Brushing aside the snide comments and personal attacks which have thus far characterized this thread, Denny has brought the discussion back to point. O'Reilly was responding to what Aniston was saying, which was that women "don't have to settle with a man just to have that child." This comment is what was referred to as "destructive" by O'Reilly. You may or may not like Bill, personally, but what he said is substantiated by the last 75 years of psychological, educational, and sociological research.
To be more specific, the lack of a strong father figure ("strong" as in being a good role model for men) is directly tied to both a "high risk" environment as a child grows up and a lack of socialization and preparedness as that child takes his or her adult place in society. The preponderance of research indicate that the most crucial time of father-child interaction is that between the ages of eight and sixteen, but the need for a father is not restricted to those few years. During the critical first three years of life, for example, when the child requires tremendous amounts of attention and interaction from his or her mother, the father's job is to shoulder whatever burdens he can so that the mother is freed up to focus on the child.
Aniston speaks out of ignorance, and was likely motivated by her need to defend her own personal choices in life. (Most people don't like to admit that they are responsible for screwing up their own lives.) Of course it's not absolutely essential for a child to have a mother and/or father. Lots of kids manage to grow up despite being orphaned and having neither a mother nor a father. Such children usually survive to adulthood and find a way to deal with the emotional and mental scars that remain until death. If they do not, then they die off or are incarcerated and society moves on. For anyone who actually cares a lick about their child, however, this is not a desirable scenario.
Any parent who wants to provide the best possible environment for their child should be doing all they can to provide a calm, stable, loving home with a mother and father figure. Such things as violence, instability, drugs or alcohol, neglect, poverty, and missing one or more parents are hurdles to normal child development. A responsible parent does whatever he or she can to avoid them. Unfortunately, there are no requirements to being a parent other than the ability to reproduce, and the child does not get to choose his or her family.
The good news is that many parents are "waking up" to their responsibilities and are taking parenting classes and educating themselves, and it is never too late to improve a child's life. The bad news is that too many parents, these days, would rather slough the rearing of their children off on someone else. The "societal ills" we are currently suffering through in direct correlation to the amount of neglect and absence of fathers our children are suffering through during their early adolescence.
As a side note, anyone interested in reading about how environmental factors (including parenting) influence brain development in young children can check out "Rethinking the Brain" by Rima Shore.
