Death, despair and dads

Suicides, drugs and alcohol kill more Americans than ever before. Police, local leaders and Congress are struggling to find a way to reverse this surge of despair. The most powerful cure, however, will not be easily put in place by public policies. This is because the best cure is more paternity.

Men and young adults of middle age are the epicenter of the death wound of despair. All the data suggest that the problem is that boys grow up without a father and men never become fathers.

First, the claims made.

Suicide rates have risen by nearly one-third since 2005, according to a new study from the Commonwealth Fund. The numbers are not just increasing, they are accelerating – the jump from 2016 to 2017 has been the largest increase in a year in recent history.

Drugs are killing more Americans than ever before. Since 2000, overdoses have more than quadrupled. Fentanyl and opioids are the main culprits.

Alcohol-related deaths have also increased – they have increased by a third in a decade, according to the University of Washington's Institute of Metrology and Health Evaluation.

There is good reason to believe that having more fathers around would mitigate these climbs.

Children in homes with only one parent instead of two are four times more likely to use drugs and twice as likely to develop problems with alcohol abuse. They are also twice as likely to develop psychiatric problems and twice as likely to commit suicide.

Millions of single mothers work tirelessly to give their children the best they can. But all the experiences and all the social sciences clearly show that the presence of a father improves the physical and emotional health of the child, not only during his childhood, but also in adulthood. We can expect the alarming number of desperate deaths to continue to increase as the crisis of fatherlessness continues unabated.

The reverse of this dark story attracts less attention. It seems that more and more men are falling into despair because they have no fulfilling purpose in this life. The most important way that men can find a goal is to be a husband and a father. Tellingly, fathers are just as likely as mothers to say that being a parent is at the heart of their identity, according to the Pew Research Center.

But as marriage rates go down and out-of-wedlock births become more common in the working clbad, we have more and more men who feel useless. About one-third of adults over 25 are single or divorced. According to the Joint Economic Committee, these adults account for 71% of all opioid overdose deaths. According to one study, non-custodial fathers are at high risk of death from addiction.

It turns out that the education of children is good for a guy. "Fathers who live with their children," writes researcher Brad Wilcox, "are significantly less likely to be depressed and more likely to say they are satisfied with their lives, compared to men and childless men who lived independently of themselves. their children. "

Children do better when they have a father. This is not controversial. It turns out that men also do better when they become dad. Hoping this Father's Day, the darker trends are reversing in America.