(The Lion) — Fathers should not be reduced to a mere “appendix” of the family, but rather should serve as a “backbone” or “beating heart” of the family, said Heritage Foundation research fellow Delano Squires during a “Dads on Duty” event on Tuesday.

The Heritage Foundation hosted the forum in Washington, D.C., and centered it around a “father’s role in shaping society.” A three-expert panel led a discussion about “the essential role of fathers, the higher purpose of children in American society, and marriage as America’s keystone institution.”

A common mistake in discussing fatherhood is to “separate the role of father from the role of husband,” Squires said. There’s “no way” to remove the institution of marriage and not have consequences for fatherhood, he said.

“We’ve seen this play out among progressives, where their sense is that a father is nice to have in the home, but not necessary, as long as there is a robust enough sort of welfare state and enough social programs to accommodate for his loss,” he said. “But I think we should not see fathers as the appendix of the family, but in some respects, as the backbone or the beating heart.”

He added that it’s also a “bipartisan problem,” with figures such as Elon Musk and Andrew Tate representing two different archetypes of “ideas that we should not pursue as it relates to fatherhood.”

Conservatives should not adopt these versions of fathering, Squires added: “We need to aim higher, and we need to reconnect the institution of marriage with the vocation of fatherhood.”

Another panelist, Hillsdale College professor Matthew Mehan, who is the associate dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government, discussed the higher purpose of children in society.

“It turns out that when you look at the Founding Fathers and their view on children, it winds up centering our entire democratic republic way of life: limited government, liberty and law,” he said, noting that George Washington wept over the death of his 17-year-old stepdaughter, adopting a love for her even though they didn’t share genetics. “And that image actually winds up being important, because children are not just a private good for the family. They actually do become adopted by everyone else.”

A child is not only someone’s daughter or son, but a nephew or niece, a granddaughter or grandson, a cousin, a neighbor, or a teammate, Mehan said. “In one sense it’s basic, but in another sense, it gets forgotten when you sort of panic about, ‘Well, there’s not enough babies to fill the coffers of Social Security,’” he said in a rebuke of purely economic arguments for having children.

The third panelist, University of Virginia Professor of Sociology W. Bradford Wilcox, noted that “boys and men across America are faltering in our country today.”

“Too many of our boys are failing in school; two-thirds of the kind of bottom performers in our schools today are boys,” he said, adding that in American colleges, nearly 60% of students are female. “Too many men are failing at work. About one in four non-college educated prime men are not working today full-time.”

As a result, too many men are “dying deaths of despair,” he added, “because they have no distinctive mission to live for, no one to love, no one to be there for as both husbands and fathers.” The breakdown of marriage and families has been a “major contributor” to these trends, Wilcox said.

Citing his recent book, Get Married, Wilcox added that one striking finding is that “young men who are growing up without a married father in the home are more likely to spend time in prison or in jail than they are to graduate from college.” On the flip side, young men growing up with both parents in the house are four times more likely to graduate than they are to spend time in prison, he noted.

Marriage is important for men’s career success as well, Wilcox said, citing a recent Harvard study: “The income premium for married guys is largest for married men who are living with their own biological children.”

Marriage plays a crucial role in family life and “promoting human flourishing” more broadly, he said. By binding men to their kids and families, marriage provides men with a “much deeper sense of meaning, direction and solidarity.”