Over the weekend, I was reading Juan Williams interesting essay in the Wall Street Journal on the sorry state of fatherhood (HT: Joanne Jacobs) in America. Williams point was as familiar as it is depressing: an enormous number of children simply do not know their fathers in any meaningful way. “The nation’s out-of-wedlock birth rate is 38%,” Williams writes. “Among white children, 28% are now born to a single mother; among Hispanic children it is 50% and reaches a chilling, disorienting peak of 71% for black children.”
The numbers reflect what I saw teaching in the South Bronx, where fewer than a dozen of my students in five years lived with both biological parents. They were, not surprisingly, some of my best, most diligent students. Then, this passage got my attention:
A study of black families 10 years ago, when the out-of-wedlock birthrate was not as high as today, found that single moms reported only 20% of the “baby’s daddy” spent time with the child or took a “lot” of interest in the baby. That is quite a contrast to the married black mothers who told researchers that 88% of married black men, or men living with the mother, regularly spent time with the child and took responsibility for the child’s well-being.
There’s a name for someone who spends time with his child and takes responsibility. The name is “father.” It’s sure as hell not “baby daddy.” I began wondering when this hip, ubiquitous phrase gained traction in the language, and why no one takes umbrage at its dismissiveness, connoting a man who is little more than a sperm donor. It turns out Julia Turner addressed exactly this point two years ago in her language column in Slate.
Who knows why these terms became catchphrases? Perhaps it’s just that they’re metrically pleasing: Baby-mama and baby-daddy are undeniably fun to say. But it’s the novelty factor that explains how the words lost their negative connotations. Sure, there are many gossip writers who still use the terms in their original senses (calling dancer Carlos Leon “Madonna’s baby-daddy,” for example) because they’re useful, reducing a complex chain of possessives—Madonna’s daughter’s father—to a nice, comprehensible noun. But it seems there are also plenty of writers who just like the way the words sound and don’t care much about the stigma once attached to babydaddyhood.
Indeed, last week, Fox News found itself imbroiled in a minor flap when it referred to Michelle Obama as ‘Obama’s baby mama.’ The network was almost certainly guilty of a lame attempt to use a current turn of phrase, but conservative columnist Michelle Malkin pointed out to the New York Times that Michelle Obama herself often refers to Barack as her ‘baby’s daddy’ and has used the phrase ‘baby daddy’ to describe Barack while on the stump this year.” Quite a contrast to the sober address Obama himself on fatherhood yesterday.
The word is “father.” If we want it taken it seriously, perhaps we should start by refusing to describe parenting in such a casual, off-handed way. The term “baby daddy” if it is to be used at all, should be used dimissively, even as a pejorative remark to describe the kind of men Juan Williams–and Barack Obama–rightly decry.
