Today we celebrate the myth of modern paternity with high homage paid to the role of the father in the proper raising of children. Images of doting dads teaching their kids to ride a bike or fish for planted trout in some sylvan vale. Psychologists preach the importance of the father figure as authority and role model, despite his deteriorated status as head of household and prime provider for the nuclear family.

What with the various wars of the last century, few families enjoyed the presence of a full-time father. World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War military buildup combined to send breeding-age males overseas, leaving wives and mothers to cope with single parentage. In the civilian world, the leftover socialist concern for children spawned a variety of social programs for feeding and sheltering mother and child, most of whom demanded the father’s departure from the household in order to qualify for the monthly subsistence check. Even occasional visitation was criminalized by demanding the women sign complaints of abandonment against the former mates. Threat of arrest by righteously resentful women was a powerful disincentive to absentee dads behind in their child support. Women rapidly found that their best interests lay in keeping men at arm’s length and raising their children in a singular manner.

Today, some 40 years after the baby boom of the ’60s, we can begin to score the results of the era. The children raised by single welfare moms are now into their fourth decade and seem not to have suffered from the fatherhood deficit to any great degree. The “hippie kids” raised on dirt floor communes and teepees seem inclined to sell out for regular employment and wall-to-wall carpet condos, but that is probably the predictable rejection of each generation of its parents’ values and morality. Considering the dire predictions of social commentators on the crippling effects of paternal absence, the results are remarkably “normal” in their social development, calling to question the much-repeated belief that government can’t do anything well.

The American dollar ain’t what it used to be, and most young families are forced to seek two salaries to make the monthly tab. This means that the prior generation of fatherless children now are raising their own kids in the near total absence of parents, substituting day care and public school incarceration for the comfort of family child rearing. Not a pleasant prospect, at best.

If Father’s Day means anything except an economic stimulus for the electric shaver industry, we ought to think about making some changes in how we do all that.

“Travus T. Hipp” is a 40-year veteran radio commentator with six stations in California carrying his daily version of the news and opinions. "The Poor Hippy’s Paul Harvey,” Travus is a member of the Nevada Broadcasters Hall of Fame, but unemployable in the Silver State due to his eclectic political views.