OPINION:
Target Corporation has apologized and pulled Father’s Day greeting cards from its stores that use the phrase “baby daddy.”
But it’s hilarious that they’re facing this public relations ding. This is what offends? Not the truths the card addresses? “Baby Daddy” is a pretty common phrase in today’s culture, used to describe the sad-but-true state of children who are born to unwed mothers and raised in single-parent homes.
Heck, there was even a sitcom titled — get this — “Baby Daddy” that ran from 2012 to 2017. It was a comedy. It was a comedy about all the laughs that go along with a baby who’s being raised by a bachelor in his 20s.
Funny stuff — except when it isn’t.
Fact is: No matter how society tries to skew it — no matter how the special interests and the radical feminists and the LGBTQ movement try to spin otherwise — it still holds true that children do best when raised in stable homes where both parents, mom and dad, are present and involved.
The real face of “baby daddy-dom” isn’t so funny at all.
The Census Bureau reported in 2016 that while “the majority of America’s 73.7 million children under age 18 live in families with two parents … the second most common family arrangement is children living with a single mother, at 23 percent.”
That’s far too many.
“Children growing up in single-parent families typically do not have the same economic or human resources available as those growing up in two-parent families,” Kids Count Data Center wrote. “Compared with children in married-couple families, children raised in single-parent households are more likely to drop out of school, to have or cause a teen pregnancy and to experience a divorce in adulthood.”
That’s far too unfortunate.
And it’s not just the affected families that suffer. Society does. All of society pays for the negative consequences that come from children who aren’t raised to behave right.
Then there’s this, specifically speaking to the “baby daddy” situation in America, from Fatherhood.org: “There is a father absence crisis in America.”
The organization goes on to list the dire statistics — the four times greater chance of fatherless homes to struggle in poverty; the seven times more likely chance of girls being raised without fathers to become pregnant in their teen years; the higher risk for children in homes without dads to face neglect and abuse, to have behavioral problems, drug and alcohol issues; the greater likelihood of those raised with dads to commit crimes and go to prison.
That’s the truth. The sad and pitiful truths of the state of America’s families — the core of society that eventually dictates and determines the culture and the politics of the country.
And egregiously, it’s a “baby daddy” world we have.
That Target has recognized this fact with a greeting card for Father’s Day isn’t the problem. The problem is that we have so many “baby daddy” households in America that there’s a niche, a marketable niche, to create and sell a “baby daddy” card in the first place.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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