According to the U.S. Census, the idea of Father’s Day was conceived by Sonora Dodd of Spokane, Wash., while she listened to a Mother’s Day sermon in 1909. Dodd wanted a similar tribute to honor her father, William Smart, a widowed Civil War veteran who raised his six children on a farm.

June 19, 1910 was proclaimed by Spokane’s mayor as Father's Day, because it was the month of Smart’s birth, but it wasn't until 1966 when honoring fathers became a national holiday. President Lyndon Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers and designated the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day. In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the public law that made the holiday permanent.

The estimated number of fathers across the nation today, says the Census, is about 66.3 million. About 26.4 million are fathers who are part of married-couple families with their own children under the age of 18.

Among these:

• 22 percent are raising three or more of their own children under 18 years old (among married-couple family households only).

• 2 percent live in the home of a relative or a nonrelative.

Single fatherhood is up dramatically -- from 400,000 men in 1970 to 2.3 million men today. Men constitute 18 percent of single parents living with their children.

Among these fathers:

• 11 percent are raising three or more of their own children under 18 years old.

• 42 percent are divorced, 39 percent have never married, 15 percent are separated and 4 percent are widowed. (The percentages of those divorced and never married are not significantly different from one another.)

• 16 percent live in the home of a relative or a nonrelative.

• 22 percent have an annual family income of $50,000 or more.

How many dads are Mr. Moms? About 143,000 men are estimated to be "stay-at-home" dads. These are married fathers with children under 15 years old who have remained out of the labor force for more than one year primarily so they can care for the family while their wives work outside the home. These fathers care for approximately 245,000 children under 15, according to population statistics. Of these children, about 20 percent are preschoolers. In contrast, 6 percent of fathers provided the most hours of care for their grade-school-aged child.

Thirty-two percent of fathers regularly work evening or night shifts and are the primary source of care for their preschoolers during their children’s mother’s working hours. For fathers working part-time, the proportion was 38 percent. For fathers who were not employed, it was 52 percent.

About 4.6 million fathers provide child support. About 84 percent of child-support providers are men, who provide median payments of $3,600 annually.

Fathers will be remembered with about 102 million Father’s Day cards, anticipates Hallmark research. About 73 percent of Americans plan to celebrate or acknowledge Father's Day, with neckties, shirts, or tools as the most popular gifts.

Happy Father's Day!

Published: June 16, 2006

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