As years went on, Jan Smith's child grew 1 weeds, although they said his growth had been stunted. He had become qute 3 the family in which he 3; they received money to keep him, so that his mother got rid of him altogether
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what question is this i dont understand
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I can't speak for everyone who grew up without a father, but in my case I can say that it generally sucked. My parents divorced when I was two, and I met my father for the first time when I was 36--and that was only after I tracked him down and showed up on his doorstep unannounced--but that's a different story.
My mother raised me and my sister by herself, and she had to work full-time, so I spent a lot of my childhood in daycare centers, and by the time I was in sixth grade I was a full blown latchkey kid. All of my friends and neighbors would go camping with their fathers, build or repair things together, play sports together, you name it. My mother did her best to make up for it by signing me up for whatever sports I was interested in and sending me to the YMCA summer camp each year, but it didn't fill the void--I still felt like something was missing.
At an early age my mother signed me up for the Big Brothers program (http://www.bbbs.org), which is a great program, but I ended up going through three different Big Brothers over the course of as many years. The first one moved away, the second one was too young and ended up blowing me off at times, and the third one was too old to really do anything fun together. I finally got to the point where I didn't want to be left behind again, so I dropped out of the program.
Fortunately, I was pretty resourceful, and some of the men in our neighborhood would look out for me, teach me things from time to time, take me to the desert to go shooting and dirt bike riding, etc., but it was unpredictable, and there were real periods of loneliness, especially when my friends would all be off doing something with their fathers.
But I have to say that the hardest part of growing up without a father was watching the toll that it took on my mother. Not only did she have to be the mother, but she also had to be the father, the bread winner, the teacher, the friend, the nurse, and she had to do it alone, without any real committed support from anyone.
Also, there was an ever present unanswered question in the back of mind as to who I really was and where I came from. My mother tried to answer it for me, but there was a big hole that she could not fill, and none of my neighbors, friends' fathers, or Big Brothers could fill it either, and that's probably why I finally tracked down my father when I had kids of my own. I wanted my kids to know firsthand who their father's father was, and the only way I could do that was to go find him. I'm just lucky he was still alive, because he died several months later.