I loved the Bear family's fanciful tree house. But the books routinely portray Mama Bear as wise and competent, while Papa Bear often appears foolish and bumbling -- an overgrown adolescent who needs Mama's stern correction as much as the cubs do. As I read the Berenstain books to my children, I tried to draw their attention to this skewed portrayal.

According to the Maryland-based National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI,) dads don't fare much better on network television than they do in the Berenstain books. NFI's recently released report, "Fatherhood and TV," suggests that TV shows tend to portray fathers significantly more negatively than mothers.

In compiling its report, NFI reviewed every prime-time television show on the six major networks for two months in spring 2000. To be included in the study, a show had to have a father and/or mother as a central, recurring character in at least two episodes. Thirty-one shows, out of a total of 103, met this criterion.

Parents in qualifying shows were rated on five dimensions. These included involvement (participating in family activities like eating meals or attending children's sporting events); engagement (interacting one-on-one with a child); guidance (showing concern about a child's growth and character development); competence, and priority placed on the family and its needs. Scores on these dimensions were summed, and portrayals were separated into three categories: positive, mixed and negative.

Happily, the report found that television portrays some good dads. Generally speaking, the best dads are depicted as being as good as the best moms. Indeed, the best parent of all is a father -- Michael Chiklis' portrayal of Chris Woods on NBC's "Daddio."

But the good news ends there. Overall, the study found, TV tends to portray mothers more positively than fathers. Moreover, whereas 97 percent of mothers fall into the positive or mixed category, fully a quarter of TV dads get negative ratings.

In other words, when TV wants to portray a bad parent, it almost always chooses a dad. In the NFI study, the worst parents of all were unmarried fathers, who were portrayed more negatively by far than all other types of parents.

What's TV dads' problem? It's the Berenstain Bear phenomenon. By and large, TV fathers are present in their children's lives. (Both fathers and mothers in the mixed and negative categories received their highest average scores for involvement.) Overall, however, TV dads provide less moral guidance, are less competent, and place less priority on the family than do mothers. TV dads may spend time with their children, but often they have little to teach them. As a result, the time they spend is not depicted as beneficial or important.

Does all this really matter? It matters a lot, in part because -- like it or not -- television shapes our children's understanding of the way the world works, and what society will expect of them as adults. Ninety-eight percent of American homes have a TV, and 50 percent of children have a television set in their bedroom. The NFI points out that, by the time a child is 6, he has spent more hours watching TV than he will spend talking to his father in his entire lifetime. TV's undermining of the cultural ideal of fatherhood is especially important today, when almost 40 percent of American children grow up without their biological father in the home.

Over the last 40 years, our nation has spent trillions of dollars on social problems, like poverty, crime and drug use, that are associated with father absence. Across the political spectrum, there is increasing agreement that one of our society's greatest needs is more good fathers -- men who love, guide, discipline, inspire and sacrifice for their children.

Unfortunately, the entertainment industry hasn't gotten the message. TV's tendency to portray fathers negatively, compared to mothers, erodes the cultural ideal of responsible fatherhood. It suggests, as well, that when Dad's not around, Mom and the kids don't suffer much of a loss. As millions of American kids can attest, nothing could be further from the truth.

-- Katherine Kersten is a director of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.