LIFE WITHOUT FATHER : AS MORE AND MORE AMERICAN MEN DISCONNECT FROM FAMILY LIFE, SOCIETY SUFFERS THE CONSEQUENCES

There’s a warrant out for David Bell’s arrest. A fitting tribute to the ineptitude of the nation’s child-support system, the warrant will sit for eight weeks on a desk at the Glendale Police Department. A judge issued it after Bell pulled a no-show at a court hearing concerning $1,500 he owes for the care of his 9-year-old son. * It’s not as if Bell is hard to find. Hours after the warrant comes down, he answers the telephone at the office of his small phone-installation company in Pasadena. And during the next two months he’ll continue going to work, going home, going about his daily routine until the police plow through an inches-thick pile of warrants for armed robbers and drug dealers and embezzlers to reach the paperwork on David Bell, errant father. * I talk to Bell the same day the judge orders his arrest. The story he tells about his child-support payments sounds well-rehearsed. He says he has been sending checks to the county-appointed trustee, who must have lost them. He even reads me the address and recounts the runaround he gets each time he calls to find out what happened to the money. (A deposition signed by the deputy district attorney assigned to the case tells a different story.) I’ve heard explanations like this from other men who fall behind in child support, and by now economists are familiar with the consequences: It’s one reason that one in three households headed by women live below the poverty line. * But, by themselves, these stories don’t capture the full picture of fatherless families. I’m more curious about something else. I’ve met Bell’s son--let’s call him Jason. The kid is irresistible. He inherited his mom’s dimples and his dad’s dirty-blond hair. He displays that combination of innocent candor and unbridled enthusiasm that makes young boys so endearing. Lori Thompson, an office administrator who looks much younger than her 30 years, has been more than willing to let Bell be a part of her son’s life. Jason lives a 15-minute drive away from his dad, yet rarely sees him. Why?

That’s a question Bell isn’t prepared for. “I don’t know, it’s difficult,” he starts. Then he tries to explain. “Because of the money. Every time I want to see my son, we have to discuss money,” he says, referring to his ex-wife. “These things are always hanging over my head. It’s hard to be part of someone’s life like that.”

Last year, guilt pangs nudged Bell back into his son’s life after a six-year absence. There were the visits to Little League games, the afternoons at the movies, the weekend of water-skiing in Arizona. Then came the broken promises: the science-fair project never built together, the Fast Traks set that arrived a week too late for Christmas, and the time Bell promised a night out bowling--and even called to say he was on his way. Jason ran to the window every time he heard a car. His dad never showed.

“That’s true,” Bells responds when I ask him about the bowling incident. “Things happen. It usually revolves around money. Lori will want this or that. . . .

“It’s difficult,” he repeats.

Like a mantra come these vague feelings from absent fathers all across the country: “I don’t know.” “Things happen.” “It’s difficult.”

The failure of men like David Bell to help support their children has moved toward the center of the national debate about poverty and gender equality. Feminist and child-advocate groups call for more generous support awards and stricter enforcement. Local district attorneys organize “deadbeat dad” roundups, knowing they’ll get a free hit of favorable publicity. Reporters recount story after story about women thrown into poverty--and onto taxpayer-financed welfare rolls--because fathers refuse to make their support payments. Child support has even become a high-profile issue in the presidential campaign, with Bill Clinton proposing to use the IRS to crack down on non-paying fathers.

But Bell’s delinquent checks are only one part of the equation. A growing body of research says that society should be equally worried about the emotional void left in the lives of children like Jason when their fathers check out. “There is this cliched image out there of the deadbeat dad,” says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, a New York think tank that studies family issues. “And there are equally cliched solutions. The story we tell ourselves is a curiously old-fashioned story, that fatherhood equals economic support. But fatherhood is more than sending checks. And the consequences of fatherlessness are deep and profound and long-lasting.”

Researchers now are attempting to measure the full range of those consequences. Consider two of our nation’s most serious problems--crime and teen-age pregnancy. Studies show that the most reliable predictor of these behaviors is not income. Nor race. It is family structure: Pregnant girls and criminal boys tend to come from fatherless families. An astonishing 70% of imprisoned U.S. minors have spent at least part of their lives without fathers. Gangs feed on fatherless sons. Father Greg Boyle of Dolores Mission Church in East Los Angeles once listed the names of the first 100 gang members that came to mind and then jotted a family history next to each. All but five were no longer living with their biological fathers--if they ever had.

As the smoke clears after the riots in Los Angeles, debates over urban problems are once again in vogue--with Great Society-style liberals calling for more government aid and Reagan-era conservatives blaming the nation’s welfare programs for creating a “culture of dependency.” Both sides of that debate may miss the point. “People who do not talk about the family are waltzing themselves down a tried-and-true path of nothing getting better,” says Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, a senior fellow at Washington’s Progressive Policy Institute who has written about family issues. “Really random and serious violence--that’s what’s correlated to fatherless families.”

The White House attempted to make that point after the riots, but botched it by sending out exactly the wrong messenger. Vice President Dan Quayle’s attack on sitcom character Murphy Brown for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone” was construed as a condemnation of struggling single mothers. Afterward, President Bush ran for political cover, while much of the media played the remark as another in a long line of Quayle gaffes.

We meticulously talk in gender-neutral terms about “single-parent households” and “parenthood.” But discussion about the particular importance of fathers is rare. In this feminist age, Blankenhorn contends, there’s an assumption that women can do just fine by themselves, thank you. They survive as independent women, as single mothers (Murphy Brown was not the first prime-time woman to have a baby on her own) and even as welfare recipients (such social critics as Barbara Ehrenreich have argued that it’s perfectly rational for poor women to find welfare checks more reliable and less troublesome than men). Even the nation’s social-services system focuses its financial and counseling assistance on mothers--often to the exclusion of fathers, critics contend.

But many researchers now single out fathers as providing a form of child-rearing distinct from that of mothers--and just as essential to a child’s development. Whether they are roughhousing with a 5-year-old or scaring the bejesus out of a delinquent teen, fathers bring a different style to parenting, says Kyle Pruett, psychiatry professor at the Yale Child Study Center and author of “The Nurturing Father.”

Social thinkers across the political spectrum are beginning to emphasize the role of fathers in building safe communities. Conservative sociologist James Q. Wilson contends that while “neighborhood standards (are) set by mothers, they are enforced by fathers. . . . The absence of fathers deprives the community of those little platoons that effectively control boys on the street.” Likewise, New Jersey legislator Wayne R. Bryant, a liberal African-American, describes the difference between the boy who throws a bottle on the ground in a stable suburb and one who does the same in an almost-fatherless housing project. The first boy picks it up when challenged by the man next door; the second responds to a female neighbor’s request with a menacing “Don’t you tell me what to do.” Without men around as role models, adolescent boys create their own rites of passage: perhaps getting a girl pregnant or dealing drugs or murdering a rival.

Throughout history, men have been torn from their families by war, disease and death. But in ‘90s America, men are choosing to disconnect from family life on a massive scale, and at far higher rates than other industrialized countries. “Men are drifting away from family life,” says Blankenhorn. “We are in danger of becoming a fatherless society.”

That is especially true in minority communities, where poverty rates are the highest. In nearly two-thirds of black households and in one-third of Latino households, only one parent--usually the mother--is present. Divorce rates, though still high, have reached a plateau. The most important factor behind the increase in fatherless households is the seemingly unstoppable rise in out-of-wedlock births. In 1989, a startling 66% of black children and 36% of Latino children were born to unwed parents.

But fathers are harder to find in white suburbia as well. Nearly a quarter of white homes are headed by one parent, and the percentage of white children born to unwed parents has nearly doubled over the last decade, to almost 20%--a much faster growth rate than that found in black communities. Lest white America become too complacent: Blankenhorn has crunched Census Bureau figures to show that white families now experience breakups at the same pace as black families did in 1965, when President Johnson called “the breakdown of the Negro family structure” one of the most pressing issues of the era.

All across America tonight, one-third of the nation’s children will go to bed without their biological fathers in the next room. And most of them won’t see their fathers the next day, either. According to studies by Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., a University of Pennsylvania sociologist, about 40% of the children who live in fatherless households haven’t seen their fathers in at least a year; for many others, contact is sporadic. In any month, only one in five of these children sleeps even one night in their father’s home. “It’s a minority of (absent) fathers that have at least once-a-week contact,” says Furstenberg.

Researchers are quick to note that plenty of single mothers raise well-adjusted children, and that children are better off not living with emotionally or physically abusive fathers. But, they add, the odds are stacked against fatherless children--particularly those who live in poverty. Children with fathers tend to do better in school, are less prone to depression and are more successful in relationships. “It shows up on cognitive achievement, on social achievement, everywhere,” says San Diego psychiatrist Martin Greenberg, author of “The Birth of a Father.” Greenberg describes the fatherless young criminals he counsels as brimming with rage over being “abandoned.” And fatherless girls, Greenberg and other researchers note, often experience low self-esteem and rocky romantic relationships as they search for the ideal father substitute. Most of the time, stepfathers can’t begin to fill the void.

That vulnerability is evident in the comments of Lori Thompson and mothers like her, who worry about the periods of depression they see in their children. Ask the normally buoyant Jason about his father, and his mood darkens. Little-boy fingers drop to his lap and tug at each other fitfully. A tiny tear surfaces, and he swats away the unwelcome drop. “He’s OK,” Jason says. Then comes a halting, deep breath. “I don’t know when he’s telling the truth or when he’s actually going to show up.”

Another mother, an aspiring producer abandoned by her boyfriend, says that no matter how much she tries to bolster her 9-year-old son, his self-esteem remains fragile. Outwardly, he appears to be a cheerful, well-adjusted child thoroughly at ease in the company of adults. But his mother confesses that he has frightened her with talk about wanting to kill himself. “Issues of potential loss affect him deeply,” she says. “I’ve been dating a guy for one week, and he already wants me to marry him and make him his daddy.”

Even before the L.A. riots, a handful of national leaders were beginning to talk about the toll that fatherless homes take on children and society. Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan says that when he came into office and examined the department’s programs, it dawned on him that the social welfare system is primarily designed to compensate for family disruption. “The net result is not as good as having an intact family,” he says.

Now Sullivan is selling his message of “male responsibility” around the country. “Most of our national dialogue on family issues . . . has focused exclusively on the mother,” he says. “However, it is not women who are abandoning or neglecting their children.”

Democratic contender Clinton has woven a similar message into his oft-repeated theme of personal responsibility. During a March 29 debate in New York, he presented this prescription for the woes of the urban poor: “You’ve got to emphasize requirements for responsible behavior in return for (government) benefits. You’ve got to change the internal culture. You have to change the ways these families operate by going in and teaching the parents.”

All this talk of family values is a political hot button. Witness the firestorm that erupted last month over Quayle’s comments. Much of the political Establishment continues to shrink from the debate over “values” (the term out of wedlock , for example, is politically incorrect in many circles because it smacks of judging others’ lifestyles). But even some liberals are becoming convinced that child support is only one part of a cultural agenda that should address such concerns as fleeing fathers and out-of-wedlock births.

Conservatives traditionally are more comfortable talking about values. But they have their own Achilles’ heel: How can you ask fathers to be fathers without providing the training and jobs to enable them to become breadwinners? Or without footing the bill for the added cost of paying welfare to men--as well as women and children--in the home?

Since 1973, real earnings of men between 25 and 29 have declined more than 20%, leading some researchers to conclude that men flee family life--or are pushed out by women--because they are not reliable breadwinners. Sullivan says he sees a role for government funding of both parenting programs and job training, but stops short of saying that government should be responsible for generating better-paying jobs. The Administration’s post-riot urban aid plan allocates $683 million to job training, but critics say the problem requires a bolder and more comprehensive approach.

Neither political party seems capable of untangling the Gordian knot of poverty and crime. If they looked beyond their ideological blinders, the nation’s leaders might see that two strings of that knot are a creaky child-support system and a social culture that encourages fathers to flee. Values and economics, inextricably wound together.

To get the full picture of what policy-makers are up against, it’s instructive to visit the offices of family-law attorneys like Jeffrey Marckese, where fathers come to fight paternity battles, resist child support and, on this spring afternoon, offer their thoughts about fatherhood.

Mark looks like a guy who belongs on the living room couch, Budweiser in hand, watching the NBA playoffs. (Although Mark is only 22, the Buds appear to have a head start on his waistline.) But today, the young man, who works as a messenger, has agreed to sit on his lawyer’s couch and talk about a topic that, he says, only occasionally crosses his mind--his young son. “I think he’s 3. . . . He was born in December, ’88.”

Mark started having sex when he was 16. His luck, he says, ran out when he was 19 and he got his girlfriend pregnant. She wanted to have the baby. He wasn’t so sure, but he stuck by her until she was a month away from delivery. Then they had a fight, and he split. When his son was about 6 months old, Mark returned for some quality time..

“It was overwhelming. I picked up this baby and thought, ‘Here’s my kid. I created him. But you know what?’ ” he asks, dead serious. “ ‘The money I’m going to spend on him I could have spent on a Lamborghini.’ ”

On that note, a deep-throated chuckle builds inside Marckese’s Wilshire-corridor office. It spreads from Mark in the middle of the couch to Ben “The Procreator” on his right (Marckese invented the nickname--Ben has seven children by four women), to the gray-bearded James on his left, who has seen his 12-year-old daughter only once. They laugh with knowing abandon, these three men who were strangers until only a few minutes before. Then they catch themselves--there’s a female reporter present. They throw sheepish looks my way, and the laughter subsides.

The experts have their own terminology for Mark’s way of thinking. Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values calls it “expressive individualism,” our culture’s overweening emphasis on personal fulfillment and freedom at the expense of commitment to family and community. This “me-firstism,” he argues, dovetails with today’s tendency to discount the role of fathers, to turn them into superfluous check-writers.

The caseworkers at the county district attorney’s office on the front lines of the child-support battle know what Blankenhorn is talking about. They spend their days tracking down errant fathers, garnishing their wages and, on occasion, putting them in jail--all in an effort to force compliance with court orders issued at the time of a divorce or when an unwed mother establishes paternity. They also hear some stories that make Mark look like Cliff Huxtable.

There was, for example, the father who said he couldn’t pay his child support because he needed the money to board his two pure-bred Doberman pinschers. Another was furious because prosecutors seized his Rolls-Royce to partly cover $200,000 in back child and spousal support. (There was also the man who claimed he was no longer the father because he had had a sex-change operation, but that’s a different story.)

Mothers know what Blankenhorn is talking about, too. But they look at it a different way. I interviewed several mothers of fatherless children who believe that these men relish the image of fatherhood but not the reality, not the chaos and clutter of child-rearing--particularly when it impinges on their careers or lifestyles. In other words, men are spoiled and irresponsible. “This man was not cut out to be a parent,” says a woman whose attorney husband of 15 years left behind three kids, only to see them at restaurant outings with his girlfriend. “He couldn’t cope with the noise. His career was the most important thing in his life.”

Furstenberg of the University of Pennsylvania and Judith Wallerstein, author of several books on divorce, are more generous toward absent fathers. They note that men regard marriage and relationships as “a kind of package deal,” as Furstenberg puts it. Divorcing the wife means divorcing the children. Moreover, most men move on to invest their emotions and money in another marriage or relationship, so there’s not much left over. “It’s hard when they also want to close the door on that first marriage,” says Wallerstein.

But as I sit listening in Marckese’s office, none of these explanations seems to fully explain Mark’s self-imposed exile. Then I remember the words of my friend Beth, whose son has never seen his father. “You want to hear my theory?” she asked one day over lunch. “Once you break up, once you divorce, men have lost control of the situation, so they don’t want any part of it at all.”

As Mark and the others tell their stories, the issue of control comes up again and again, though none of them use that word. Each wants control over how his child-support checks are spent. “Can’t they make her show receipts?” asks Mark. (In fact, challenging his ex’s spending habits would require that Mark actually see his child. Then he could argue before a judge that his son is not being adequately cared for.)

These three men also want control over the upbringing of their children--even as they insist that they are not the fathers. Like the others, Mark still won’t believe the blood test that showed a 99.91% probability of his paternity. But when Marckese refuses to indulge Mark’s doubts, his client suddenly changes his tune. If he is the biological father, Mark says, he intends to “go after the kid” in a custody battle.

“Huh?” I ask, startled, though half-remembering that Beth’s ex-boyfriend fought paternity and demanded custody at the same time.

“Is this for revenge?” Marckese asks his client.

“Partly.” Pause. “She owes me an immense amount of time with this child (because of the payments). And I think I could do a much better job as a parent. She’s collecting welfare, she comes from a welfare family. . . . Either way, I have to pay for the kid. The Lamborghini is gone. It’s already down the freeway.”

James tells a more complicated story. Like Mark, he initially wanted nothing to do with being a father. And some part of him still doesn’t want to believe he is one. “You ever read a blood test? It’s an algebraic nightmare,” he says, handing me the results. Maybe so, but one line is pretty clear. It states that the statistical probability of his fathering the child is 99.91%.

James, who declines to give his age but appears to be in his late 40s, was seeing a woman in Los Angeles, got her pregnant (“She insisted she was safe,” he says) but wasn’t interested in becoming a parent. “I didn’t want responsibility, any kids or family,” he says. When I press him, James makes veiled reference to a troubled upbringing and adds, “Family life scared me.”

After James’ daughter was born 12 years ago, his girlfriend moved to Florida, where her family could help support her. Since then, James has seen his child once, when she and her mother came here on a vacation and he took her to the beach to fly kites. James, unemployed and vague about his work history, insists he hasn’t visited the child because he couldn’t afford the air fare. Why not pick up the phone? At that, he starts to say he didn’t know where they were living. He finally admits, “I didn’t have an interest in seeing the kid.”

Now, however, James says, his spiritual life has changed; he recently turned to Christianity. He’s older and more mature. And he’s ready to be a father to his child. But he’s worried about how she will react to a father who initially denied paternity. “That’s a deep cut,” James says. “This is the guy who denied you in court.”

As he turns toward me, the look in his eyes is distinctly out of place amid the male ribaldry and banter. James is terrified. “Let me ask you something,” he says to me, a stranger. “What do you think I should say now? How should I say it?”

From Homer on, there have been those who contend that fatherhood, unlike motherhood, is a learned role, not a natural one. If that’s true, it could explain why so many absent fathers feel awkward in their relationships with their children, and avoid them rather than learn to cope. An absent father’s “repertoire of skills to directly relate to the child is limited,” says Furstenberg. “Fathers play at most a co-pilot role even during the marriage. So after the marriage, that is not an easy relationship.”

It is especially hard for men like James, who were never married to the mother and never experienced being a parent. What do you do with a 3-year-old on visiting day? How do you discipline when you’re not part of a child’s daily life? How do you react when a teen-ager won’t talk to you? And, for James, how do you ask a child’s forgiveness? “To be a visiting parent is hell,” says Wallerstein, who teaches many of her clients “visiting skills.” “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

And mothers--who are typically hostile to their ex-husbands and boyfriends--cannot be counted on to smooth the way. Many mothers openly admit to sharing their hostility with the children. How can an absent father compete with that? Even mothers with more balanced attitudes aren’t likely to help an absent father develop or renew a close relationship with his child. One mother has watched the father of her little girl, now 5, come by the house every six weeks to take the child out to dinner, even when she was a toddler. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for him to play with her at the park or his house? “I used to make those kinds of suggestions,” responds the mother, a child-development specialist. Now she feels it would be more honest to allow the child to see her real father, without trying to make him appear any better--or worse--than he is.

Ben, our father of seven, loves children and bristles at the label “absent father.” He has a 13-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son from his only marriage. He also has two 7-year-olds (by different women), a 5-year-old, a 4-year-old and, now, an infant of 4 months. He pays regular child support to his first six children and hired Marckese because he refused to pay support on his seventh child until blood tests proved he was the father.

He considers himself a good dad to this brood and is puzzled by my assertion that he seems to take procreation casually. “I don’t know what you mean by that,” he says, indignant that a role he takes so seriously could be questioned.

Ben’s attitude is not so surprising. Out-of-wedlock births, particularly in some minority communities, have become so common that many unwed young people don’t give a second thought to having children. Much has been written about the reasons teen-age girls and young women have children without the emotional and financial commitment of marriage: peer pressure, the need for love, the apparent absence of other alternatives. Only recently has attention begun to focus on unwed fathers, with such influential commentators as William Julius Wilson, author of “The Truly Disadvantaged,” citing joblessness and low pay as one reason many men don’t marry, and others placing more emphasis on a society-wide breakdown in values.

For Ben, a machinist who shells out $1,000 a month in child support, money is not the issue. He explains his burgeoning family as the logical consequence of playing the field. The art of contraception is obviously no secret to this 34-year-old man. But he laughingly talks of how the mind shuts down “and other things take over” in the heat of romance.

He refuses to call any of his children accidents, nor does he blame the mothers for getting pregnant. But at one point he complains that women “set you up. They know the type of person you are, and they know I’m a good dad and I make money.”

Has he ever considered marrying the mother of one of these children? Not since his divorce more than a decade ago, he says. “I play around. I play around a lot. But my kids always come first anyways.”

Ben’s attitude toward marriage and fatherhood may have something to do with his own fatherless childhood. But it may also reflect his definitions of manhood. During our session in Marckese’s office, Ben is so stunned by James’ spiritually guided decision to forgo premarital sex that he comes back to the issue again and again. At one point, Ben even wonders if the older man has trouble relating to his daughter because he isn’t having sex.

It’s not hard today to find men much younger than Ben who want to become fathers, children making children, even if they have no intention of staying with the mother, nor any means of supporting their children. That was apparent when I interviewed four East L.A. gang members, all unwed fathers, all under 19. I asked each of them why they had fathered children. And, to a man, they said they did it because they wanted to; they weren’t coerced or tricked or pressured. I gave them every out I could think of: “No contraceptives around?” “Maybe your girlfriend pressured you?” They wouldn’t budge.

George, 18, recently out of a juvenile facility, was inspired by the sight of another homeboy playing with his kids in the park. Afterward, though, reality set in. Of his second child that was on the way, he mumbled, “More trouble, more trouble.” Titi, head shaved and body covered with tattoos, described the joy of hanging out on the corner with his homies until late at night, his infant in his arms. Curly, an 18-year-old with a warm and open face, insisted that he will always be there for his 2-year-old son, even though his girlfriend was now with someone else.

Researchers have concluded that having children has become a sign of manhood in communities where there are no role models left to point to other ways. The scent of death among these gang members--Father Boyle insists that most of them don’t expect to live past age 25--probably accelerates that process. Once they have children, these young men aren’t exactly considered prize catches as husbands: Without high-school diplomas, their economic prospects are bleak. And, so far, their girlfriends have managed to survive on their own and support their children by collecting welfare benefits.

But there’s also the breakdown of traditional values to consider. In many communities, fathering children without assuming full responsibility for their care has become commonplace, and often spans two or three generations within one family. Researchers say that men like George and Titi no longer face social rebuke for their actions. Even the economic-minded William Julius Wilson raises concerns about “weaker social strictures against out-of-wedlock births.”

Often, the parents of both these gang members and their girlfriends even condone the baby-making, hoping--as one gang member put it--that fatherhood will force them to “straighten out.” Oddly enough, those having the babies tend to be the “good girls”--not those with loose reputations. “It’s no accident who these (young men) pick to have their children,” says Father Boyle.

So Ben is not the bleakest side of the statistics. He may contest paternity, but once he is proved the father, he will pay his child support. And every weekend, he says, he brings all his children to his house (though he concedes that his girlfriend is the primary baby-sitter during these stays).

What is more worrisome to society are the fathers who don’t stick around long enough to see their kids out of the hospital, let alone off to kindergarten. “There’s a certain lawlessness that runs through these unmarried relationships. There’s no code of conduct,” says Betty Nordwind, director of L.A.’s Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law. Nordwind, who helps clients collect child support from fathers, blames the rising out-of-wedlock birthrate for her mounting frustrations on the job.

“You ask, ‘Where are the men?’ ” she says. “From what I can see, they’re onto the next relationship, they’ve rolled into the next bed.”

Government cannot force men to be good fathers. California’s Supreme Court stated as much in 1981, when it ruled against a mother who wanted to force the father of her infant daughter to visit. But that is not stopping social engineers around the country from using government money and public policy in their efforts to revive fatherhood.

On secluded church grounds in the heart of San Antonio, low-income Latino men gather for a retreat, participating in traditional American Indian ceremonies and taking vows of nonviolence and responsible fatherhood. These “rites of manhood” are a central component of the fatherhood program at Avance (Get Ahead), a government- and corporate-funded parenting school aimed at San Antonio’s barrio, where role models are in short supply.

Avance founder Gloria Rodriquez originally taught only women. But she quickly sensed that their newfound skills and confidence threatened their husbands and boyfriends. Rather than risk breaking up families, Avance opened its doors to men, who attend regular classes on child development and parenting techniques.

Program Supervisor Isaac Cardenas concedes that some men--forced into the classes by the courts--drop out or refuse to change their ways. But he prefers to dwell on the success stories like George Gomez, whose drinking and violence nearly caused his family’s breakup. Two years after he was arrested for beating his wife and neglecting his children, this 25-year-old sign maker’s preferred topic of conversation is his strategy for potty-training his toddler. “Everyone is surprised how much I’ve changed,” he says.

Inside New Jersey’s state Capitol building in Trenton, a no-nonsense Democratic legislator has pushed through a plan to reform the state’s welfare system by promoting family unity. In Wayne Bryant’s opinion, it’s sheer lunacy to think that the nation’s largest welfare program--created 57 years ago to support widowed women and their children--would work in the modern world.

Aid to Families With Dependent Children has taught three or four generations of men that “if you want your children to do well, you’ve got to leave,” says Bryant. He is referring to AFDC rules that prevent a woman from receiving full benefits if the father at home has an employment record or works more than 100 hours a month. Although research is spotty, many policy-makers agree with Bryant’s contention that AFDC’s conditions discourage family formation.

Signed into law along with his more controversial proposal to withhold extra benefits if a woman has additional children once she’s on welfare, Bryant’s legislation eliminates the bias against households with fathers. Wisconsin has adopted similar reforms that would increase benefits to women who marry, provided they and their husbands attend job training and parenting classes.

In Portland, Ore., Memphis, Tenn., and eight other American cities, 3,000 low-income men are beginning to stream into job-training and peer-support sessions designed to lure them back to their families as breadwinners. This is the experimental Parents’ Fair Share demonstration program, run by New York’s nonprofit Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. and funded with state, federal and corporate money.

These men have plenty of excuses for abandoning their families or failing to pay child support. A few told MDRC researchers that their ex-partners didn’t want them around because they were broke. “If you don’t got money, they don’t want to deal with you,” said one man. Some complained that their girlfriends wasted their money on drugs. Others said they had been replaced by a new boyfriend. Yet during focus groups, these same men displayed flashes of strong emotion about the meaning of fatherhood, about “doin’ right,” and how “a dog can make a baby, but a man can take care of it.” As part of the lesson plan, the fathers are being asked to write obituaries for themselves--as their children would write them.

The most serious obstacle between these men and their families was a lack of stable employment at livable wages, the program designers concluded. Many fathers couldn’t find jobs, while others were working two marginal jobs and still felt they couldn’t afford child support. Even the criminals, one researcher noted, didn’t seem to be making much money. So the program’s founders decided to target their efforts at job training. “Contrary to popular impressions, a lot of these men do have an interest in their children,” says the MDRC’s Gordon Berlin.

In addition to these kinds of programs, policy-makers are debating more sweeping government action to support families. A massive overhaul of the support-collection system would raise more children out of poverty and could make money a less valid excuse for not coming around to the house. If David Bell’s paycheck were automatically debited for child support each month, would money issues be hanging over his head every time he thought of visiting Jason? Eliminating AFDC and replacing it with a welfare system to support families--rather than just women with children--is another idea gaining attention. But it’s unlikely that budget-conscious Washington will soon foot the bill.

In the end, though, all of this policy-wonking may be as effective as changing the spark plugs on a dead engine. Bryant concedes that his welfare changes are not likely to alter behavior patterns for another 10 years--and even then he only expects a 25% drop in single-parent births. And what about that broad swath of middle-class fathers beyond the reach of welfare reform and parenting programs, who dutifully pay their child support but rarely see their children?

Blankenhorn argues that before fathers will come home, society as a whole--from MTV video jocks and politicians to mechanics and lawyers--must decide that fatherhood is a cultural ideal worth defending. “In the end,” he says, “Madonna lyrics matter more than who gets elected President.”

Change could come sooner than we think. An analogy I heard more than once equated errant fathers with cigarette smokers. Twenty years ago, few people would have seriously considered restricting their freedom. Then, boom! First we relegated them to separate sections; then we kicked them out of office buildings and airplanes. In a few years, smokers fell into disgrace.

What if society treated errant fathers the same way?