According to unpublished U. S. Census data, there are an estimated 64.3 million fathers across the United States.

From The Census Bureau's 2006 Current Population Survey’s (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC), there were 26.5 million fathers who were "part of married-couple families with children younger than 18 in 2006."

Among these, there were an estimated 159,000 "stay-at-home dads in 2006. These married fathers with children younger than 15 have remained out of the labor force for more than one year primarily so they can care for the family while their wives work outside the home. These fathers cared for 283,000 children. Among these stay-at-home dads:

60 percent had two or more children.
40 percent had an annual family income of $50,000 or more.
35 percent had children younger than 3 living with them."

(Source: United States Census Bureau, "Facts for Features: Father's Day: June 17, 2007," CB07-FF.08, April 17, 2007; http://www.census.gov)

"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection."

(Source:  Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1931, in  James Strachey and Anna Freud, eds., The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 21,  New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961, quoted in Andrews, Robert; Biggs, Mary; and Seidel, Michael, et al., The Columbia World of Quotations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996; www.bartleby.com/66/.)

Both young men and young women benefit from the influence of a highly involved father.  But a study recently completed by Marcia L. Carlson of Columbia University indicates that adolescents are far more likely to realize that benefit if their biological parents have achieved a stable marital union than if their parents have failed to create such a union. 

Analyzing data from a national sample of over 2700 adolescents, Carlson examines four measures of problems in adolescents’ lives: negative feelings (feeling “sad and blue” or “nervous, tense, or on edge”), internalizing symptoms (being “too fearful or anxious” or “withdrawn”), delinquency (damaging property, stealing, lying to parents, injuring others, or skipping school), and externalizing behavior (failing to “get along with other kids,” “argu[ing] too much,” or cheating).  Carlson’s data indicate that “across all the four measures, the higher the level of reported father involvement, the lower the level of behavioral problems....Adolescents who report that they do not have a father have the highest problem scores.” 

Carlson adduces evidence that on a number of measures paternal involvement is beneficial for adolescent well-being regardless of adolescents’ family circumstances.  However, the data show that fathers are far more likely to be “highly involved” in the lives of adolescents if they live with them.  Such coresidence is unusual except for “continuously married fathers.”  “Fathers,” Carlson remarks, “are least involved with adolescents born outside of marriage whose mothers either remain unmarried or marry a stepfather.”  A father who was married to his adolescent offspring’s mother but has then divorced is likewise unlikely to be highly involved in their lives.  Consequently, Carlson documents a high level of paternal involvement for only 10-18% of all fathers who are not coresident with their adolescent children. 

Carlson’s research reveals not only that a typical coresident father is more involved in his adolescent child’s life than a father living apart, but also that “father involvement is more beneficial when the father is coresident.”  In statistical analysis, “the benefit of each unit of father involvement is two to three times as great when the father lives with the adolescent as when he lives elsewhere.”  Indeed, Carlson’s numbers indicate that in reducing the negative feelings an adolescent experiences, paternal involvement is “only beneficial if provided by a coresident father.” 

Even more incompatible with progressive orthodoxy than Carlson’s findings concerning paternal involvement in children’s lives are her findings about family structure.  For although progressives desperately want to believe that all family forms serve children equally well, Carlson’s concludes that “adolescents living with their continuously married biological parents have significantly lower behavioral problem scores compared to all other family types,” even in statistical models that control for differences in mothers’ and children’s background characteristics.   The difficulty of accommodating this family-structure finding within progressive thinking is compounded by statistical analysis showing that paternal involvement only “partially accounts for the family-structure effects.”  In other words, some of the benefits that an intact parental marriage delivers to adolescent children remain even when the father is not particularly involved in his children’s lives. 

Why is it that even adolescents with uninvolved fathers are better off when their parents stay married?  The distinctively high levels of parental involvement among married mothers may be the key.  Carlson reports that the mothers in this study who were “least likely to be highly involved” in their children’s lives were actually those who had “either divorced and remained single or [who had] had a nonmarital birth and remained unmarried.”  It appears that the omni-competent single mothers who can handle parenthood without a husband are quite rare.

Hard realities are puncturing decades of progressive fantasies about how resilient children and superwoman single mothers would do just fine in a world without fathers. 

(Source: Marcia J. Carlson, “Family Structure, Father Involvement, and Adolescent Outcomes,” Journal of Marriage and Family 68 [2006]: 137-154.)