A father's love offers children the equipment to leave home. For the past quarter century we've been steeped in morality tales about the damage that overbearing and overly strict fathers have done. The most recent and comprehensive data on divorce and single parent families show that fatherless families produce children with lower IQs, higher suicide rates, more abortions, more illegitimate births, poorer school performance, more trouble with the law, more drugs, more violence, and more mental illness than intact families. It is quite amazing that something as basic to women's nature as motherhood has been so successfully distorted while fatherhood has been so misunderstood. What infertility should have taught Anne Taylor Fleming is that some facts in life are givens.
Culture is important.
But it didn't create the mothering urge, and it cannot silence it. Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. These pages are dedicated to all kids, but especially to Riana, Maia, and Christopher.