For Chris Gardner who was played by Will Smith in the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness," fatherhood is the greatest job in the world.
It is also a job that Gardner and others believe is increasingly in trouble.
More than 19 million children — about one in four — were living in households where no father, biological or other, was present, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report in 2005.
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The statistics also show that this burden falls more heavily on black children, with 56 percent living in single-parent families mostly headed by mothers.
That figure compared with 22 percent of white children and 31 percent of Hispanic children.
“Father absence in the African American communities, across America, has hit those communities with the force of 100 hurricane Katrinas,” said Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Chicago-based Black Star Project. “It is literally decimating our communities...”
For groups like the Black Star Project, the focus is on education, sponsoring activities such as getting fathers to walk to school with their children on the first day of classes each year.
In 2006, the National Fatherhood Initiative commissioned a survey that found over 90 percent of those questioned agreed there is a father-absence crisis in America.
They listed work demands as the No. 1 barrier to being a good father. Fathers who were not married to the mother of their children cited a lack of cooperation from mothers as the chief obstacle to being a good father, followed by work, money and treatment of fathers by the courts.
Roland Warren, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, said that children in fatherless households are more susceptible to life’s challenges.
“They are two to three times more likely to use drugs, become teen parents, be connected with the criminal justice system, to fail in school or to live in poverty,” he said.