It used to be done by promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce. Now, that has obvious costs for the parents in many cases and certainly isn't always the right approach because of problems like domestic abuse.
But the good of the children is part of why past societies have incentivized keeping parents together to care for their children and maybe we've gone a bit too far in the other direction, away from a happier medium.
> It used to be done by promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce.
Stigmatizing divorce does absolutely nothing to make fathers emotionally invested in their kids. If anything, it can make them resentful of their kids.
The article was about how boys need emotional support from their father. A father who is present and married but still demands that his son "man up" and bottle up every problem is of no help.
It's really hard to be emotionally invested when you're totally absent from most of their lives, though. It doesn't work the other way, i.e. it won't fix a bad father, but there are plenty of guys who could do better by literally just showing up.
There are plenty of men who have no gross moral fault, who are still excluded from their kids' lives by a wife who divorces him and gets custody. Stigmatizing divorce would help that. In divorces that occur in the US, close to 80% of the time it's by women; close to 90% when the woman is college-educated. The vast majority of divorces are not predicated on a gross moral fault by the man, but on unhappiness by the woman, growing apart, found a new guy, whatever. The woman in those cases is thus putting her own happiness above the wellbeing of her kids. So a stigmatization of divorce by society could work very well. It worked very well historically. Women are not more important than children. In fact, half of children are girls who also need fathers. And a woman-centric view of defining morality is just another demonstration of the problem of society's current disregard for men, boys, and the male experience.
But the good of the children is part of why past societies have incentivized keeping parents together to care for their children and maybe we've gone a bit too far in the other direction, away from a happier medium.