Try doing a Google search for “single father.” First, you’ll have to turn off your computer’s auto-fill option, which will insist on searching for “single mother”; that incidentally, yields 48 million results in 0.17 seconds. Once you’ve got the correct words in the correct places, hit search again. Amazingly, you will yield 30 million fewer results.
Imagine being a single father out there, combing the Internet for resources, advice, support groups, any kind of lifeline – and coming up short. How must it feel to be considered the second-best option by not only our courtrooms and TV sitcoms, but now by our search engines?
President Barak Obama gave an enlightening speech last year on the values of fatherhood: “If we want our children to succeed in life, we need fathers to step up,” he said, “We need fathers to understand that their work doesn’t end with conception – that what truly makes a man a father is the ability to raise a child and invest in that child.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1970, only 1 percent of children were being raised by a single father. Today, about 16 percent of custodial parents are men. That means about one in six single parents is a father raising his child.
I had the privilege to speak with single dads from the Inland Empire about the joys and challenges of single fatherhood. The two things they had in common: prideful joy in raising their children and a strict 9 p.m. bedtime.
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