Sam M. passes along this Hanna Rosin review of a new book that finds good things to say about deadbeat dads. Sam says the review actually accomplishes the opposite of what it intends to do: it validates all the stereotypes of deadbeat dads. From the review:

Andre, one of the first fathers they talk to, is a high school kid who is delighted when he finds out his girlfriend is pregnant—delighted in a genuine, go warm all over, grin widely and thank Jesus way. “I always wanted my own child,” he tells the researchers, which surprises them. “I want to be a real father to my kids. I want to not only make a baby but I want to take care of my baby.” That he can actually do that in a sustained way is dubious. He is a teenager who doesn’t live with his father,  doesn’t work, and doesn’t know anything about babies, and—like most of the men—his relationship with the mother goes south pretty quickly. But what’s undeniable is his genuine deep yearning to be a father, very different in quality than the Timothy McSeed jumping around the delivery room  crowing.

Well, yeah, but only superficially. McSeed saw the children he sired as a notch on his belt, proving how much of a man he was. Andre is less crass, certainly, but sees the children he sires as objects to provide emotional fulfillment, albeit a more sympathetic kind of emotional fulfillment than that prized by the odious McSeed (a babydaddy who was filmed jumping around the hospital room after his girlfriend delivered his sixth child, yelling, “I’m the king! I’m the king!”). He has no realistic way to do any of the things he says he wants to do for the child he has fathered, or at least he doesn’t have the structure in his own life, or, it seems, the personal character to succeed. There is a reason we marry and have families: because raising children is difficult, and we need social structures to give us a context in which to do it — and, in the case of young fathers, something more than sentimentality to bind us to our children and their mothers when the going gets tough.

Sam writes:

I did not think it was possible, but I dislike deadbeat dads even more now that I have read this.

Yep.