Research Paper on:
The Evolution of American Fatherhood

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
of the children who live in fatherless households have not seen their fathers in over a year and 50 percent of children who do not reside with their fathers  have never set foot in their fathers house (Anonymous, 2002). Children with absent fathers drop out of school three times faster than their counterparts (McLean, 2000). Statistics show that 60  percent of convicted rapists, 70 percent of adolescents charged with murder, and 70 percent of long-term prison inmates grew up without a father (McLean,2000). Yet despite these dismal statistics,  for years the societal message has been that fathers do not "really" matter. Divorce has been positively encouraged by psychologists who have urged parents to consider their own self-fulfillment above  all else. Once divorce occurs, custody is almost always awarded to the mother. Amneus (2002) points to the example provided by a Georgia superior court judge, Robert Noland, who always  awards child custody to the mother based on the premise that he has never seen a "calf following a bull. They always follow the cow. So I always give custody  to the mother." Most judges agree and regard the mother-headed reproductive dyad of mother and child as a natural unit. There is, of course, some validity in this view  as humans are mammals and the male mammal is often inconsequential to the raising of the next generation. Amneus (2002) makes the observation that riding through a Washington, DC  ghetto leads one to conclude that the black youths hanging out on street corners are so obviously unsuited to parenthood that it makes sense that if they did intrude  on the lives of their offspring, their mothers would be perfectly justified in doing what other female mammals do when the male comes around -- "shoo him off." However,