I never once said a father's role is useless. The fact that that was your take away is all about you and nothing about what I wrote. And the point of my story which you very clearly missed is that my husband's life wasn't destroyed by the fact that he had an absentee/abusive father and it doesn't have to be that way for other boys either - despite the narrative.

Kids who don't have dads, particularly in urban situations, are almost always poor. It is the poverty and the lack of other social supports that drives the dysfunction - not the mere fact of not having a dad around. Something that I quoted coming from experts who study fatherhood at Cambridge and USC.