One possible reaction to Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids: The Importance of Fatherhood in Virginia, the brand-new study put together by a diverse group of scholars for the National Marriage Project and the National Center for Black Family Life, might be to ask: “Do we really need a study to tell us dads are important?”
It would be wonderful if studies showing obvious truths were unneeded, but too much of the modern world has cast off common sense because of ideological commitments. Decades ago, the late Harvard scholar James Q. Wilson said the amount of evidence for the superiority of the family in which both mother and father lived with children was so massive that “even some sociologists believe it.”
Studies proving the obvious about the family seem to be ever in need to counteract those who tell us the traditional married mother-father family is simply one option, maybe even an inferior one, in which children can thrive. For decades, not only the sociologists but also many of the creators of mass culture have been trying to prove that the married fifties sitcom couple Ozzie and Harriet were wrong while nineties sitcom single-mom-by-choice Murphy Brown was right.
Only squares like Vice President Dan Quayle would say otherwise, we were told. Dads are nice, Hollywood and liberal politicians have been telling us, but not really essential.
Perhaps that is why the introduction to Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids, a study of the state of fatherhood in Virginia,starts off with a quotation from Barack Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day speech: “Too many fathers…are missing…missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.” This shouldn’t be seen as a partisan issue, but all too often it is.
The study’s authors, led by the National Marriage Project’s Brad Wilcox, come from the University of Virginia, Hampton University, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Institute for Family Studies. They don’t all agree on everything, including every policy recommendation offered in the study. Yet they all agree that “both father engagement and father presence matter for Virginia’s children, and the state can do more to increase the odds that boys and girls across the Commonwealth have the benefit of being raised by a good dad.”
What did they find? Well, though the study is very blunt that most kids, even those who are raised in single-parent homes, end up doing ok, the reality is that kids who live with a dad, particularly a dad involved with their lives, do much better.
Drawing on data for Virginia children from the National Surveys of Children’s Health in 2022 and 2023, the study looked at results for over 1,300 children “from intact, stepfamily, and single-father families with biological, adoptive, and stepfathers.” Fathers were coded as “highly involved” if they reported “handling the demands of children ‘very well,’ and the family eats meals together at least 4 days per week.” The report summarizes research showing that the way dads play with their children, encourage them to take risks, and discipline them all differs from mothers. Dads are not just another financial input.
Intact families with married parents showed the highest percentage of highly involved fathers, while percentages were similar for single fathers, adoptive parents, and married birth-parent with stepparent families. The study specifically found that “the odds of a child in a cohabiting family having an active and engaged father are 83% lower than the odds for a child in an intact-married family.” Translation? Marriage matters.
Virginia kids with highly involved dads earn higher grades, have the schools contact their parents about discipline or learning fewer times, and are much less depressed. The authors point out that having involved fathers is in some ways more important for boys today because of the problems associated with boys raised without fathers present. For instance, over one-third (35%) of boys without involved fathers have their school send home notes for behavior, but fewer than a quarter (22%) with involved fathers do.
It is interesting, however, that in some areas, the effects on girls are often just as strong. While boys with involved fathers are 2% more likely to get high grades than those without, girls with involved fathers are 15% more likely to do so. Similarly, while boys without involved fathers are slightly more likely to be depressed than those with them, girls without involved fathers are 10 times more likely to be depressed than those who had them.
What is fascinating is that the advantages were true for white, black, and Hispanic children. In fact, black and Hispanic children with involved fathers were slightly more likely than white children to get A and B grades in school. The differences in performance corresponding to race track very closely with the percentages of children with highly involved fathers.
To be sure, this data does not say that unmarried cohabiting fathers can’t be good dads to their kids, or that single mothers can’t raise healthy, well-adjusted children—again most kids do end up ok. There are many fantastic stepfathers and single fathers out there. But what it does undeniably suggest is that kids who grow up in a household with a married mom and dad who are active in their lives are more likely to have better outcomes.
The policy suggestions the study recommends are aimed at achieving six main goals. Some of them, such as the second, “Creating a Positive Culture of Fatherhood,” seem to involve mostly public relations. The first, “Making Schools Boy-Friendly,” includes a raft of very specific positions that include expanding opportunities for single-sex education. Number three, “Limiting Access to Pornography,” offers both technical and legal solutions for this scourge of developing healthy relationships. The sixth, “Helping Formerly Incarcerated Fathers Stand Tall,” highlights ways Virginia’s Department of Corrections is already helping fathers prepare for reintegration into their families as well as society—and shows how Governor Glenn Youngkin’s leadership on this issue bodes well for making Virginia a national model.
Reading a study might not sound relaxing on Father’s Day, but you might just take a look at this one. Only 60 pages, chock-full of charts and references you can use, Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids is useful for those who want to learn (or know how to show others) that involved dads are an essential key to healthy families and a healthy society—and that there are ways we can help more dads become involved and more boys grow up with the tools to do so themselves one day.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
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