Dads matter. So argues Prof. Brad Wilcox in The Atlantic:
I understand where Jennifer Aniston is coming from. Like many of her peers in Hollywood, not to mention scholars and writers opining on fatherhood these days, she has come to the conclusion that dads are dispensable: "Women are realizing it more and more knowing that they don't have to settle with a man just to have that child," she said at a press conference a few years ago.
Her perspective has a lot of intuitive appeal in an era where millions of women have children outside of marriage, serve as breadwinner moms to their families, or are raising children on their own. Dads certainly seem dispensable in today's world.
What this view overlooks, however, is a growing body of research suggesting that men bring much more to the parenting enterprise than money, especially today, when many fathers are highly involved in the warp and woof of childrearing. As Yale psychiatrist Kyle Pruett put it in Salon: "fathers don't mother."
Pruett's argument is that fathers often engage their children in ways that differ from the ways in which mothers engage their children. Yes, there are exceptions, and, yes, parents also engage their children in ways that are not specifically gendered. But there are at least four ways, spelled out in my new book, Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (co-edited withKathleen Kovner Kline), that today's dads tend to make distinctive contributions to their children's lives... (The Atlantic)
"...a look at SF925 reveals that something much more insidious than advocates let on is underway. This bill would strip the words “mother” and “father” of meaning under Minnesota law. Henceforth, the bill states, these words — among the most beloved and culturally freighted in the English language — “must be construed in a neutral manner to refer to a person of either gender.”
Although the American Psychological Association (APA) boasts scholarly objectivity, the social-science guild has for years conducted studies that generate the results—from the alleged benefits of the “good” divorce to the virtues of homosexuality—that progressive activists’ itching ears want to hear. Consequently, it often falls to one brave solider to challenge the groupthink.
The benefits of intact biological families were emphasized on a "Building a Marriage Culture" panel at the National Review Institute's 2013 Summit, "The Future of Conservatism." One of the panelists, Doug Mainwaring, spoke of his personal experience as a gay man who came to realize that his own children need both a mother and a father.
A Florida judge has approved the adoption of a 22-month-old baby girl that will list three people as parents on her birth certificate -- a married lesbian couple and a gay man.
The journal Demography has just published a very interesting 
