This is despite the fact that 38 percent of absentee dads have neither custody nor visitation rights. It's hard to imagine that men will pay for kids they have no right to see. But rather than encouraging loving contact between fathers and their children, government simply goes after the paycheck - driving many more dads underground. Third, the popular culture increasingly demoralizes husbands and fathers, portraying men as redundant to family life. The war against dads has been particularly hard on black men.
Black males are thus especially susceptible to the belief that they are disposable and dispensable.
Even under slavery, females were able to fulfill their most elemental gender-specific role. Males, however, were completely stripped of their identity as men. In the late 1990s, as pay cuts and single parenthood increasingly threaten the security of middle class life, white men are beginning to understand what it means to be irrelevant and redundant. Perhaps the time has come for dads to stand up and ask for the honor and support they so desperately need if they are to come through for their kids. Sylvia Ann Hewlett is an economist and founder of the National Parenting Association in New York.