The Culture of Fear (18 page)

It is a measure of how clouded our public discourse has become that
illegitimacy,
having largely disappeared from the lexicon, would make a comeback in an era when nearly one in three children was born to an unwed mother. But what a powerful comeback. The U.S. Senate, following
the election of large numbers of conservative Republicans in 1994, seriously considered applying an “illegitimacy ratio” to determine how much money states were eligible to receive in federal block grants. States with high rates of unwed motherhood or abortion would have lost funds. Although the proposal lacked sufficient support from Democrats to succeed, a couple of years later a bonus system did pass Congress. States with the lowest out-of-wedlock birth rates were eligible for $20 million each in 1998. Even liberals joined in the panic mongering about illegitimacy. “I don’t think anyone in public life today ought to condone children born out of wedlock ... even if the family is financially able,” Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala told reporters.
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Newspaper and magazine columnists called illegitimacy “the smoking gun in a sickening array of pathologies—crime, drug abuse, mental and physical illness, welfare dependency” (Joe Klein in
Newsweek
) and “an unprecedented national catastrophe” (David Broder in the
Washington Post).
Richard Cohen, also of the
Post,
asserted that “before we can have crime control, we need to have birth control” and deemed illegitimacy “a national security issue.”
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A national security issue? Images come to mind of children of single moms selling state secrets to Saddam Hussein. Again, when pondering the effects of single motherhood it is important to compare apples to apples. Studies that compare single-parent households and two-parent households with similar levels of income, education, and family harmony find few differences in how the children turn out. The great majority of children of single mothers don’t become criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill, or security threats. A study that looked at 23,000 adult men found that those raised by single mothers had income and education levels roughly equal to those raised by two parents. Research shows that as a group, children of single moms tend to fare better emotionally and socially than do offspring from high-conflict marriages or from those in which the father is emotionally absent or abusive.
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Scare campaigns can become self-fulfilling, producing precisely the negative outcomes that the doomsayers warn about. Exaggerations about the effects of unwed motherhood on children stigmatize those children and provoke teachers and police, among others, to treat them
with suspicion. Why do so many children from single-parent families end up behind bars? Partly, studies find, because they are more likely to be arrested than are children from two-parent households who commit similar offenses. Why do children from single-parent families do less well in school? One factor came out in experiments where teachers were shown videotapes and told that particular children came from one-parent families and others from two-parent families. The teachers tended to rate the “illegitimate” children less favorably.
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Fear mongering about mothers directs attention away from fully half of America’s parent population—the fathers. Warnings parallel to those about mothers are nowhere to be found. Rarely do politicians and journalists warn about unwed dads, and seldom does the National Honor Society refuse admission to them. On the contrary, wifeless fathers are practically revered. A headline in
USA Today
in 1997 proclaimed, “Unwed fathers, increasingly unencumbered by social stigma, are raising kids in greater numbers than ever before.”
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There
was
one noteworthy scare about dads, and political leaders and social scientists issued warnings seemingly as dire as those about monster moms. “The single biggest social problem in our society may be the growing absence of fathers from their children’s homes, because it contributes to so many other social problems,” President Clinton declared in a speech at the University of Texas in 1995. “Father absence is the engine driving our biggest social problems,” echoed David Blankenhorn, author of
Fatherless America,
in an “Eye on America” segment on CBS’s “Evening News.” “Our national crime problem,” he said, “is not driven by young black males. It is driven by boys who are growing up with no fathers.” Blankenhorn went so far as to suggest that violence against women is attributable to boys who grow up without dads and become resentful.
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A front-page story in the
New York Times
posed the fatherlessness menace no less sweepingly: “Over all, children in homes without fathers are more likely to be poor, to drop out of high school and to end
up in foster care or juvenile-justice programs than are those living with their fathers.”
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But notice the logic here. Unlike mothers, who are deemed deficient on account of what they do or what they believe, dads are judged on whether or not they’re around. Men’s mere
presence
is apparently adequate to save their children and the nation from ruin.

In truth, the crusade against fatherlessness is but another surreptitious attack on single mothers. Most advocates are too sophisticated to offer sound bites such as that given by Wade Horn, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, to the
Washington Post:
“Growing up without a father is like being in a car with a drunk driver.” However one phrases it, to insist that children are intrinsically better off with fathers regardless of who the fathers are or how they behave is to suggest that no single mother can adequately raise a child. About boys Blakenhorn made this claim explicitly. A mother cannot raise a healthy son on her own, Blankenhorn decreed, because “the best mother in the world can’t tell her son what it means to be a man.”
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Scares about missing dads also impugned lesbian mothers, whose children Blankenhorn disparaged as “radically fatherless,” though in fact studies find that kids reared by lesbians have no greater academic, emotional, or behavioral difficulties than other children—aside from those caused by discrimination against homosexuals.
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Several bodies of research—mostly missing from media accounts about the fatherlessness menace—reveal the spuriousness of the evidence behind the scare. Literature on divorce shows that the main negative impacts on children are conflicts between the parents before the divorce and loss of the father’s income afterward, rather than absence of the father per se. Research on how children fare following divorce also disputes the alleged power of poppa’s presence. Studies of children who live with their divorced or separated mothers find, for instance, no improvement in school performance or delinquency when the children’s fathers visit more often.
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A large national study was conducted by Kaiser Permanente and Children Now of troubled children in
two-parent
families. Asked to whom they turn for help, only 10 percent selected their fathers, while 45 percent chose their mothers, and 26 percent chose their friends.
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One category of children, invisible in the brouhaha over fatherlessness, clearly benefits by
not
having their fathers around. Studies of child abuse often focus on mothers, but in fact fathers commit about half of all parental child abuse. In some surveys more than half of divorced women say that their former husbands struck them or their children. Blanket statements about the dangers of fathers’ absence conveniently ignore the existence of such men. They overlook the unfortunate fact that, apart from the extra money and “respectability” fathers might provide, many have little they are willing or able to contribute to their children’s well-being, and some do considerable harm. If as a group kids from fatherless homes fare less well, this is partly because women have difficulty supporting themselves and their children on what they are paid, and more than half of divorced dads get away with underpayment of child support. Such a result is also attributable to the factor mentioned earlier: the continuing stigma of growing up in a single-parent household, a stigma further reinforced through fear mongering about fatherlessness.
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Of the innumerable myths told about single mothers the most elemental is single status itself. In reality, many are single only temporarily or only in the legal sense. Two out of five women who are unmarried when their first child is born marry before the child’s fifth birthday. One in four unwed mothers lives with a man, often with the child’s fath er.
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On occasion mothers portrayed as single do not qualify even on temporary or legal grounds. In its coverage of Awilda Lopez, the New York woman who brutally murdered her young daughter, Elisa Izquierdo, the
New York Post
spoke of the man in Lopez’s life as her “boyfriend.” In fact, Lopez was married. As Richard Goldstein of the
Village Voice
suggested in a critique of the coverage, an intact family might have confused the issue of who was to blame for the horrific treatment of Elisa, especially since the husband apparently participated in the little girl’s abuse, and neighbors said he beat and stabbed Lopez, sometimes in front of her children. Yet the
Post
depicted him as a man
who would “cook, clean, and take the children out to a nearby playground.”
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Much of the media framed the Elisa Izquierdo tragedy literally as a fairy tale.
Time,
in a five-page cover story, reported that Elisa, like the princesses in fairy tales, was “born humble” but “had a special enchanted aura” and liked to dance. “And,” the article went on, “unlikely as it may seem, there was even a prince in Elisa’s life: a real scion of Greece’s old royalty named Prince Michael, who was a patron of the little girl’s preschool.” But in this real-life fairy tale, the story went, neither the prince nor any government agency could rescue the princess from the wicked witch, Elisa’s “single” mother. “Some Mothers Are Simply Evil,” read a headline in the
New York Post.
“A monster like this should have stopped living long ago,” proclaimed a writer for the
New York Daily News.
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Time,
in its cover article, relayed police reports from neighbors, of little Elisa pleading, “Mommy, Mommy, please stop! No more! No more!” as Lopez sexually molested her with a toothbrush and a hair-brush. When her screams grew too loud,
Time
said, Lopez turned up the radio.
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That these sordid details made their way into the pages of a family newsmagazine that repeatedly decries graphic depictions of depravity in print, on television, and in cyberspace is telling in itself. There must be something terribly compelling about gruesome tales of sadistic moms. Katha Pollitt of
The Nation
captured part of their appeal when she commented that “lurid replays of Awilda Lopez’s many acts of sadism, while officially intended to spur outrage, also pander to the readers’ sadomasochism.” An observation by Bruno Bettelheim in an essay on children’s fairy tales also helps to explain the allure of what are essentially fairy tales for adult readers. “The fairy tale suggests how the child may manage the contradictory feelings which would otherwise overwhelm him,” Bettelheim wrote. “The fantasy of the wicked stepmother not only preserves the good mother intact, it also prevents having to feel guilty about one’s angry thoughts and wishes about her.”
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Media tales about monster moms serve a parallel purpose for adults. They say that we—or our wives, sisters, daughters, or friends—are good
mothers by comparison. They invite us to redirect (more accurately, misdirect) our self-doubts. When we lose our temper or strike out at our children we may secretly worry about our potential for child abuse. But at least we know we could never do the things Awilda Lopez did.

How can we be so certain? Reporters spelled out for us precisely how Lopez differed from us. “Drugs, drugs, drugs—that’s all she was interested in,”
Time
quoted a neighbor saying of Lopez, and not just any drugs, not the sort that subscribers to
Time
might use. Lopez was “dominated by crack,” a drug that, according to the
New York Times,
“can overwhelm one of the strongest forces in nature, the parental instinct.” Crack “chemically impairs” mothers, the
Times
quoted one psychologist as saying, to the point where they “can’t take responsibility for paying the rent or seeing that there is food on the table for their children.”
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Infanticidal mothers are routinely depicted by the media as depraved beyond what any of us can imagine about ourselves or our friends and relatives. The year before Awilda Lopez, the media-anointed monster mother was a South Carolinian named Susan Smith, who drowned her two little boys in a lake. She too was portrayed as severely degenerate. She had been having an affair with her boss’s son and planned to dump her husband and marry the boyfriend. After her lover wrote her a note saying he wasn’t ready for the responsibilities of fatherhood, the story went, she decided to kill her kids. As if all of this weren’t perverse enough, she had been having consensual sex with her stepfather, reporters revealed.

It took some doing, though, for the news media to portray Smith as the personification of depravity. They had to invalidate everything they themselves had been saying about her. Throughout the first week after the death of her children the press depicted her as a loving, heroic, small-town mom. They even bought in to Smith’s weepy tale about a black man carjacking her kids, a story that should have made reporters wary, considering their embarrassment five years earlier after Charles Stewart, a Boston man, hoodwinked them with exactly the same racist ruse following the murder of his pregnant wife in an insurance scam.
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