Action Men

Dads take action. Usually it's what they do best for their children, what their kids rely on.

How best to deal with failing grades and a 10,000 text message month? Cheyenne, Wyo., father Gregg Christopherson smashed the phone to bits after receiving the $4,756.25 tab — he and his presumably equally technologically innocent wife thought they had disabled the feature. As for his daughter, her texts are zilch and her grades are back up: "I felt really bad, and I have learned my lesson," says the 13-year-old.

What to do when authorities don't act responsibly towards your kids? You take action on your own as did an anonymous Australian dad who found his sons within his first week in Sweden (the mother had been declared a fugitive in both countries after fleeing with the 10- and 11-year-old) when the police there had said for six months it couldn't be done. Equally ambitious, two fathers of soldiers killed by "friendly fire," fought through the Army's red tape barricades to find some peace by discovering the truth of what really happened to their sons.

And what to do to set a good example for your children? You treat everyone equally and try to make the world a better place, even if the results turn out to be those faced by Jonathon Moscone who is spending a lifetime trying to reconstruct for himself and others his martyred father, the former San Francisco mayor George Moscone.

Act. Act well. Act for the good. Act for your kids.