This has turned into the year Britain finally started talking about fathers again. The Centre for Social Justice’s Lost Boys report warned that around 2.5 million children – roughly one in five – now grow up with no father figure at home, and that today’s boys are more likely to have a smartphone than a dad in the house. Sir Gareth Southgate used his Richard Dimbleby Lecture to warn of “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers” stepping into the space where fathers and community leaders used to be. The BBC’s The Eubanks: Like Father, Like Son showed a dad and son painfully trying to repair their relationship. Fathers have marched in ‘Dad strikes’ for better paternity leave, and Stephen Graham’s Letters to Our Sons project invites men worldwide to write honestly to their boys about manhood today.
Last week’s Moral Maze on Radio 4 asked “What should we expect from a father?”, and invited me to give evidence defending fathers and real marriage as the best foundation for children. Some may say that the laws don't really change culture, they only reflect it.
That sounds clever, but it’s wrong. The Government’s own review of smoking laws, for example, found they influenced “social norms around smoking”, and we all know seatbelt and drink-driving laws have done the same. Behaviours that were once routine because of the law are now seen as reckless.
Laws have similarly influenced the culture around sex, children and especially fathers.
The Law Society explains how no-fault divorce made breakups much easier, calling it a “landmark change” in how couples think and talk about ending their marriages. After separation, children usually live mostly with one parent – in around nine out of ten cases the mother – while fathers become the “non-resident parent” with limited contact.
For years, our statutes have been teaching that fathers are optional. Parliament literally deleted “the need of that child for a father” from statute in fertility law, replacing it with a vague requirement to consider the need for “supportive parenting”. The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 turned marriage from an institution that produces children and binds a mother and father to their children, into something that depends on the whims of adults.
The truth is that children, on average, still do best when raised by their own mum and dad in a stable, public, man-woman marriage. Cohabiting couples with children are 3x more likely to split than married couples by the age of five. By age 14, almost half of first-born children are no longer living with both natural parents. The further Britain drifts from marriage, the more ‘lost boys’ and father hunger it creates.
A better settlement would begin by telling the truth again: that a child’s need for a father is not an embarrassing relic but a description of reality. It would stop scrubbing mothers and fathers from official language in favour of phrases like ‘non-birthing parent’. It would end the ‘couple penalties’ in the tax and benefits system that quietly nudge low-income families apart. And it would once again allow professionals, in policy and guidance, to say that children generally do best with their own mum and dad committed to one another for the long haul.
Above all, it would treat marriage as what it actually is: the best social technology for society for keeping husbands and wives together, long enough to raise the next generation.
The good news is that this debate has reopened. Supporters of real marriage are standing up for the pattern that works best. Every faithful marriage, every dad who stays, quietly proves that a better story for Britain’s sons and daughters is still possible!