Word: fathers
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...folks at Hallmark are going to have a very good day on June 17. That's when more than 100 million of the company's ubiquitous cards will be given to the 66 million dads across the U.S. in observation of Father's Day. Such a blizzard of paper may be short of the more than 150 million cards sold for Mother's Day, but it's still quite a tribute. What's less clear is whether dads--at least as a group--have done a good enough job to deserve the honor...
Worldwide, 10% to 40% of children grow up in households with no father at all. In the U.S., more than half of divorced fathers lose contact with their kids within a few years. By the end of 10 years, as many as two-thirds of them have drifted out of their children's lives. According to a 1994 study by the Children's Defense Fund, men are more likely to default on a child-support payment (49%) than a used-car payment (3%). Even fathers in intact families spend a lot less time focused on their kids than they think...
...this cooperative system that allowed mothers to have more babies than they could support and fathers to vary in how they cared for them. The politicized notion of the nuclear family aside, a mother and father raising children alone was typically a temporary and often less than optimal phase for our ancestors...
None of this gives modern fathers who neglect their kids an evolutionary pass. Indeed, some studies suggest that even having one full-time dad might not be enough. Among many traditional societies across South America, people subscribe to the folk wisdom that any man with whom a woman has had sex in the 10 months before giving birth makes some biological contribution to the fetus growing inside her. Even the woman's official husband accepts this, and any possible father is welcome to assist--discreetly--in providing care for the child. Research by anthropologist Steve Beckerman and his team suggests...
Offering adoption assistance was an easy call for Steve Steinour, CEO of Citizens Financial Group and the father of two adopted children. "We knew from experience that for most Americans, adoption is an unaffordable option," he says. Citizens-- a bank based in Providence, R.I., with 25,000 employees--provides up to $21,000 in aid, a sum that helped put it at the top of the Dave Thomas Foundation's list of adoption-friendly workplaces. Though Steinour says retention is much greater among the 100 or so workers who have used the benefits, he admits that this impact is hard...