Parenting & Family Quote by Susan Faludi

Faludi lands the punch where the culture pretends not to bruise: fatherhood is treated as an optional identity, while debt is treated as a moral absolute. The line works because it yokes two kinds of obligation that American life ranks very differently. A car payment is contractual, automated, credit-scored, backed by repossession and public shame. Child support is framed, in too many courtrooms and talk-radio monologues, as a personal grievance: money “taken” by an ex, not money owed to a child. By putting them side by side, Faludi exposes the real hierarchy - not between men and women, but between institutions that can punish you and people who can’t.

The intent is not to tally delinquent dads as a demographic factoid; it’s to indict a system of incentives and a story we tell about masculinity. Pay the bank and you’re responsible. Dodge the child and you’re “complicated,” “struggling,” maybe even “screwed by the system.” The subtext is that modern manhood has been trained to fear economic failure more than relational failure, and to understand consumption as duty. The car is mobility, status, a tool of work - a symbol with cultural backup. The child is dependence, vulnerability, continuity - a symbol that requires care rather than conquest.

In Faludi’s broader context as a feminist critic of backlash politics, the line reads as a diagnosis: when masculinity is organized around autonomy and entitlement, the easiest thing to abandon is the obligation that most clearly demands sustained empathy.