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live with both of their biological parents, 13% live in a stepfamily, 56% live with their single mother, and 4% live with their single father.
These data, however, do not tell us about how many children have relationships with their biological fathers or other father figures, even if they do not live with them. Selzer (1991) found that over 70% of children who do not live with their father have some type of contact with him. This contact often includes social contact, economic involvement, and paternal participation in childrearing decisions. Similar results have been found by Mott (1990) with the additional finding that a substantial number of children also have contact with a stable father figure other than their biological father. Phares and Lum (1997) examined whether the percentage of clinically-referred children living with only one biological parent was higher than in the general population. They found that while clinically referred children are somewhat less likely to live with both biological parents (42%), well over half of referred children have regular face-to-face contact with their fathers.
A third explanation for excluding fathers is based on the assumption that fathers are less willing than mothers to participate in research. Although one investigation found that fathers had lower rates of participation (Hops & Seeley, 1992), a review of child development studies found that fathers were no more difficult to recruit than mothers (Woolet, White, & Lyon, 1982). The latter review found that subject refusal was more related to factors such as time involvement and number of data collections than to parent gender (Woolet, White, & Lyon, 1982).