Colleen Carroll Campbell: The power of a father's presence

Article here. Excerpt:

'For fatherhood in America, these are the best of times and the worst of times. So says a new Pew Research Center report on fathering trends.

The report, released in June, found that today's fathers are active in their children's daily lives to a degree not seen in nearly half a century. Live-in dads now regularly eat meals with their children, play with them, read to them, help them with their homework and ask them about their day. They also log more than twice as many hours on kid duty than did their own dads: In 1965, the average married father spent only 2.6 hours a week caring for his children; by 2000, that average had risen to 6.5 hours.
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But that's where the good news ends. The Pew report found that alongside this rising level of involvement among live-in fathers is a rise in absent fathers — men who live apart from their children and often have little or no role in their children's daily lives.

In 1960, just more than one in 10 children lived apart from their fathers. Today, more than one in four do. The statistics are starker when parsed by race: Nearly half of African-American fathers and more than a third of Hispanic fathers live separated from their children. An education gap also exists: Some 40 percent of dads who dropped out of high school live apart from their children, while only 7 percent of college graduates do.
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The consequences for children are profound. As statistics in the 2011 Father Facts report make clear, children who live apart from their biological fathers are more likely to suffer abuse, run afoul of the law, abuse drugs or alcohol, struggle with emotional and behavioral problems, live in poverty and engage in early sexual activity. Children raised by their married fathers and mothers, by contrast, fare better on nearly every sociological measure available, from their rates of graduation to their incidence of out-of-wedlock childbearing and divorce.'