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There was one noteworthy scare about dads, and political leaders and social scientists issued warnings seemingly as dire as those about monster moms. “The single biggest social problem in our society may be the growing absence of fathers from their children’s homes, because it contributes to so many other social problems,” President Clinton declared in a speech at the University of Texas in 1995. “Father absence is the engine driving our biggest social problems,” echoed David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America, in an “Eye on America” segment on CBS’s “Evening News.” “Our national crime problem,” he said, “is not driven by young black males. It is driven by boys who are growing up with no fathers.” Blankenhorn went so far as to suggest that violence against women is attributable to boys who grow up without dads and become resentful.24

A front-page story in the New York Times posed the fatherlessness menace no less sweepingly: “Over all, children in homes without fathers are more likely to be poor, to drop out of high school and to end up in foster care or juvenile-justice programs than are those living with their fathers.”25

But notice the logic here. Unlike mothers, who are deemed deficient on account of what they do or what they believe, dads are judged on whether or not they’re around. Men’s mere presence is apparently adequate to save their children and the nation from ruin.

In truth, the crusade against fatherlessness is but another surreptitious attack on single mothers. Most advocates are too sophisticated to offer sound bites such as that given by Wade Horn, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, to the Washington Post: “Growing up without a father is like being in a car with a drunk driver.” However one phrases it, to insist that children are intrinsically better off with fathers regardless of who the fathers are or how they behave is to suggest that no single mother can adequately raise a child. About boys Blakenhorn made this claim explicitly. A mother cannot raise a healthy son on her own, Blankenhorn decreed, because “the best mother in the world can’t tell her son what it means to be a man.”26

Scares about missing dads also impugned lesbian mothers, whose children Blankenhorn disparaged as “radically fatherless,” though in fact studies find that kids reared by lesbians have no greater academic, emotional, or behavioral difficulties than other children—aside from those caused by discrimination against homosexuals.27

Several bodies of research—mostly missing from media accounts about the fatherlessness menace—reveal the spuriousness of the evidence behind the scare. Literature on divorce shows that the main negative impacts on children are conflicts between the parents before the divorce and loss of the father’s income afterward, rather than absence of the father per se. Research on how children fare following divorce also disputes the alleged power of poppa’s presence. Studies of children who live with their divorced or separated mothers find, for instance, no improvement in school performance or delinquency when the children’s fathers visit more often.28

A large national study was conducted by Kaiser Permanente and Children Now of troubled children in two-parent families. Asked to whom they turn for help, only 10 percent selected their fathers, while 45 percent chose their mothers, and 26 percent chose their friends.29

One category of children, invisible in the brouhaha over fatherlessness, clearly benefits by not having their fathers around. Studies of child abuse often focus on mothers, but in fact fathers commit about half of all parental child abuse. In some surveys more than half of divorced women say that their former husbands struck them or their children. Blanket statements about the dangers of fathers’ absence conveniently ignore the existence of such men. They overlook the unfortunate fact that, apart from the extra money and “respectability” fathers might provide,