Denial

Let's discuss denial, university-style. While in Australia in 1997 at an academic consultation on fatherhood, I heard two well-known family scholars from Perth, Steve Zubrick and Sven Silburn, summarize findings from a major study of child well-being in Australia. The study, called the Western Australian Child Health Study, was done by Zubrick, Silburn and seven colleagues, and was conducted in cooperation with the Bureau of Statistics, the Australian equivalent of the U.S. Census Bureau. A primary purpose of the study was to estimate the relative importance of various risk factors facing Australian children.

Zubrick and Silburn's presentation was long and detailed, but neither of them said a word about the effects of family structure on outcomes for children. It was a striking omission. Australia has long been one of the world's leaders in the proportion of children living in father-absent homes. Moreover, by 1997, an impressive body of scholarly evidence from around the world was clearly suggesting that the trend of family fragmentation posed genuine risks to child well-being. So why, in their publications and other public presentations, were these scholars choosing not even to discuss the issue? Did the data from their study shed no light on the question? Or were they simply choosing not to report the data?

The latter, it turns out. Zubrick and Silburn were forthright and even cheerful in telling us about this decision. Yes, the data from the study revealed clear and worrisome correlations between family structure and child well-being. But no, they were not reporting this evidence to the public. They had their reasons. They did not want to cast aspersions on single parents. More fundamentally, they did not want to label as problematic a social trend about which, in their view, nothing could be done. Better, in their view, to focus on non-controversial, realizable goals - such as improved parenting skills for all parents and better community supports for all families - than to draw attention to facts that would only make single parents feel worse than they already do. They had concluded that publicizing the data on family structure would do more harm than good.

Let's call this approach Plan A. Its chief virtue is efficiency. When findings are unwelcome, pretend in public that the findings do not exist. No questions, no hassles. The chief drawback of this approach is arrogance. Did you miss the announcement that some university faculty now take it upon themselves to serve as national censors, privately and unilaterally deciding what the public should and should not be permitted to know about current research on major social issues?

Sources: Sven R. Silburn and Steve R. Zubrick, et al., Western Australian Child Health Survey: Family and Community Health (Perth: Australian Bureau of Statistics and TVW Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, 1996).

First published Spring/Summer 2001.