Commenting on paternity establishment programs: What these millions of children want and need is not a name on a form or a promise that the sheriff will arrest these guys if they don't pay child support. What they want and need is in-the-home, love-the-mother fathers,. . .
David BlankenhornA good father does these basic things: provides for his family, protects his family, and gives spiritual and moral guidance.
David BlankenhornThe most urgent domestic challenge facing the United States at the close of the 20th century is the re-creation of fatherhood as a social role for men.
David BlankenhornWe would be more American on the day we permitted same-sex marriage than we were on the day before.
David BlankenhornChildren have a primal need to know who they are, to love and be loved by the two people whose physical union brought them here. To lose that connection, that sense of identity, is to experience a wound that no child-support check or fancy school can ever heal.
David BlankenhornDefining and celebrating the New Father are by far the most popular ideas in our contemporary discourse on fatherhood. Father as close and nurturing, not distant and authoritarian. Fatherhood as more than bread winning. Fatherhood as new-and-improved masculinity. Fathers unafraid of feelings. Fathers without sexism. Fatherhood as fifty-fifty parenthood, undistorted by arbitrary gender divisions or stifling social roles.
David Blankenhorn