Defining and celebrating the New Father are by far the most popular ideas in our contemporary discourse on fatherhood. Father as c...lose and nurturing, not distant and authoritarian. Fatherhood as more than bread winning. Fatherhood as new-and-improved masculinity. Fathers unafraid of feelings. Fathers without sexism. Fatherhood as fifty-fifty parenthood, undistorted by arbitrary gender divisions or stifling social roles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
More broadly across time and cultures, it seems, one perennial piece of advice to father has been the importance of acting tenderl...y toward their children. The New Father, it turns out, is an old story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up wi...th his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To recover the fatherhood idea, we must fashion a new cultural story of fatherhood. The moral of today's story is that fatherhood ...is superfluous. The moral of the new story must be that fatherhood is essential.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as a ...vital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »