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Sunday, August 19, 2001

By Steve Levin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Michael Cassetori has experienced plenty of changes in his adult life: two careers, job postings spanning three continents, and the birth of two daughters, Danielle and Erin.

But nothing prepared the Army veteran for the changes he faced when Jackie, his wife of 17 years, died in 1999 after a three-year battle with breast cancer.

	Michael Cassetori, one of the many single fathers recorded in Census 2000, gets a peck on the cheek and an embrace from daughters Erin, 9, and Danielle, 16. (Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette)

"Change was something I had to do," said Cassetori, 51, of Franklin Park, who runs the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Oliver High School. "I didn't want to do it. I accepted it as something I had to do."

Though Cassetori felt alone in his new role, he had plenty of company in one respect -- he had become a single father, one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in the nation.

The Census 2000 data shows that there were 2.2 million households across the country in which single men were raising children, a 62 percent increase since 1990. In Pennsylvania, there were 89,716 single fathers with children, a 59 percent increase during the same period.

Across the six Western Pennsylvania counties in the Pittsburgh region, the number of single-father families increased about half that fast, but still showed a significant increase of 35 percent between 1990 and 2000, from 10,554 to 14,290 households. More than half of those households -- 7,330 -- are in Allegheny County.

To be sure, there still are 14 times more married couples with children and four times as many single mothers as there are single fathers in this region -- yet the single fathers group is the only one of those that actually grew in the last decade.

Demographers and sociologists say the increase in single-father homes is the result of changing social and legal trends, and different attitudes about both motherhood and fatherhood. The changes are evident in all aspects of American life, from the availability of changing tables in restaurants' men's restrooms to the number of men who now work as nursery school helpers.

"I'm not surprised," said David J. Eggebeen, an associate professor of human development and sociology at Penn State University. "There is a changing cultural context of men as parents and men as nurturers."

It's that change, Eggebeen and others believe, that spurred family court judges to award joint parental custody to fathers in more and more divorce cases -- and as long as a father has joint custody or greater, he can be counted a single father for census purposes.

Joint custody benefits

Judith Seltzer, a sociology professor at UCLA who has studied joint custody cases, found that fathers with joint legal custody see their children more frequently, have more overnight visits and pay more child support than fathers in families in which mothers have sole legal custody.

The benefits of joint legal custody, Seltzer wrote in her study, are that parents' negotiations about fathers' participation in child rearing after divorce "may shift from trying to resolve whether fathers will be involved in child rearing to the matter of how fathers will be involved."

"Judges are susceptible to that" conclusion, Eggebeen said.

In Allegheny County, Common Pleas Judge Cynthia Baldwin recalled that during her years as a full-time family court judge from 1990 until last year, the number of requests by men for joint custody increased.

"That concept just came into its own in the past five or six years," she said, following changes in case law in other jurisdictions and more publicity about single fathers.

"All of that came together, and people said, 'Even though we can't live together, maybe we can parent together.' "

Vince Regan, the executive director of Responsible Single Fathers, an advocacy, education and support group with 2,000 members nationwide, said he believed that the courts also have been influenced by an influx of younger judges.

"What they bring to the bench in terms of their own personal experiences and those of their friends and extended families would influence how they rule today," said Regan, who is raising five children on his own.

"I don't think it'll ever be a 50/50 proposition ... that half the time when a relationship ends the kids go with the mom and half the time they go with dad. But I do think that the number of single fathers will continue to grow over the next 10 years."

Feminism gets credit

The trend also shows up in increased interest in such groups as the Single Parents Association.

"I'm getting more and more dads calling me about it," said Renee Boyka, director of the Sewickley chapter. The chapter, which began in March, offers guest speakers for single parents on such topics as raising responsible children and stress management, along with organizing family activities and "adults-only" nights.

"With more and more dads having custody, they want to see what the group does so they can do stuff with their kids," Boyka said. "Dads want more activities than listening to speakers."

John R. Sims Jr., founder of the Pittsburgh-based Single and Custodial Fathers Network, said the increased numbers were the result of the feminist movement of the 1970s. It was then, he said, that "men were given the permission to be more active parents."

That, in turn, led women to reassess motherhood, said Ida Simpson, a Duke University sociologist who teaches a course called "The Changing American Family."

"Previously, parenting got narrowed so that it was channeled through motherhood," Simpson said. "With women going into the work force," parenting is no longer "gender-specified."

Sociologists and demographers say that as many as a third of the men listed as single fathers in the census may be living with another adult, whether it's a roommate, a relative or an unmarried partner.

But that does not skew the census results, said Jason Fields, a Census Bureau demographer, because, "They aren't married and they do have a kid."

In Pittsburgh, the number of single fathers with children increased from 1,992 in 1990 to 2,135 in 2000, a 7 percent increase. But elsewhere in Allegheny County, many communities showed markedly larger percentage increases in single fathers, ranging from 39 percent in Wilkinsburg to 91 percent in West Mifflin.

Regionally, Beaver County had the smallest percentage increase in single fathers -- 29 percent -- while Butler County had the largest such increase at 54 percent.

Only 11 of Butler County's 57 boroughs and townships failed to register increases in single fathers during the past decade. The number of single fathers more than doubled in many areas of the county, and Cranberry's single-father population increased by 75 percent, from 53 in 1990 to 93 in 2000.

Armin Brott, a Berkeley, Calif. author and co-author of five books about fatherhood, said "fathers are coming out of the closet, so to speak.

"The shift is from the internal to the external," he said. "In other words, men have always felt this way but they were not going public with it. You see this in other areas as well [with] men refusing job transfers and promotions."

Cassetori said his main goal following his wife's death was to "maintain the family integrity."

"We do whatever we need to do to make things work for the family," he said.

Day trips, movies, shared chores and nightly sit-down dinners -- "We ate a lot of pizza for a while," Danielle said -- keep the three of them connected. But there is still a big hole. They miss Jackie terribly.

"Time heals all wounds," Cassetori said, "but this was a deep one. It's going to take a long time."

Tim Rozgonyi, Post-Gazette assistant technology systems editor, contributed to this article.