Fatherhood: the antidote to the poverty problem

Article here. Excerpt:

'According to the World Bank, in the year 2015 the extreme poverty rate (less than $2/day) around the world allegedly dropped below 10% for the first time. Although this is good progress, extreme poverty, for 702 million people, remains an international crisis. We know that women and children are deeply impacted socially and academically by living in poverty.

Politicians, economists and other organizations have many ideas for solving this crisis. United Nations officials, for example, have set a noble goal “to end poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030”—also known as Sustainable Development Goal #1.2 Is this goal well intentioned? Indeed. Is it attainable? That depends on how one makes sense of the problem. Misdiagnosing the source of this poverty problem can lead to the wrong prescribed solution—no matter how well-intentioned.
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Current social science research powerfully asserts: “...there is a Father-Factor in our [world’s] worst social problems. In other words, for many of our most intractable social ills affecting children, father absence is to blame.” In the United States over 24 million children are growing up without their biological father; in the year 2014 nearly a quarter of children lived in father-absent homes. Dr. Pat Fagan writes: “The Index of Family Belonging for the United States is now just above 45%, which means that 45% of U.S. children on the cusp of adulthood have grown up in an intact married family.”

This is, in large measure, due to the rise of divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births over the past 50 years. In 1960 only 6% of babies were born to unwed mothers in the United States. Thanks to the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and the passing of no-fault divorce laws in many countries, that number has risen to over 40% today and continues to increase. Similar trends can be seen in countries around the world. Creating a worldwide culture that teaches sex is a deserved commodity and marriage is based in adult desires and emotions has done more damage to the family structure than almost anything else.

In the overwhelming majority of divorce cases in many countries, custody of the children is given to the mother. Although children who are victims of divorce still have a father, the severing of their parents’ marriage often severs the consistent influence from the father. This has had devastating effects—especially in the economic realm, as we will see in the next section.'