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Title: The Family Way: Treating Fathers As Optional Has Brought Big Social Costs
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Wilson, James Q.
The Family Way: Treating Fathers As Optional Has Brought Big Social Costs
Wall Street Journal, Opinion Journal, January 7, 2003.
Also: http://www.fact.on.ca/news/news0301/wsj030107.htm
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Dow Jones, Inc.
Keyword(s): Crime; Delinquency/Gang Activity; Family Structure; Family Studies; Fathers, Absence

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

On the deepest matters of cultural and social affairs, the best guide is to reflect on human experience. This means looking backward at those experiences, and conservatives are more inclined to do this than are liberals. Conservatives get a lot of grief for this. After all, looking backward sometimes means failing to endorse bold and desirable changes. One such change was the guess by a few men in Philadelphia in the 18th century that a government based on a written constitution, federalism, separated powers and carefully defined authority would succeed in rationalizing the need for human freedom with the imperatives of national defense. Another was the argument in the 1960s that legislation endorsing civil rights was a good idea. Both were very good guesses. But in my view these successful examples of looking forward do not bear on cultural and social policy. The Constitutional Convention and the civil rights movement were guesses about how to create new political and legal institutions. Today, however, many of our most important problems are about how we live with one another. To think about these clearly, we must understand our centuries-old experience with love, honor, loyalty, friendship, family and patriotism. These feelings shape child-rearing, decent conduct and personal integrity. Almost everybody wants these things, but many of us try to alter the human emotions that supply them. The past provides guides about how people in fact live and think; the future supplies theories about how people might live and think, provided a variety of assumptions are somehow met. But the assumptions are rarely met. I am struck by how often in the past half-century, looking backward--the conservative way--has provided a better guide to action than has looking forward.
Bibliography Citation
Wilson, James Q. "The Family Way: Treating Fathers As Optional Has Brought Big Social Costs." Wall Street Journal, Opinion Journal, January 7, 2003.