Book excerpt: Millions of families strive to give their children the best possible upbringing after being split apart by divorce. Separated mothers and fathers -- and in many cases their second spouses -- struggle to find the right way to piece together parent-child relationships in its wake. In this revolutionary work, psychologist Sanford L. Braver -- who undertook the largest ever federally funded study on issues confronting divorced fathers -- shows how millions of well-intentioned mothers, fathers, judges, lawyers, educators, and other caregivers have been repeatedly and tragically misled by the prevailing data about divorce and parenthood.For years our society has accepted the image of the "dead-beat dad" who shirks childcare payments and other responsibilities. Yet Braver proves that this villainous figure -- like many other myths of the divorced parent -- simply does not exist in significant numbers. Moreover, Braver overturns one of the most important pieces of data on divorce in the past quarter-century: the belief that divorced women suffer a steep decline in their standard of living. This widely embraced notion was the result of misread data, but was transformed into "fact" by the media and the courts, and accepted by divorced families and their advocates.No other book has revealed the deep flaws in today's research on divorce. One-sided studies of divorced men and women, misused census data, and poor research have skewed many of the assumptions around which parents and courts have shaped divorce settlements, parenting responsibilities, and child-rearing decisions. Every divorced parent -- and anyone who loves a divorced parent -- urgently needs this book to understand the newrealities behind divorce and parenting. Notes. Index.