Biological fathers not necessarily the best, social dads parent well too

A large number of U.S. children live or will live with a "social father," a man who is married to or cohabiting with the child's mother, but is not the biological father. A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family examined differences in the parenting practices of four groups of fathers according to whether they were biologically related to a child and whether they were married to the child's mother. Researchers found that married social fathers exhibited equivalent or higher quality parenting behaviors than married and cohabiting biological fathers.