By Lori Borgman
McClatchy-Tribune News Service

In my bulging file folder marked marriage and family, is a tidbit on a "60 Minutes" show from 1999. It was a segment on an overpopulation of elephants on an African game preserve.

The best solution at the time was to move baby elephants to new preserves. The babies were transported and appeared to be doing fine. About a decade later, however, the young male elephants began attacking and killing rhinos, behavior very uncharacteristic for elephants.

Researchers concluded that these young males had grown up without sufficient male models - without fathers. Despite cynicism that it was too late to do any good, the young males were transported to locations with large mature bull elephants.

The mature bulls set things straight with the young males and the violent attacks and killing stopped. As Diane Sollee, director of Smart Marriages, wrote at the time, "Daddies do matter, even in elephants."

We can host conferences on youth violence every day of the week and funnel money into the schools that house the worst offenders, but those actions don't target the heart of the problem. The real problem, just like it was for the elephants, is the daddy deficit.

The most important factor in explaining violent crime is not race or income, but family breakdown. For years we have fueled our own breakdown by indulging in the nonsense that mothers and fathers are interchangeable.

We have chased the male bulls away telling them that they aren't essential. We waved goodbye and told them that as long as they were financially responsible, they were doing their job. Fatherhood has been reduced to an economic tradeoff - dads for dollars.

There is more to being a father than footing the bill. Fathers fill critical emotional and psychological spaces in the hearts and lives of children that only fathers can.

This is not to say that there aren't female-headed households doing a good job. But when one person does the job of two, the job is considerably harder. And try as she might, a mother can never be a father.

A father teaches a boy what it means to be a man by example. He teaches a son how to work, how to handle aggression, exercise self-control and how to treat a woman. A father encourages risk, tells a kid to run faster, climb higher, and picks up the pieces on the heels of defeat.

Fathers are the male bulls that protect the herd. Generally, larger, louder and more muscular, fathers provide a sense of safety so that boys in particular are less likely to look for protection on the street or in a gang.

A father is equally critical in the life of his daughter. His relationship with her is the number one predictor of her sexual behavior prior to marriage. A father shapes his daughter's expectations of men and even influences the success of her own marriage.

The perils of fatherless families cut across the lines of color and culture. It is a family matter that matters to every family because we're all sharing space on the same preserve. As Pope John Paul II once said, "As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live."

When there is an obvious truth that no one wants to talk about, we say there's an elephant in the middle of the room. The elephant in the room today is the absence of male elephants.