“I don’t have a dad,” says Megan, 8, a tiny blond child with a pixie nose who gazes up at a visitor and talks of her hunger. “Well, I do have a dad, ; but I don’t know his name. I only know his first name, Bill.” Just what is it that fathers do? “Love you. They kiss you and hug you when you need them. I had my mom’s boyfriend for a while, but they broke up.” Now Megan lives with just her mother and older brother in Culver City, California. What would you like to do with your dad? “I’d want him to talk to me.” She’s hurting now. “I wish I had somebody to talk to. It’s not fair. If two people made you, then you should still be with those two people.” And she’s sad. “I’m not so special,” she says, looking down at the floor. “I don’t have two people.” She imagines what it would be like for him to come home from work at night. “It would be just like that commercial where the kids say, ‘Daddy, are you all right?’ ” She smiles, dreaming. “The kids show the daddy that they care for him. They put a thermometer in his mouth. They think he’s sick because he came home early. They are sitting on the couch watching TV, and it’s like, wow, we can play with Dad!” Megan thinks her father is in the Navy now. “One day when I get older, I’m gonna go back to Alabama and try to find him.” More children will go to sleep tonight in a fatherless home than ever in the nation’s history. Talk to the experts in crime, drug abuse, depression, school failure, and they can point to some study somewhere blaming those problems on the disappearance of fathers from the American family. But talk to the fathers who do stay with their families, and the story grows more complicated. What they are hearing, from their bosses, from institutions, from the culture around them, even from their own wives, very often comes down to a devastating message: We don’t really trust men to be parents, and we don’t really need them to be. And so every day, everywhere, their children are growing up without them. Corporate America, for a start, may praise family life but does virtually nothing to ease it. Managers still take male workers aside and warn them not to take a paternity leave if they want to be taken seriously. On TV and in movies and magazine ads, the image of fathers over the past generation evolved from the stern, sturdy father who knew best to a helpless Homer Simpson, or some ham-handed galoot confounded by the prospect of changing a diaper. Teachers call parent conferences but only talk to the mothers. When father arrives at the doctor’s office with little Betsy, the pediatrician offers instructions to pass along to his wife, the caregiver presumptive. The Census Bureau can document the 70 million mothers age 15 or older in the U.S. but has scant idea how many fathers there are. “There’s no interest in fathers at all,” says sociologist Vaughn Call, who directs the National Survey of Families and Households at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s a nonexistent category. It’s the ignored half of the family.”
