The gender gap in education might really stem from sons’ greater vulnerability to father absence.

Father absence is not just correlated with negative outcomes but actually causes negative outcomes.

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework — an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self- sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

In brief, sending a father-deprived child into the world and assuming everything is okay because the dad provides money is like sending a drunken driver onto the highway and assuming everything is okay because the gas is paid for. It doesn’t mean that the drunken driver will not get to his or her destination. It just means that the risks are enormous. And the consequences of failure are forever.

Even when race, education, income, and other socioeconomic factors are equal, living without dad doubled a child’s chance of dropping out of high school.

Few sons are like their fathers — most are worse, few better.

Father was almost always short of cash. He borrowed money to start new businesses, only to see them fail. The tide of the Depression was against him, but he didn't realize it. He did not have enough education to sense that the tide was coming to drown him, and that he should take evasive measures and run to high ground like some of the wealthier, better-educated businessmen of Singapore, Penang and Malacca.

We spend billions to get from dads the money few of them have, and virtually nothing to allow dads to give the time they do have—the time their children need.

Perhaps there is at work here a process, apparent in many situations but imperfectly understood, by which problems reproduce themselves from generation to generation. If I refer to this as a cycle of deprivation.

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.

A home without daughters is like a spring without a source

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.

Industrialization created the “Father’s Catch-22”: a dad loving his children by being away from the love of his children.

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.