Fathers A Needed Part Of Families

It’s Father’s Day. So what?

Aren’t dads optional? Television’s Murphy Brown, culminating 20 years of male-bashing feminism, claimed they were. That silly sitcom became a wake-up call for public opinion.

Now, even some feminists have begun to admit that men have a purpose, beyond supplying Hollywood with villains and buffoons. Fathers can help raise children, sharing the load that makes many a lonely working mother stagger.

The shift in opinion was overdue.

Forty percent of the children in the United States live in a home where their father is absent. That ratio has doubled in the past 30 years.

David Blankenhorn, author of the book, “Fatherless America,” has documented the trend. It is more than a consequence of divorce. In 1960, only 4 percent of fatherless homes featured nevermarried mothers; by 1990, 22 percent did. Who needs fathers?

Children do.

Yet America’s children are living, Blankenhorn says, in a “social recession.”

The symptoms have not been attributed to the absence of fathers. Confusing causes with effects and reluctant to face the failure of ‘60s social experiments, analysts blame social corrosion on economics, racism, the media - anything but the notion dads are disposable.

Yet in fatherless households, statistically there’s a high likelihood children will become involved in our modern social plagues: juvenile crime, educational failure, sexual abuse, poverty, adolescent child-bearing and domestic violence against women.

Blankenhorn explains that a dad who has cared for his daughter since infancy has a protective instinct not present in stepfathers, who are far more likely to molest. In households not bound by the commitments of marriage and fatherhood, children are much more likely to see their mother beaten by a man. From a committed dad, boys learn the self-discipline that keeps them out of jail; girls learn a self-worth that makes them less likely to seek affection in promiscuity.

Politicians can’t fix this. But here and there around the country, others are trying. In Cleveland, a hospital outreach worker finds young dads and brings them in to see their newborn babes. In California, a LaMaze class added a separate “boot camp” for dads. In Spokane, Head Start teachers get dads involved and offer parenting classes. In churches, programs like Marriage Savers and Promise Keepers have begun to build the relationship most crucial to kids.

Only individual adults, two by two, can make the commitments and restore the social norms that keep dads in the home where they are needed.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board