gifts, brunches and cards.

Apart from those who regard these days (Mother's Day, Secretary's Day etc.) as excuses for the card companies to make money throughout the year, most people rightly take time out to recognise the contribution that fathers and mothers make to their families.

It is also a good opportunity to take a deeper look at the role of the father and to look at how the father can make a more meaningful contribution to the family.

For many, the model of the nuclear family is a thing of the past. Divorce, births out of wedlock and in some families, death, means that the two-parent family is unknown to many children.

Increasingly, children are brought up by a single parent, usually the mother, with weekends or occasional visits the sum total of the time spent with the other parent.

This is the reality for hundreds of families today, and it creates many challenges both for the families themselves and for society in general.

Most research shows two-parent families are more likely to produce children who are grounded, responsible and prepared for the challenges of the "real world'' than children from single parent families.

But there is little to be gained from punishing people who have children out of wedlock, or forcing couples trapped in unhappy marriages to stay together.

The statistics for so-called deadbeat dads continue to be dizzying in their size, although collection rates have improved. At the same time, resentment builds when a father is failing to pay child support but can afford to travel abroad, or when a mother receiving child support is dressed to the nines and the children are in rags, as one letter-writer put it recently.

Even in stable two-parent families, fathers can find themselves adrift and uncertain of their purpose as they perceive themselves drifting from the centre of the family to the periphery, as John Burchall described in yesterday's newspaper.

But the father has a vital role to play. Children without a male role model can be lost and confused; fathers who avoid having a meaningful part in their children's lives are depriving themselves of a challenging but rewarding opportunity to really make a difference.

There are no easy answers to the problem, but education is the place to start.

Teaching children that the responsible choice is not to have children themselves but to wait is important, and so is teaching people who are soon to be married that the wedding is the beginning of the marriage and not an end in itself. Good parenting is hard, but parenting when one parent is absent is even harder and has consequences which extend far outside a single family.