Robert L. Maginnis, Lt. Col. (Ret.)

My responsibilities at the Family Research Council include overseeing drug and crime issues with a special emphasis on children.  These assignments provide me opportunities to speak across America to groups of parents and government leaders about drug and crime-related issues.  These opportunities may increase because last month I was fortunate to be appointed by the U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott, to serve on the national Parents Advisory Council on Drug Abuse.

I often try to combine parenting and work.  Recently, Grant, my 13-year-old son, and I visited a computer software store and a local video arcade.  I wanted to learn more about violent video games and the influence this form of “entertainment” has for children.

At the arcade, we sat inside a darkened booth and played a game entitled “House of the Dead.”  The seats shook, the authentic-looking pistols recoiled with each shot and the gunfire and explosion sounds were loud and realistic.  For perhaps five minutes, I watched a fast-moving series of attacks by strange-looking human-like creatures as Grant quickly returned fire.  There was an abundance of blood and body parts flew into the air accompanied by terrible screams.  Frightening!

I spent 24 years in the U.S. Army training soldiers to kill.  I’m an expert trainer and appreciate the realism modern simulations provide.  These “games” which “entertain” our children are incredibly realistic and when used frequently will modify their behavior.

Still at the arcade, I watched little boys gleefully shoot at computer-generated human-like figures.  I understand that some games allow the user to morph pictures of friends, enemies or whomever onto the bodies of animated figures.  The player can then practice “killing” real people. 

Some people call this “entertainment” and they claim that such material does not affect adolescent behavior.  I disagree.  The U.S. military spends millions of dollars to buy these technologies so to better teach soldiers to kill.  There are many scientific studies supporting the precept that behavior can be modified by video and audio technologies.

We also visited a video game store that sells software with titles like “Half-Life,” “Doom,” and “Nam.”  The eye-catching boxes in which the games are packaged boast real-to-life action pictures and bold print that reads: “Best game of all time!”, “Animated blood and gore,” and “Move carefully – one shot kills!”  This shouldn’t be child’s play.

I’m interested in video games because they have been implicated in the surge of adolescent violence.  Most Americans want to reverse the recent trend in adolescent violence and if video gaming teaches dangerous behaviors, then action must be taken to protect our children.

Unfortunately, American adolescent violence is only one of a number of worrisome trends.  I believe these trends may apply to other countries as well.  Judge for yourself.

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IS DOWN

• U.S. students perform poorly when compared with most western nations.

• 95% of our college-bound youth would not be admitted to college anywhere else in the world.

INCREASED TEEN SEXUAL ACTIVITY

• The rate of births to unmarried teenagers has increased almost 200 percent since 1960.[iii]  In 1996, 12.9 % of all births were to teenage moms.

• 89% of births to teens occurred before marriage in the 1990s, compared to less than 30% 60 years ago.

• 3 million teens –  about 1 in 4 sexually experienced teens –  acquire a sexually transmitted disease each year.

• 48.4% of 9-12 graders have had sexual intercourse at least once.  7.2% had initiated sexual intercourse before age 13.

• Black (80.3%) and Hispanic (57.7%) male students are significantly more likely than black (65.6%) and Hispanic (45.7%) female students to have had sexual intercourse.

• Among students currently sexually active, 24.7% had used alcohol or drugs at their last sexual intercourse.

• Since 1960, the rate at which teenagers are taking their own lives has more than tripled.In 1995, among adolescents, suicide was the third leading cause of death after accidents and homicide.

• Among children aged 14 and younger, suicide has risen 75% over the past decade.

• In 1998, 20.5% of 9-12 graders had seriously considered attempting suicide.  Girls were significantly more likely than boys to have considered attempting suicide.

• 12-17-year-olds are three times as likely as adults to become violent crime victims.

• Nearly half-a-million more adolescent boys will be in gangs in the year 2010 than today.

• One-fifth of students carry a weapon (gun, knife, or club) at least one day a month.

• 13.6 million Americans are current users of illicit drugs.

• 9.9% of 12-17-year-olds are current illicit drug users.  That’s down from 11.4% in 1997, but short of the 1979 historic high (16.3%).

• Teens rank drugs as the single most important problem facing people their age.  Teachers and principals say bad parents or family problems are the biggest problem, yet kids rank parents 10^th.

Alcohol

• About 10.4 million current drinkers were between 12-20 years old in 1998.  Of these, 17% have driven a vehicle at least once after drinking alcohol.

Tobacco

• 18.2% of youths 12-17 years old were current cigarette smokers in 1998.   Youths aged 12-17 who currently smoke cigarettes are 11.4 times more likely to use illicit drugs and 16 times more likely to drink heavily than nonsmoking youths.

• 69.7% of students had tried cigarette smoking.

What does this mean?  These trends are bad and likely to get worse as the teenage population increases over the next decade.  There are consequences should these trends continue.

1. As academic performance drops we will be less competitive as a nation in the expanding international marketplace.

2. As teen sexual activity expands more children will be born without fathers and they will be doomed to disadvantaged lives.  More teenagers will suffer from an epidemic of STDs with serious health and economic ramifications.

3. Each teen suicide leaves a devastated family and denies society of a potentially productive life.

4. Juvenile crime can rob the offender of a meaningful life, robs the victim of his freedom and perhaps his health and possessions, and diverts resources from other critical law enforcement needs.

5. Drugs and alcohol rob the user of his health and productivity, and expose him to potentially deadly diseases.

Based on a wealth of science, these problems can in part be attributed to failed parenting.  Effective parenting can reduce the scope of these problems and save the community escalating social costs.

One of the obvious parenting problems is the epidemic of fatherlessness.  What I’m about to cover is not meant to disparage single mothers.  I grew up in a mother-only home and I know there are many heroic single mothers out there doing the best job they can to raise their children.  But they’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t easy – no one can replace the unique influence of a good dad.

Most Americans believe they know what good fathering looks like.  A survey about fathers asked Americans to rank the best media fathers.  Americans selected Bill Cosby’s affable, put-upon Cliff Huxtable as their ideal dad.  A distant second place went to Jimmy Stewart (George Bailey, in It’s a Wonderful Life), and third place went to Hugh Beaumont (Ward Cleaver, Leave it to Beaver).  These TV dads are fatherhood’s cultural icons, but they are not a realistic portrayal of the challenges facing modern fathers.[xxiii]

Real fathers told the pollster that balancing work and family demands was their biggest challenge.  Not surprisingly, 60 percent said spending time with their children was the best thing they could do for their children. 

Unfortunately, for many children, their father problem is not about work demands.  No, it’s more basic.  Their dads are absent.

Graphic from Issues 1998 by the Heritage Foundation, p. 171.

In 1950, for every 100 children born, 12 entered a broken family.  Today, for every 100 children born, 60 will enter a broken family.  Each year, about one million children experience the divorce of their parents and 1.25 million are born out of wedlock. (The proportion of children entering broken families has more than quadrupled since 1950.)[xxiv]

Graphic from Issues 1998 by the Heritage Foundation, p. 167.

Among whites in 1995, 25.3% of births were out of wedlock, more than double the rate of 11 percent in 1980.  Among blacks, 86 percent of first births[xxv] and 69.9 percent of all births in 1995 were out of wedlock, up from 58 percent in 1980.[xxvi]

Divorce is the second major cause of single-parent families, and Americans divorce at the highest rate among all nations of the world.  The number of children living with single divorced parents continues to rise; in 1997, the number was 8.1 percent, up from 7.5 percent in 1993.[xxvii]

The consequences of fatherlessness have been extensively measured and shown to be highly related to every childhood problem.

Consider some facts about fatherless children.

• Tonight, at least 28% of American children will go to sleep in a fatherless home. Worse, at least 60% of black American children are living apart from their biological fathers.

• The number of children living apart from their dads has climbed from 5.1 million in 1960 to 16.9 million in 1996.[xxix]

• Fifty percent of all white children and 75 percent of all black children born in the last two decades are likely to live for some portion of their childhood with only their mothers.

• A “one-percentage-point increase in births to single mothers appears to increase the violent crime rate about 1.7 percent.”

• 72% of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers.

• The likelihood that a young male will engage in criminal activity doubles if he is raised without a father and triples if he lives in a neighborhood with a high concentration of single-parent families.

• A study of American cities with populations over 100,000 found that the divorce rate has the strongest correlation with the rate of robbery.  This relationship was present regardless of the socioeconomic and racial composition of the city.

• The presence of a stepparent does not significantly improve a child’s situation.  Residential grandparents may help to improve the youths’ chances of avoiding incarceration.

• Fatherless children are nearly twice as likely as those from intact families to drop out of high school.

• Children living apart from their biological fathers are up to 75% more likely to have to repeat a grade of school and 70% more likely to be expelled from school than children living with both parents.

• Those who live with single parents or in stepfamilies are 50% to 150% more likely to use illegal drugs, alcohol, or tobacco compared to children who live with both biological or adoptive parents.

• Compared to females who grow up with their fathers, females from fatherless homes are 111% more likely to have children as teenagers, 164% more likely to have a premarital birth, and 92% more likely to dissolve their own marriages.

• Three out of four teenage suicides occur in households where a parent has been absent.

• Compared with children in traditional, intact, married families, children are six times more likely to be abused in blended (divorced and remarried) families.

• Abuse is 14 times more likely in single mother/living alone families.

• Abuse is 20 times more likely in families where the natural parents cohabit.

• Abuse is 33 times more likely when the mother cohabits with a boyfriend.

• Children living apart from their biological fathers are 20-30% more likely to have an accident than children living with both natural parents.

• The mortality rate of infants born to college-educated but unmarried mothers is higher than that for infants born to married high school dropouts.

• Fatherless children are five times more likely to live in poverty, compared to children living with both parents.

• Only 15% of black children living with their married parents are in poverty, compared to 57% of those living with their mother only.

• Almost 75% of American children living in single-parent families will experience poverty before they turn 11 years old.  Only 20% of children in two-parent families will do the same.

• Children of broken families experience significantly lower self-esteem and poorer self-concepts than children of intact families.

Fatherlessness is a serious problem and the evidence strongly suggests that it is a primary/significant contributor to adolescent crises.

There is also a problem with a shortage of responsible parenting.  After all, most children today do have two parents at home.

We know that good parenting protects children from many of the adolescent crises.

You may have heard about the drug crisis in Plano, Texas.  Plano is the fifth fastest-growing city in the nation.  Business is booming.  Crime rates are so low that Money Magazine rates Plano the safest medium-size city in the U.S.

Unfortunately, Plano’s teens are dying from heroin and police haven’t been able to stop the scourge.  Plano’s police chief said,

“If the community is looking to us to win this war, we have lost it.”  A police officer at a Plano high school blames parents.  “They work too hard, leave children alone too long and give them ample allowances that allow them to buy drugs.   . . . They think that because their kids have a beeper, they’re keeping up with them.”

I agree with this officer.  Responsible parenting is key.  Consider what we know about parenting and problems with teenagers.

• Teens with strong emotional connections to their parents are less likely to engage in early sex, experiment with drugs and alcohol, or behave violently.

• Even children who grow up in very disadvantaged and violent neighborhoods but are strictly supervised are less likely to grow up to be violent.

• Teens whose mothers are not employed outside the home are far less likely to become delinquent compared to teens whose mothers are employed outside the home.

Parents need to commit enough time to help vaccinate their children from these problems.

A Harvard professor put the problem this way:  “Time is like oxygen.  There’s a minimum amount that is needed to survive.  Less than that amount may cause permanent damage.  And I think the same holds true for a child’s time and exposure to both parents.”

Parents today spend roughly 40 percent or 10-12 hours/week less time with their children than did parents a generation ago. Fathers in the U.S. devote at least two fewer hours to childrearing each day than fathers in Russia.

Father absence is also prevalent in homes with two full-time earners.  Noteworthy is the fact that fathers in dual-earner households spend about an hour less per day with children than do employed fathers in one-earner households.

The number of dual-earner households has radically increased, effectively giving children far less time with their parents than ever before.  Today, more than 72 percent of women with children under 18 are in the paid labor force, compared with 47 percent in 1970.  The increase has been sharper for women with children under age 3, from 34 percent to 62 percent over the same period.[lv]

Consider some facts about parenting time.

• There is a communication gap between teens and parents.  Most parents (95%) say they have talked with their children about drugs, but only 77% of teens agree.

• 20% of 6-12th graders say they have not had a good conversation lasting for at least 10 minutes with at least one of their parents in more than a month.

• Children are father hungry.  Among children ages 8-12, almost 1/3 say that they do not spend enough time with their fathers.

• On an encouraging note: Teens of parents who are home at “key” times of the day, such as breakfast, after school, at dinner, and at bedtime, are less likely to try alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana.  Shared parent/teen activities and high parent expectations appear to be protective as well.

Many parents feel guilty about their parenting time deficit but when confronted with facts about teen crises, most will do something.   Surveys reveal this guilt and likely if we were honest with ourselves, most parents wish they took more time to be with their children.

I believe that most parents don’t want their children to fall prey to adolescent crises.  I believe our civic responsibility is to do everything possible to help parents to be the best parents they can be.

The following are some policy initiatives that will encourage more responsible parenting.  There’s something here for everyone.

1. Government should make effective parenting a top priority or at least not hinder it.

Why not institute a policy requiring government officials to answer whether their programs and policies encourage effective parenting?  Such a policy will eventually give the community a reputation for being family friendly, and I also believe it will pay big dividends – better quality lives and reduced social costs.

I encourage you to embrace the following principles or create your own guides to strengthen the community’s foundation: the two-parent family.

• Recognize that two-parent families are our most important social resource.

• Children have the best chance of success in a two-parent family.

• Parents should be the primary caregivers and educators in their children’s lives.

• Two-parent families are vital to the social health of the community.

• Public policies that strengthen two-parent families strengthen all of society.

• Government welfare agencies are a poor substitute for parents.

• Government should seek to support parents rather than replace them.

• No legislation should be passed without considering the impact on families.

2. Encourage businesses to be pro-parenting.

A. Allow workers flex time when possible so at least one parent can be at home when the kids arrive after school.

B. Give parents more homework when possible.  There are many benefits of parents working at home:  parents are accessible throughout the day, can organize their work schedules around family events, and can model various work roles for their children.

C. Host more family activities.

D. Recognize good parenting.

E. Provide parenting classes -- after all, many of us didn’t have good role models.

F. Give discounts that promote effective parenting.

3. Strengthen marriages to vaccinate against divorce.

A. Adopt laws that make divorce less likely.  Specifically, repeal no-fault divorce laws.  The ratio of divorces to marriages rose from 25% in 1960 to more than 50% today.This is tragic!

A recent survey found that Americans favor divorce reform to strengthen the rights of spouses who want to save their marriages.  Support for divorce reform is particularly strong among people under age 30; the first generation raised under so-called “no-fault divorce” laws.

Marriage has extraordinary relevance to such issues as crime, welfare dependency, joblessness, educational failure, drug addiction, and health.  The differences in crime rates among blacks and whites virtually disappear when marriage is factored into the studies.

B.      Encourage disengaged dads to become more involved with their children.   Provide incentives to fathers not living with their families who enroll in parenting classes and job training programs.  Teach parenting skills to inmates.  The objective is both financial and emotional commitment to children.

Recognize that fathering is not just a trip to the local restaurant and renting some videos every other weekend.  It is getting up and going to work – maybe not the best job in the world – to make sure your kids have food, decent clothing and soccer cleats.  It is past time that fathering means more than making babies.  Real fathers are responsible for the social, financial and emotional support of their children.

C. Encourage religious involvement.  There is compelling evidence that religion helps keep marriages together.  The prevalence of divorce among weekly churchgoers throughout the U.S. (17%) is less than half that for people who claim “no religion” (37%).

Devout Catholics, for example, have especially low divorce rates - thanks in part to the fact that Catholic parishes typically take the responsibility of providing premarital counseling and marital support.

Moreover, a recent Columbia University poll of high school students shows that religion helps kids stay drug-free.  The survey found that:

• Teens who smoked and drank in the past month and used marijuana are less likely to attend religious services regularly.

• The more important a role religion plays in the life of a teenager, the less likely he or she is to try to use illegal substances.

• The family that eats together, communicates fully and prays together is the family most likely to produce substance-free children.

Local churches are ideally suited to provide premarital counseling and to mentor young men to become effective fathers.  Churches should also reach out to families in crisis by meeting practical needs such as job training, childcare, and transportation.

4. Involve parents in school activities to encourage school connectedness.

Going to children’s programs is not my favorite activity, but I participate to communicate that I care.   Our children deserve and want our involvement in their schools and I suspect most teachers would welcome parental interest.  We know that the better the student-school connection, the less likely the child will exhibit problem behavior.  Getting parents and teachers working on this connection is key.

5. Increase the take-home pay of parents by reducing the extraordinary tax burden that families with children bear.  This will give parents more at-home time.

In 1948, the average U.S. family of four paid 3 percent of their annual income to the federal government in direct taxes; by 1997, the tax burden had risen to 24.7 percent.  When state, local, and indirect taxes are included, the total tax bite rose to an average of 38 percent in 1997.  Taxes in part explain the growing parent absence at home especially during the vulnerable afternoon and evening hours.

The best employment policies for families are generally those which increase the take-home pay of parents via higher wages and those which give parents greater control over when, where, and how much they work.

6. Encourage family-related recreation.

Provide recreational activities at discounts to financially strapped families to encourage fun family time.  Family fun shouldn’t be the exclusive domain of the well-to-do.

7. Encourage disconnected fathers to provide both financial and emotional support. 

There are numerous initiatives that reconnect fathers and their children.  For example, Missouri is experimenting with a program where it temporarily discounts the support payments for men who enroll in parenting classes and job training programs.  Wisconsin is teaching parenting skills to inmates.

8. Community coalitions can work.

U.S. House of Representative Congressman Rob Portman from Cincinnati developed a community-based anti-drug coalition model that harnesses local, federal, state, and community resources.  His model has been tried with success in several communities.  What’s unique about the Portman model is that it gives a high profile to the effort because the local congressman can pull most community leaders into the fold. I believe this model could work against many adolescent crises.

9. Annual “Pray for the Children” October Weekend.

“Pray for the Children” is a national effort gaining grassroots attention, which calls people of all faiths to raise their children up in prayer, praying that the children will be drug-free and safe.  It is a time to pray for their families and caring others, that they may have the strength, support and wisdom to keep children drug-free and safe.

This idea is for everyone of faith.  The concept can be as simple as a family sitting around the kitchen table to talk about adolescent problems and pray, or perhaps a community-wide ecumenical service in a coliseum focused on educating parents and children.

10. Provide more parent surrogates for the parentless.

Local churches and civic groups should reach out to the fatherless.  The last resort is to replace parents with government agents.  Unfortunately, that may become necessary and we must do so as compassionately and as quickly as possible. 

Where parents are missing or unwilling childrearers, offer healthy alternatives.  There are natural surrogates: teachers, coaches, big brothers and sisters.  Doing nothing is accepting failure.

If our objective is to reduce long-term social problems like crime, juvenile suicide, drug use and irresponsible sexual behaviors, then promoting effective parenting is key.  There is overwhelming evidence that effective parenting generally produces safe, responsible children. 

Investing in parenting initiatives and working to reverse fatherlessness will reappotentially major social and economic benefits.  It won’t be easy, but our children and our future are worth the investment.

Thank you for your attention and I encourage you to keep giving your best to protect the family.

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