Im a father and i know my little girl needs me.Shes almost 3 and i had to go to jail for a few months.My wife said at nite she would cry and ask for me.and one day on the way to get croceries she started crying when my wife asked her,she said she missed daddy and she wished i would come home.She was only two and just that short amount of time away effected her.It broke my heart.

I know that, generally speaking, a father is beneficial to the way a child grows up. However, when you ask if they are necessary, I have to say no. A good friend of mine attends a prestigious university here in the United States and never knew his father. In fact, he only had a mother and three sisters. He turned out to be unbelievably respectful to women yet could easily relate to and hang with the guys.

You can say, "Well IF I had a father, I would have learned certain things more easily in life" etc... but that doesn't make a father necessary at all. You can still learn everything you need to learn in life without a father, even if it is more difficult. Similarly, I could say that I would live a much better life and live much more easily if I had grown up with more money in the family, or not as a minority, etc, but life is about learning to climb above any obstacles thrown at you and to grow stronger from them. In other words, I'm saying a child may ultimately become a stronger person from not having a father. It goes both ways.

Just my two cents.

A Father is the Person that let's you have fun. I remember I wanted to climb a really big tree once, but my Mom wouldn't let me. But my Dad made a Big enough distraction so that I could Climb up the tree and get back down without my Mom seeing. Not having a Dad could really mess up your life.

I remember this day in my junior year of highschool (1998) and it was speech class and we were giving speeches about our other classmates. During one girl's speech she made the statement that the classmate her speech was about still had both parents, "which she found odd". That has always stuck with me as the time I realized society was beginning to view marriage as a joke.

On a second note: I grew up without my father, I would always look to other male figures in my life as role models and believe I did a good enough job in looking for the characteristics that make a good man that I now am a decent man. So while I don't recommend not having a father, I don't believe it is all important because I feel most would respond in a similiar manner as I did.

Another problem though is that the mothers then don't bring in any "good" male figures for their children to develop values through, and that I think is the root of a lot of issues within out country.

Fathers are very necessary to have especially in the case of the son unless the dads an idiot. But mostly because the father kinda helps balance the equation so that you don't get too much feminism.