About 40 years ago, as divorce was becoming commonplace, America
began waking up to the importance of fatherhood. Up until then,
the literature on child rearing was almost exclusively mother-
oriented. Fathers didn’t count for much. After all, Freud had
pretty much ignored them, hadn’t he? That changed with the 1974
publication of psychologist Fitzhugh Dodson’s How to Father.
(Factoid: Dodson is credited with being the first to turn the
noun “parent” into a verb with How to Parent, his 1970
bestseller.) Since then, it has become increasingly apparent
that whether present or only sometimes present or not present at
all, fathers exert great influence on their children’s lives,
for better or worse. By now, nearly everyone knows that kids in
father-absent homes are at risk for all manner of difficulties,
but the scope of the problem is worth reviewing: According to
the U.S. Census Bureau, 24 million children — one in three —
live in father-absent households. Children in such homes are
five times more likely to be