"Mrs. John B. Dodd, of Washington, first proposed the idea of a "father's day" in 1909. Mrs. Dodd wanted a special day to honor her father, William Smart....

The first Father's Day was observed on June 19, 1910 in Spokane Washington. At about the same time in various towns and cities across American other people were beginning to celebrate a "father's day." In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge supported the idea of a national Father's Day. Finally in 1966 President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the 3rd Sunday of June as Father's Day."

(Source: Father's Day on the Net, http://www.holidays.net/father/story.htm.  A friendly reminder from The World Congress of Families and The Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society: Father's Day is Sunday, June 17th.)

"Whether we view fatherhood as fundamentally a biological act or fundamentally a spiritual vocation depends decisively on whether or not we seek to know and love God. For true human fatherhood-fatherhood that is loving and strong, consisting of the sincere gift of the self-must necessarily point beyond itself, allowing itself to become oriented toward something larger and better than the fragile human male. In this sense, true human fatherhood must always consist of what the Holy Father, when he was the playwright Karol Wojtyla, once called the "radiation" of fatherhood. That is, men must seek to let the perfect paternity of God the Father radiate through the frail man, understanding that the human father is genuinely authoritative only to the degree that he himself is under authority, recognizing himself as God's obedient son."

(Source: David Blankenhorn, "Fatherhood Uprooted: A Sociologist Looks at Fatherlessness and its Causes," Touchstone, vol. 14, no. 1 [January/February 2001], 20-25.)

Apologists for the contemporary world of fatherlessness tirelessly assure us that family structure does not matter.  So long as family processes remain warm and open, they assert, children will do just fine in their mother-only families.  Exposing the folly of such reasoning probably was not the objective of the Texas A & M sociologists whose study of "constructive parenting" recently appeared in The Journal of Marriage and the Family.  It happens to have been the result, nonetheless.

Using three waves of data collected between 1971 and 1997 from individuals growing up in the Houston area, the authors of the new study looked for the correlates and consequences of good parenting.  In the baseline statistical model initially employed in this study, the researchers found that "parental education and growing up in an intact family predicted higher scores of adolescent perception of receiving good parenting" (p < .001 for both variables).  In the full statistical model later applied to the same data, the researchers further established that "growing up in an intact family also predicted better interpersonal relations and more active social participation."

Nor should anyone underestimate the importance of good parenting in fostering favorable outcomes among children: "the adolescent perception of good parental upbringing predicted less psychological disturbance, better interpersonal relations, and more active social participation in early adulthood.  Interpersonal relations and social participation in early adulthood predicted a higher score in constructive parenting in middle adulthood."

Good parenting-and all the good things that come as a result of it-can, of course, be found in some single-parent homes.  But this new study should make quite clear that the parenting processes that deserve the label" constructive" show up most often in the family structure we call "intact.

(Source: Zeng-Yin Chen and Howard B. Kaplan, "Intergenerational Transmission of Constructive Parenting," Journal of Marriage and the Family 63[2001]:17-31.)