Fathers are Fantastic

After the birth of our first baby, my husband went to the store for a few needed items and returned with the items plus a tiny, pink dress with checkered bows on it and a huge smile on his face. It gave him joy to provide something good for his new daughter. Having just become a father, he now understood what it was like to have and to love his own child. He also understood more deeply that every other baby girl in the world was somebody’s daughter, and he valued all little girls and understood their fathers a little bit better.

But not everyone agrees that fathers are good for families. Feminist Merav Michaeli claims that a father’s legal custody over his children leads to “ongoing hurt in children.” There is a significant cultural push to vilify fathers and men in general, labeling them as dangerous and “toxic.” Are there bad men and bad fathers? Certainly. But even a surface-level exploration of the data reveals significant information about the profound positive influence of men as fathers.

Research compiled by the National Fatherhood Initiative shows that children who grow up in father-absent homes are:

• Four times more likely to live in poverty

• More likely to be abused and neglected

• More likely to commit crime

• More likely to go to prison

• Twice as likely to die in infancy

• Twice as likely to drop out of high school

• Twice as likely to suffer from obesity

• More likely to abuse drugs and alcohol

• Seven times more likely to become pregnant as a teen

A synthesis of numerous studies on fatherhood shows that fathers have a significant influence on their daughters. Daughters who have a loving, respectful, active relationship with their fathers are less likely to:

• Develop eating disorders

• Be raped or sexually abused

• Engage in risky sexual behaviors

• Be overly dependent on men

• Have difficulty dealing well with authority figures— especially men

• Be imprisoned

• Abuse drugs and alcohol

In short, children who know, live with, and feel loved by their fathers are happier, richer, healthier, safer, more educated, more confident, less abused, and more independent than children whose fathers are absent.

Fathers are a profound social good and should be celebrated, appreciated, and valued as irreplaceable assets to their children and to civilization at large.

For more on men and for full documentation on these statistics, see my book, The Invincible Family, Chapter 9: The Goodness of Men.

My husband with the dress he bought for our daughter, who is now all grown up.