UNDERSTANDING FAMILIES - SOCIOLOGY

Understanding Families

Understanding Families

Introduction

As the population of the United Kingdom shifted from rural, agrarian, or farming living arrangements to those of more urban and industrial conditions starting in the middle of the 19th century, men saw their role as parent transformed by employment demands that pulled them away from the home. Instead of holding a central role as instructor and instiller of core knowledge such as social norms and spiritual beliefs—tasks allowing great contact with one's children—a father's role has become more synonymous with the more distant role of absent provider for the family. Despite holding significant income advantages over mothers, fathers have lost much of the power to interact with—and therefore influence—their children on a daily basis.

Current British families reflect a much larger diversity in makeup or constellation compared with families of the past, as a result of higher rates of divorce and separation. Approximately half of all first marriages end in divorce, with rates exceeding 67% for second and third marriages. Many expectant parents decide not to marry. Indeed, 31.2% of today's custodial mothers have never been married. According to 2002 U.K. Census data, approximately 13.4 million custodial parents had custody of 21.5 million dependents under age 21 years in 2002. Approximately five of six (84.4%) of these custodial parents are mothers, a proportion that has appeared stable for approximately one decade.

Discussion

In many ways, a troubling characteristic of the contemporary family overall is that fathers are more likely to be rather absent from their children's lives than in previous times. Although every father likely struggles to enhance his presence in his child's life, some fathers actively choose to minimize or terminate their support of their dependent offspring. Studies suggest that many of these decisions by fathers to terminate relationships with their children occur as a collateral effect of conflict or disengagement with their children's mother.

A “deadbeat dad” can be defined as a form of child abandonment in which an absentee or nonresident father worsens his child's living conditions by withholding his financial support, physical contact, and psychological, intellectual, and cultural tutelage. Earlier investigations of deadbeat dads in the literature focused predominantly on the financial support provided by non-custodial fathers, while later studies have explored the other facets of such an absent father.

Prevalence

In the United Kingdom in 2002, approximately 7.1 million out of 11.3 million custodial mothers (63%) were court awarded child support, with awards averaging $5,138 annually. Even more startling is that the amounts of child support actually received in 2002 averaged only $3,192 annually—a mere 62% of the awards granted. Roughly 4.6 million mothers (74.7%) received some support, and less than half (2.8 million; 45.4%) received all of their awarded support.

As evidence of the value of establishing and maintaining child support agreements, custodial parents who received all of the child support due to them in 2002 were less likely (14.6%) to have poverty-level annual income than were parents who received only some or none of their expected child ...