"Each night, in the United States, more than 50 million children eat dinner without their fathers. Given this grim statistic, it seems appropriate to wonder what difference a father makes anyway. Or, put differently, does dining with Dad matter, or is a father at the dinner table like a kidney or a lung - nice to have but not essential for living?

We might start by looking at the scientific studies that measure a child's well-being by his parents' presence at the dinner table. The most famous - the one cited repeatedly by newspaper columnists and talk-show hosts - is a report by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University that concludes that "the more often teens have dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs." A spokesman on the center's Web site declares: "Parents, there's something you can do to protect your kids from drugs and alcohol. Combine ground beef with egg, tomato sauce, breadcrumbs and spices. Bake in an oven-safe pan at 350 for 50 minutes. Serve hot.

...In missing the family dinner, we fathers are missing a large portion of our children's lives, the part they are living right now. Without dinner as a touchstone, it is so much easier to let the rest of the day slip away as well. How soon before our children are grown and out of the house, the family table a forgotten memory? How soon before they do not miss us at all? They may recover just fine, but we may not."

"There's the Haitian father who left for work one morning, was picked up outside his apartment and was deported before he got a chance to say goodbye to his infant daughter and his wife. There's the other Haitian father, a naturalized American citizen, whose wife was deported three weeks before her residency hearing, forcing him to place his 4-year-old son in the care of neighbors while he works every waking hour to support two households.

These families are all casualties of a Department of Homeland Security immigration crackdown cheekily titled Operation Return to Sender. The goals of the operation, begun last spring, were to increase the enforcement of immigration laws in the workplace and to catch and deport criminals. Many women and men who have no criminal records have found themselves in its cross hairs. More than 18,000 people have been deported since the operation began last year.

So while politicians debate the finer points of immigration reform, the Department of Homeland Security is already carrying out its own. Unfortunately, these actions can not only plunge families into financial decline, but sever them forever. One such case involves a father who was killed soon after he was deported to El Salvador last year.

"Something else could be done," his 13-year-old son Junior pleaded to the New York-based advocacy group Families for Freedom, "because kids need their fathers."

Right now the physical, emotional, financial and legal status of American-born minors like Junior can neither delay nor prevent their parents' detention or deportation."

Despite their intense concern for the teenage mother, social scientists have paid remarkably little attention to the father involved in teenage pregnancy.  As the authors of a new Australian study remark, "Most studies on adolescent pregnancy have focused on the female, with their male partners largely escaping scrutiny."  The Australian scholars question this narrow research focus, however, since "it is the male who may have the decisive role in initiating the sexual encounter."  Consequently, the Australian investigators set out to identify the characteristics of "fathers in the setting of teenage pregnancy."

To better understand fathers in this setting, the Australian scholars collected data from a cross-sectional cohort of 50 male partners of pregnant teenagers and 50 male partners of pregnant women over 20.  Statistical analysis revealed a number of significant differences between these two groups. 

Unsurprisingly, the men involved with pregnant teenagers were not particularly religious.  "Teenage fathers," report the researchers, "were ... significantly less likely [than other fathers] to state that they had a religious belief" (p < 0.0001).  Also unsurprising is the finding that men involved with pregnant teenagers were far less likely than other fathers to be married to the pregnant woman involved (p < 0.0001). 

But perhaps more surprising is the finding that a highly disproportionate number of the men involved with pregnant teenagers experienced the separation or divorce of their parents.  "Our findings indicate that an overwhelming 50% of teenage fathers had experienced parental separation or divorce during their early childhood," write the authors of the new study.  "This is in sharp contrast to just 12% of older fathers" (p < 0.0001).  Childhood experience of parental separation or divorce persists as a statistical predictor of teen-pregnancy fatherhood in statistical models that take into account differences in socioeconomic background. 

The Australian scholars note that earlier research has identified bad childhood family experiences, including parental separation or divorce, as distinctively common among young women who become pregnant as teenagers.  But this new Australian study shows that "the fathers [involved with pregnant teenagers] were just as likely as the mothers to have been raised in a home environment where the childhood relationships with and between the parents were negative or absent, and childhood experiences of violent parental relationship and/or parental separation or divorce were present." 

Americans have reason to fear that the numerous parental divorces of recent decades have helped produce far too many men willing to impregnate unmarried teenage girls.