The Father Factor: Data on the Consequences of Father Absence (USA)

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 24 million children in America -- one out of three -- live in biological father-absent homes. Consequently, there is a "father factor" in nearly all of the social issues facing America today. This website by the National Fatherhood Initiative presents data on the effects of father absence on: poverty, maternal and child health, incarceration, crime, teen pregnancy, child abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, education, and childhood obesity

Fathering in Australia among couple families with young children

There has been growing recognition of the importance of fathers to families in recent years. Societal trends, such as rising levels of employment among mothers of young children and recognition of the importance of the father–child relationship, have given more prominence to the contribution that fathers make to family life. Governments are increasingly interested in creating conditions that can foster fathers’ involvement in families; for example, through promoting more flexible working arrangements or by ensuring that children maintain contact with fathers following family breakdown. This growing interest in the role of fathers has been mirrored in the scientific community. However, there has been a limited amount of research on fathers in Australia, with the result that there remains much to be learnt about the ways that Australian fathers contribute to families and how they feel about themselves as fathers.

This report aims to increase understanding of the many ways in which fathers in couple families with young children contribute to family life, through the study of their time investment with children, their supportiveness as partners, their financial contribution, their parenting behaviours and styles, and their perceptions of their own adequacy as fathers. The impact of fathers on children’s wellbeing is also examined.

Feminist ideal a myth: Gloria Steinem

Women grappling with the overwhelming pressure for perfection that can wreak havoc in their lives need to realise that the notion of "having it all" is largely a myth, women's movement icon Gloria Steinem told eating disorder clinicians at an annual meeting in the US. Women have made huge strides in the workplace over the past several decades, but with no reduction in their amount of responsibility for child-rearing and household duties, she said. Steinem told the group of several hundred attendees, many of them psychologists, physicians and nutritionists, that women cannot "have it all" unless and until men have an equal role in rearing children.

Who’s oppressing who? Barbara Kay (Canada)

In its earliest and most benign form – the political campaign to achieve equality under the law and equality in economic opportunities – feminism was a necessary and welcome reform movement. No rational person could be less than delighted to see barriers to a full range of educational and career options for women fall by the wayside. The feminism I take exception to today is not the mild and blameless right of a woman to self-actualize that all women absorb by osmosis from the cultural air we breathe, but the radical ideology that has come to dominate the movement’s academic and institutional elites over the last 40 years. This is an ideology that sees the relations between the sexes as a never-ending antagonistic power struggle, with women as eternal victims and men as eternal oppressors. It is an ideology that explains away the moral failings of women as the fault of a patriarchal “system”, but holds men responsible for their actions. And most important, it is an ideology that shortchanges children by privileging the rights and importance to children of mothers over fathers.