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What It Means to be a Dad
The Changing Role of Fatherhood
By Johnathon Allen
Studies show that youth rely more on their fathers for factual information and look to their mothers for day-to-day care and emotional support. A survey of 20,000 families, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, shows that children are twice as likely to receive A's in school when their fathers are involved in their education.
Unfortunately, according to the NFI, an estimated 27.3 million children live absent their biological fathers, and estimates are that at least half of all children in America will spend some time in a single-parent family before they're 18. More disturbing is the fact that, according to the National Commission on Children, 40 percent of kids from broken families haven't seen their fathers at all in the last year.
The profundity of these trends is starkly apparent when you consider U.S. Census figures from the past 40 years: The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 80 percent of the children from the post-war generation grew up in a family with two biological parents who remained married throughout their childhood. Since then, the proportion of children living in one-parent homes has risen from nine percent in 1960, to over 39 percent in 1996. The number of currently divorced adults in the United States has quadrupled in the past 15 years (17.6 million in 1995, up from 4.3 million in 1970) and, according to the 1990 Survey of Income and Program Participation, 88 percent of these custodial parents are mothers.
No matter how you cut it, today's parents are facing considerably different circumstances than their parents did. As Dan Canady, a boomer-era father of five from Colorado, says, "When I was a kid, my parents had the 'wait until dad gets home' mentality. My father wasn't really involved in my upbringing, except as a disciplinarian. Though it's not always easy, I'm doing my best to change that for my own kids."
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