In response to the declining birth rate, President Trump recently said he thought that giving mothers a $5,000 “baby bonus” check whenever they gave birth sounded like a good idea. Speaking from experience — I am a mom with three kids — that money won’t go very far. What mothers really need is for the fathers of their kids to step up and parent, much more than they need a one-time check that probably wouldn’t even pay for the birth itself.
The lack of fathers in the home raising their own children or providing the financial support they are obligated to provide is astounding. The number of children in this country who live without a father in the home could fill New York or Los Angeles four times over, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s about one in every four kids. What about child support payments? It’s usually fathers who are ordered by a court to pay it — just 46 percent of families receive the full amount they are owed.
I work for a ministry that serves women who are pregnant and/or parenting young children. The families we serve experience significant hardship and, sadly, almost all of them lack a father in the home. Most of the fathers are not only physically absent from family life, they also refuse to fulfill their duty to provide financially to raise their children. Thus, mothers end up carrying the full financial, physical and emotional responsibility of caring for and raising their children.
I often wonder how some of these moms with multiple kids and little to no social and emotional support, plus significant financial burdens, do it.
One of our moms works the night shift. She gets home at 2 am to sleep three hours, then gets her older kids up and out to school, and then she cares for twin two-year-old boys and a special needs child while taking care of the household. She has no back up, no one to “take over” when she needs a break. But even more challenging is the lack of someone, specifically the father of her kids, to share the financial responsibility for the needs of the family. She deals with a monthly budget deficit of hundreds of dollars. Every paycheck, she must figure out what bills will get paid and which will not. She is thankful for nonprofit organizations and ministries, like ours, that offer temporary assistance, but constantly seeking help gets to be physically and emotionally exhausting.
There is a lack of contingencies and consequences that the government allows for these men. Many of our moms have gone through the process of filing for child support in hopes that some financial contribution from the father of her children will help provide for their needs. The problem is that filing for child support very rarely bears fruit — it can take a Herculean effort to go back time and again to fill out paperwork and cut through red tape. Many fathers will purposefully evade the process. I can honestly say that out of the 60 women I have served over the past three years through this ministry, there is only one family that consistently receives the court ordered child support assistance that the children need. Just one.
This is unacceptable. I know this administration can do better for the kids who bear the consequences of these fathers’ lack of responsibility.
The Trump administration has, within weeks, mobilized government agencies and law enforcement to swiftly apprehend and remove illegal immigrants, as well as carry out many other initiatives. Would rounding up fathers who evade their financial responsibility to their children be done as efficiently and swiftly as these? Once they are apprehended, can they be held accountable for gaining employment and their wages directed, first, to the children for whom they are responsible? While money cannot make up for an absent father, it can certainly help mitigate the ongoing crisis that families face. If our moms didn’t have to constantly fight just to meet basic needs for their kids, I can only imagine how much more they could offer for the overall development and care of their children.
A one-time check isn’t going to solve these problems. Men need to step up and take care of their responsibilities — maybe they need enforcement from the government to do it. When fathers are allowed to cowardly evade their responsibility and the law, we put children at risk, and we cripple families.
While we know that so much of the problematic cultural issues that we see through ministering to families is out of our control, we can do our part to advocate for kids to be better cared for and properly loved.
Ligia Navas-Murphy is a Case Manager at ProLove Ministries and a wife and mother with three children.
