to meet this 
challenge and advance the cause of responsible fatherhood because, 
after all, it is hard to change people's attitudes and behaviors and 
values through legislation. But that doesn't mean we are powerless, nor 
does it mean we can afford not to try to lessen the impact of a problem 
that is literally eating away at our country.
  In recent times, we have had a great commonality of concern expressed 
in the ideological breadth of the fatherhood promotion effort both here 
in the Senate and our task force, but underscored by statements that 
the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of Health and 
Human Services have made on this subject in recent years. Indeed, I 
think President Clinton most succinctly expressed the importance of 
this problem when he said:

       The single biggest social problem in our society may be the 
     growing absence of fathers from their children's homes 
     because it contributes to so many other social problems.

  So there are some things we can and should be trying to do. I am 
pleased to note our colleagues, Senators Bayh, Domenici, and others 
have been working to develop a legislative proposal, which I think 
contains some very constructive and creative approaches in which the 
Federal Government would support financially, with resources, some of 
these very promising grassroots father-promotion efforts, and also 
encourage and enact the removal of some of the legal and policy 
barriers that deter men from an active presence in their children's 
lives.
  Another thing I think we can do to help is to use the platform we 
have on the Senate floor--this people's forum --to elevate this problem 
on the national agenda. That is why Senator Gregg and I have come to 
the floor today. I am particularly grateful for the cosponsorship of 
the Senator from New Hampshire, because he is the chairman of the 
Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families. We are joined by a very 
broad and bipartisan group of cosponsors which includes Senators Bayh, 
Brownback, Mack, Dodd, Domenici, Jeffords, Allard, Cochran, Landrieu, 
Bunning, Robb, Dorgan, Daschle, and Akaka. I thank them all for joining 
in the introduction of this special resolution this morning, which is 
to honor Father's Day coming this Sunday, but also to raise our 
discussion of the problem of absent fathers in our hopes for the 
promotion of responsible fatherhood.

  Senator Gregg indicated this resolution would declare this Sunday's 
holiday as National Fathers Return Day and call on dads around the 
country to use this day, particularly if they are absent, to reconnect 
and rededicate themselves to their children's lives, to understand and 
have the self-confidence to appreciate how powerful a contribution they 
can make to the well-being of the children that they have helped to 
create, and to start by spending this Fathers' Day returning for part 
of the day to their children and expressing to their children the love 
they have for them and their willingness to support them.

[[Page S7164]]

  The statement we hope to make this morning in this resolution 
obviously will not change the hearts and minds of distant or disengaged 
fathers, but those of us who are sponsoring the resolution hope it will 
help to spur a larger national conversation about the importance of 
fatherhood and help remind those absent fathers of their 
responsibilities, yes, but also of the opportunity they have to change 
the life of their child, about the importance of their fatherhood, and 
also help remind these absent fathers of the value of their 
involvement.
  We ask our colleagues to join us in supporting this resolution, and 
adopting it perhaps today but certainly before this week is out to make 
as strong a statement as possible and to move us one step closer to the 
day when every American child has the opportunity to have a truly happy 
Father's Day because he or she will be spending it with their father.
  I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey, Senator 
Torricelli, is recognized for 10 minutes.
  Mr. TORRICELLI. Thank you, Mr. President.

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