Suicide, drugs, and alcohol are killing more Americans than ever before. Police, local leaders, and Congress are scrambling for ways to reverse this rise in deaths of despair. The strongest cure, though, won’t be easily brought about through public policy. That’s because the strongest cure is more fatherhood.
Middle-aged men and young adults are the epicenter of the plague of deaths of despair. All the data suggests that the root of this problem is boys growing up without fathers, and men who never get to be fathers.
First, the grim facts.
Suicide rates have increased by nearly one-third since 2005, a new study by the Commonwealth Fund found. The numbers aren’t simply climbing, they’re accelerating — the jump from 2016 to 2017 was the greatest single-year increase 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.
Deaths due to alcohol have also climbed — increasing by one-third in a decade, according to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
There’s reason to believe that having more dads around would abate these climbs.
Children from homes with just one parent instead of two are four times more likely to abuse drugs, and twice as likely to develop alcohol abuse issues. They’re also twice as likely to develop psychiatric issues and twice as likely to commit suicide.
Millions of single mothers selflessly toil away to give their children the best they can. But all experience and all social science make it clear that having a father present improves a child’s physical and emotional health, not just during childhood but also into adulthood. We can expect the disturbing numbers of deaths of despair to keep rising as long as the crisis of fatherlessness continues unabated.
The flip side of this dark story gets less attention. It seems that more men are falling into despair because they lack a fulfilling purpose in this life. The most important way men can find purpose is as a husband and a father. Tellingly, dads are just as likely as moms to say that being a parent is central to their identity, according to the Pew Research Center.
But as marriage rates fall, and as out-of-wedlock births become more frequent among the working class, we have more men who feel pointless. About one-third of adults over age 25 are single or divorced. These adults account for 71% of all opioid overdose deaths, according to the Joint Economic Committee. Noncustodial fathers are at elevated risk of deaths from addiction, according to one study.
It turns out that raising kids is good for a guy. “Fathers who live with their children,” writes scholar Brad Wilcox, “are significantly less likely to be depressed and more likely to report they are satisfied with their lives, compared to both childless men and men who lived apart from their children.”
Kids do better when they have a dad. That’s not controversial. It turns out that men also do better when they get to be a dad. Here’s hoping that this Father’s Day, America’s dark trends reverse.
