They are three to four times more likely to fail at school. They are five times more likely to live in poverty. They are three to four times more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems requiring psychiatric treatment. As adolescents, they are four times more likely to commit suicide. If they're boys, they are significantly more likely to get in trouble with the law as teenagers.
Girls are significantly more likely to bear a child out of wedlock as teenagers.
In assembling these figures, Horn took a sociologist's view of the problem, reporting aggregate outcomes. But he also provided a psychological account of the effects of father absence. Children who don't have this kind of interaction with an adult figure in the household have much greater difficulty in developing self-regulation, and have much more difficulty in developing the capacity to recognize subtle emotional cues of others. When families succeed in their task of socializing children, they impart lessons in self-restraint and the deferral of impulse gratification. That is just simply not so.