Don't listen to the voices that talk about dysfunctional families, especially when they admit that pretty much all families are dysfunctional by their own self-serving definition.

Being fatherless is not a dysfunctional family - it is a BROKEN family. Previous generations dealt with this by strongly discouraging divorce and pairing up widows and widowers to complete families and socially lionizing men and women who married into such situations. Orphanages (now foster homes) could handle the children abandoned by broken-ness, but is was always better to reconstitute a family. We shouldn't so much praise single mothers, we should put social pressure on such situations to be repaired usually through a gracious remarriage to complete a family. It's like an airplane that is missing half of its engines - you don't keep flying it that way, you get it to the ground and fix it! Broken families don't need coddling and government sanction, they need to be fixed.

Our society is far to willing to countenance PlayBoys and SillyGirls.