Neighborhood standards and values may be set by mothers, but they are enforced by fathers, or at least by adult males. Neighborhoods without fathers are neighborhoods without men able and willing to confront errant youth, chase threatening gangs, and reproach delinquent fathers. I do not know any way of requiring this generation of errant fathers to take up their responsibilities. The reach of the law has been lengthened, but we should not be optimistic that this will result in more than a modest increase in the size of the family support payments received by some mothers. For every race and at every age, married men live longer than unmarried ones and have lower rates of homicide, suicide, accidents, and mental illness.
Crime rates are lower for married than unmarried men, and incomes are higher.
In the past, the institutions that have produced effective male socialization have been private. Today we expect government programs to accomplish what families, villages, and churches once did. I think we will be disappointed. Government programs, whether aimed at farmers, professors, or welfare mothers, tend to produce dependence, not self-reliance. Our policy ought to be to identify, evaluate, and encourage those local, private efforts that seem to do the best job at reducing drug abuse, inducing lovers to marry, persuading fathers to take responsibility for their children, and exercising informal social control over neighborhood streets.