Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths

Men who bridle at the stereotype of the ""deadbeat dad"" with ""zipper"" problems who vanishes from his children's lives will find consolation in this provocative look at fatherhood in the age of divorce. In an effort to rehabilitate the image of divorced dads and to present them as overwhelmingly responsible and caring parents, Braver, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, explains how the negative stereotypes have taken hold. Basing his theories on a study he conducted over eight years with 1000 divorcing couples, he argues that faulty research and the need for a villain in divorce cases has fueled a ""jeering chorus"" of politicians, journalists and sociologists that has transformed bad fatherhood into ""an obvious and defenseless scapegoat for the ills of society."" Although the U.S. Census Bureau reports that only half of all women receive the child support awarded by the courts, the author contends that this figure is suspect because it doesn't distinguish between divorced fathers and those who've never been married; the latter group, he argues, is less likely to comply with child support. He also contends that many women give erroneous responses when questioned about the money they've received. Braver supports joint custody as being in the child's best interest, but his conviction that children without active fathers join gangs, commit crimes, become pregnant or fail in school--an idea that Braver traces to Patrick Moynihan's now famous 1968 treatise on broken families--is highly debatable. Braver's argument for encouraging dads to get more involved in their families is refreshingly free of chest-thumping rhetoric, but readers with more fluid, less patriarchal notions of family life will find much here to question. Editor, Irene Prokop; agent, Janet Spencer King. (Sept.)