I am not one who needs to be informed of the critical nature of a father in the lives of his children. My own father shaped me to an incredible extent, and is responsible for much of what good there is in my makeup. Our society has trouble understanding this. Most commercials show a clueless, spineless guy getting bossed around and corrected by his wife, without whom he would clearly be lost. There is only one part of such commercials that holds true, most men would be lost without their wives, but not because they need their wives to guide, direct and teach them everything about surviving and succeeding in society.
Mr. Mark Alexander has taken the opportunity Father's Day presents to note some of the statistics that back up the critical nature of the father in a family.[1] Particularly noteworthy, especially to me who has so often tried to argue, white though I am, that racial discrimination is no longer all that significant, is the fact that when you control for the presence or lack of a father in a person's life, the correlation between race and crime, and even between poverty and crime, utterly disappears.[2] It is the prevailing lack of a father in the inner city society, in which so many black families are trapped, that, in fact, traps the next generation there.
[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/markalexander/ma20050617.shtml [2] social researcher Ms. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, quoted in the above.