Lois M. Collins and Marjorie Cortez report in The Atlantic,

More than half of babies of mothers under 30 are born to unmarried parents. The divorce rate among those who do marry exceeds 40 percent, according to the 2012 State of Our Unions report.
These statistics play out most often in the form of absent fathers—or the arrival and departure of serial father figures involved in romantic relationships with a child’s mother. (Moms still usually retain custody in a breakup or divorce.) Twenty-four million American children—one in three—are growing up in homes without their biological fathers, the 2011 Census says. Children in father-absent homes, it notes, are almost four times more likely to be poor.

This national epidemic of absent fathers, whatever its myriad causes, is a tragedy. When it happens among Christian men who ought to behave differently it also becomes a scandal.