“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” goes the notorious feminist proclamation. Yet revelation, reason, and science inform that this isn’t true for those very little women, and little men, known as children. Nor is it true of the grown women who raise children. Moreover, research illustrates dads’ importance with a finding that will seem counterintuitive to many: Single fathers actually have better parenting outcomes than do single mothers. (More on that later.)

Society today is a long way from Father Knows Best. In fact, significant because art does sometimes imitate life (and life can imitate art, too), the entertainment norm today is what The New York Times’ John Tierney in 2005 dubbed “The Doofus Dad,” a modern-day husband and father who is “lazy, incompetent and stupid.” That’s how the Deseret News’ Sarah Petersen described him in 2013. As she related, quoting Tierney:

“One evening, after watching Homer Simpson wreck the family car at a monster-truck rally and plunge on a skateboard into Springfield Gorge, my 6-year-old son asked me, ‘Why are dads on TV so dumb?’” wrote John Tierny [sic] from the New York Times. “Where did we fathers go wrong? We spend twice as much time with our kids as we did two decades ago, but on television we’re oblivious (‘Jimmy Neutron’), troubled (‘The Sopranos’), deranged (‘Malcolm in the Middle’) and generally incompetent (‘Everybody Loves Raymond’). Even if Dad has a good job, like the star of ‘Home Improvement,’ at home he’s forever making messes that must be straightened out by Mom.”

Petersen points out, too, that the “doofus dad stereotype isn’t new,” but greatly predates the 1990s and ’80s.

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