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By Alison Kuznitz
State House News Service
Massachusetts Family Institute has been dedicated to strengthening the family in the Commonwealth for 30 years. The latest census data and social science research confirm that children do best when they are raised in a home with both their mother and their father, and it is part of our mission to ensure that those facts get a hearing.
In June 2008, then-presidential-candidate Barack Obama addressed the crisis of fatherlessness by lamenting that "[w]e know the statistics – that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison … And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it." Nearly 14 years later, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis echoed these same sad truths by observing, "If every kid in America had a loving father in the home, we would have far, far fewer problems that we would have to deal with as a society …" Yet, despite the seriousness of the problem and the remarkable agreement from across the political spectrum, fatherlessness is not an issue we see our elected leaders or media figures doing much to address.