A friend of my wife called. When she was told my wife was out of town, she said "So you're home babysitting." My response was, "No, I'm home being a father."

I'm sure my wife's friend meant no harm. It's just that I dislike the assumption that if a father is with his children without his wife, then he is baby-sitting.

Not so. He is being a father.

It did get me thinking, however, about the role of fathers in our society.

Too many children are abandoned

I suppose that I am one of the lucky ones. My dad was usually there for me; I always knew he cared about me. He was easy to please and I knew he was proud of me.

I also know that there is a growing number of children who have never had and may never have that experience.

According to D. Blankenhorn in the book "Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem," roughly 40 percent of American children will go to sleep tonight in homes in which their fathers do no live. Blankenhorn writes that "never before in this country have so many children been voluntarily abandoned by their fathers."

That's strong language: "voluntarily abandoned." It conjures, at worst, pictures of biological fathers who take absolutely no responsibility for a child or might not even know one exists to, at best, fathers that leave a family through divorce, disappearance or some other type of abandonment.

But what about the type of father who is there but not there? They might be physically present, but they're absent in an emotional, supportive sense.

I believe that there are many more of the there-but-not-there fathers than those that literally abandon their children.

Moms bear responsibility for most of the tasks

Here's just a sample of the work that remains. Again according to Time, fathers spend only about two-fifths as much time with their children as do the mothers, according to three independent surveys.

Now here's the fact that shocks me - and to which knowing mothers everywhere will attest - researchers have found no single child-rearing task for which fathers bear primary responsibility.

There's something screamingly, horribly, terribly wrong here.