High Stock Value of Fatherhood pushing up the High Rate of Jackets

June 18, 2023

Perhaps a crude headline, but I appreciated Dr Orville Taylor's 2023 Fathers Day article. It highlighted that anecdotes and also research should be understood in context, which is sometimes narrow. In the 1950s, when there was very high migration of young working people from Jamaica, Taylor notes that in her book, My Mother Who Fathered Me, researcher Edith Clarke reported that 30% of households had no father in the home. The book seems to have focused on the negative effect of this rather than the economic and social situations that created it. Discussions around this book caused the society to conclude that the Jamaican father being uncaring and unsupportive of their children.

Then Taylor moved away from this to highlight Dr Samms Vaughn's 10 year study that started in 2011, found that 80 per cent of newborns have a father's name on their birth certificates. Looking at it in a different way, research done by STATIN and reported in the PIOJ Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions points out that 18 per cent of families have no father in the home, this is a significant, but much lower than the 30% of the 1950s and very close to the presumed 20% of children born after 2011 who do not have a father's name on their birth certificates.

Having established that father's are named, Dr Taylor says that between 20% and 50% of tests to prove fatherhood are failed. In this context he concludes that mothers place a higher value on giving a child a good father, rather than their real biological father.

The figures seem to exonerate the Jamaican man from lacking as a parent and again turning to the social and economic causes that would lead to another undesirable result. In my experience, I see more evidence of men trying and succeeding as a parent than their counterpart.