Fatherless America : Why Men are Increasingly Viewed as Superfluous to Family Life

Never before in American history have so many men abandoned their families or failed to form them.

For our society is not only losing fathers, it is losing the very ideal of fatherhood.

Men are increasingly seen as expendable - or as part of the problem. "We are simply changing our minds about the role of men in family life", the authors of this book write. "The core question is simple: do children need fathers?

Increasingly, our answer is 'no', or at least 'not necessarily'." Few value shifts in this century, they point out, have been as consequential as this. This book demonstrates that whether the concern is with child welfare, family disintegration, educational failure, crime or the many other social problems that confront people today, no demographic current is more dangerous to social well-being than fatherlessness. The statistics on absent fathers: more than one-third of America's children live in fatherless homes; more than half of non-residential fathers do not fulfill their child support obligations; nearly half of all children living apart from their fathers have not seen them in the previous year; more than one in four children is born to an unmarried woman, and in three-out-of-four of these cases, the father is never legally identified; nearly 30,000 children a year are the product of donated sperm. David Popenoe is the author of "Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Society" and "Neighborhood, City and Metropolis".