Voices

“It seems that our way of addressing the needs of men and fathers who come from inner-city areas that are drug-infested and crime-infested is to build more prisons and to put more police on the street. That’s only provided minimal success. We have never in the history of our country tried to provide support for men as fathers. We’ve tried to incarcerate and police our way out of it. Now we’re on a path toward empowering men to do the right thing.”

--Joe Jones, founder of a federally funded program for unwed fathers, Baltimore.

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“I wish I knew 18 years ago how much they watched me, how much the kids are learning from not so much what you say but how you do and how you act. . . . My kids remember the little things. They’ll talk about the time you took them out to breakfast, not the time you took them to Disneyland.”

--Brad Black, executive officer, Coast Guard Air Station, Mount Clemens, Mich.

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“One of the things I was very struck by was how the role of looking after children profoundly changed the lives of these men. They would say, ‘I had no clue that my child’s love for me would be this powerful, or my desire to love them so unconditionally would change my mind as well as my heart.’ . . . But very few men got support for doing this, from friends and families and workplaces. And the women were criticized: ‘You went to the trouble to have it. Why do you leave it with him?’ ”

--Kyle Pruett, Yale University professor of child psychiatry and a specialist in families with fathers as primary caregivers.

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“My students used to buy me T-shirts in the ‘70s saying, ‘Fathers Make Better Mothers.’ The assumption was that things were changing so rapidly that there would be equal involvement on the part of fathers and mothers. That simply hasn’t happened.”

--Ross D. Parke, professor of psychology at UC Riverside and author of “Fatherhood.”

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“My father, he was a great dad. But . . . other than firm discipline, he left most of the rearing to my mother. I wanted to be a part of my kids. If there was a problem, I always went to my mom and said, ‘Well, how do you think Dad is going to react?’ I’d rather have my kids come direct to me.”

--Kyle Anderson, father of 5-year-old twins, White Bear Lake, Minn.

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“That big study that just came out on infants in day care--well, who did they study? They studied mothers. What does this say about the importance of fathers? They did this big huge study about parental involvement, and they didn’t even ask any questions about fathers? There’s some problems in that.”

--Lowell Johnson, leader of “Dad and Me” classes that Kyle Anderson attends in White Bear Lake, Minn.