Quintton Williams, 25, was running out things to do with his 3-year-old son. He didn't have a lot of money to spend on activities.

A friend had told him about a new young fathers' support group that met weekly, and encouraged him to go. Williams, who lives in St. Louis, decided to check it out.

Duane Gill, 41, facilitates the group, which was launched by the nonprofit Parents as Teachers (PAT) earlier this year. He follows a curriculum that focuses on child development, effective discipline and parenting apart from a child's mother. Gill also shares information about free activities around town, and provides pizza and chicken wings.

The camaraderie has turned out to be a bigger draw than the free food.

There's a group of about 20 teens and young men meeting weekly, all with the desire to become better fathers.

"I love being my son's role model," Williams said. He likes showing him new things and playing sports with him. His biggest challenge, he said, is the cost of providing for a child.

"Being a parent is expensive," he said. Williams works as a safety officer and plans to begin training at the St. Louis County Police Academy by the end of the month. He's been attending the fatherhood meeting regularly for the past couple of months, and says he's learned how to improve the relationship and communication with his son's mother, with whom he shares custody.

"We want to keep a positive relationship for the sake of our son," he said.

A portion of the meeting time is set aside to discuss what Gill calls "baby-mama drama." It first came up when one of the young fathers raised the question of how to deal with his daughter's mother's new boyfriend. "What if he wants to discipline my daughter?" the father asked. That discussion lasted for an hour and a half.

There are obstacles that arise when fathers are trying to co-parent a child while living apart from the mother, Gill said. The peer support offers a chance to vent about problems and brainstorm solutions.

"There is group wisdom being shared," Gill said. "I learn a lot from them, too."

Another frequent topic of discussion addresses how to best discipline children. Gill said he wants young fathers to consider ways other than spanking to correct a child's behavior.

"You don't always have to be physical with your child," he said.

One out of every 15 American males will father a child while in his teens. The situation can be overwhelming, but help and resources are out there. Kristen Mandrell, a project manager with PAT, says the nonprofit's entire Fatherhood Toolkit is offered for free on the website parentsasteachers.org under the Resources tab.

The parenting sessions target areas with high rates of infant mortality and teen pregnancy, with the goal of reducing both. PAT wants to help teen parents, male and female, improve their parenting skills and learn about the developmental needs of infants and young children. The group sponsors three young fatherhood groups and four teen motherhood groups per week in the St. Louis area, along with several more across the country.

There's a ripple effect to educating young fathers: Their children do better, across every measure of well-being, than their peers in father-absent homes.

Williams knows the importance of his role. His own father has been married to his mother for 28 years, and has always maintained a strong relationship with him.

He speaks passionately about his hopes for his son.

"My dream for him is to be the best little man he can be," Williams said. "I want him to be better than me. I don't want him to have a child as young as I did. I want him to go to college, be able to leave St. Louis and travel the world."

The fact that he's putting in the work to become a more informed father will bring those dreams closer to reality.

When the family court judge decided how often Griffan Reutzel would see his 3-year-old daughter after his divorce, Reutzel felt punched in the gut.

"What just happened?" he thought. "It was surreal."

Reutzel, 35, had expected to share parenting 50/50 with his ex-wife after their 2014 divorce. Instead, he got a visitation schedule of one day during the week, every other weekend and every other week in the summer. He said he had been involved with his daughter's life since birth. Now, it felt like his daughter had been taken away from him.

"At the end of the day, (others) don't know how bad that feels," he said.

He didn't have the tens of thousands it could cost for an appeal, which he may not have won, anyway. Reutzel, who works at FGR Mechanical and Liberty Teeth Armory in southeast Missouri, says he felt depressed and discouraged. His mother, Linda Reutzel, decided to investigate why the court seemed to favor the mother in the case. She says she discovered a system of institutionalized gender bias that led her to take on the family court system through the state legislature.

Linda Reutzel, who lives in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, began driving to state capital Jefferson City every week to meet with lawmakers. She connected with the National Parents Organization (NPO), an advocacy group fighting for family court reforms such as shared parenting legislation. They armed her with research suggesting that children fare better, emotionally and behaviorally, when they spend more than a third of their time with each parent.

Ned Holstein, founder and chairman of NPO, says the standard custody agreement is out of touch with how families have changed. Increasingly, both parents work in the paid labor force. Fathers today are more involved in daily child care than previous generations. In the past legislative session, about 20 states considered some form of shared parenting legislation, Holstein said. The issue is picking up steam in the media and state houses.

In Missouri, the Reutzels helped get a bill passed by the House and Senate, which is awaiting the governor's signature. The bill creates guidelines for parenting plans that "maximize to the highest degree the amount of time the child may spend with each parent." It requires courts to disclose why shared parenting wasn't awarded and provide written findings and conclusions in custody cases. It also prohibits courts from establishing their own rules, such as having a default parenting plan.

In other states, bar associations have objected to bills that may have put victims of domestic violence at risk or limited judicial discretion. The Missouri Bar Association is not taking a position on this bill, which does not apply in cases of domestic violence or abuse.

One legislator questioned Reutzel about whether children would feel the stability of a "home" if they were constantly shuttling between residences. Others have criticized these types of legislative measures as a way for men to avoid paying as much child support. Would a new standard shift the focus away from the best interest of the child to the best interests of the parents?

Holstein counters that shared parenting is in the best interest of the child. Research shows that fathers pay more child support, and more willingly, when they have more access to their children. He fears that lawyers who benefit financially from drawn-out, expensive custody battles are the ones who oppose changing the system.

"The fact of the matter is that most fathers desperately miss their kids" after a divorce, he said.

Linda Reutzel is more blunt in her criticism. All her son wanted was more time with his child, she said. The custody arrangement reduced him from a parent to a visitor.

"Men and women are obviously different," her son said. "But the feelings for a child are as deep on both sides."

It makes sense for the courts to consider that.

The death of a silverback gorilla quickly led to a national referendum on a mother's parenting, a police investigation into her family and an angry mob sending her death threats on social media.

The mother, outed by social media vigilantes, nearly lost her 3-year-old child after a moment of distraction. Since then, she has become the target of those who say she should have been shot instead of the endangered ape.

The Cincinnati police said on Tuesday that they are investigating the family of the preschooler who slipped through a three-foot rail and fell into the moat of the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo on Saturday. Harambe, the lowland gorilla, approached the child, eventually dragging him through the water. Zoo officials say the child's head banged against the concrete, and they fatally shot the gorilla to save the child's life.

The human gut reaction after hearing this news should be grief and anger at the untimely and unnecessary loss of a majestic creature -- one held captive by humans. It was my instinctive response, as well. I tweeted on Sunday: "It takes considerable effort to scale a zoo's gorilla enclosure. Requires a lot of parental negligence for that to happen."

But I had rushed to this judgment before I had seen the actual barrier or knew much about the parent's behavior in that moment of the child's escape. I'd fallen into that easy trap of casting blame and judging a person in a flash of anger.

Later, I saw a photo of the barrier in question and realized that it wouldn't have taken much for a determined, impulsive preschooler to dash through the moat in the amount of time it would take a parent to turn around and attend to another child in her care.

This is when human higher-order thinking should kick in. It's rational after a tragedy to question if it could have been prevented. It makes sense to question whether a three-foot rail and four-foot hedge was enough of a barrier between humans and 450-pound beasts at a zoo, which has a responsibility to adequately protect both visitors and animals.

And it is that uniquely human ability to self-reflect that allows us to remember a moment when we may have been that parent who looked away for a second while a quick-footed child darted away. We've all likely seen children run across a parking lot dangerously, or through a store, while their parents appear distracted.

Even animals can exhibit empathy.

Those quick to criticize zoo officials and experts for killing the gorilla might pause to consider how they would want those officials to respond if it had been their child or grandchild or nephew who accidentally fell into that enclosure.

"But that would never be my child!" the rationalizing human brain responds. "A 'good' parent like me would never take her eyes and hands off a slippery 3-year-old at a zoo," it says, in that self-soothing, illusion-of-control way. The ability to judge the mistakes of another allows a person a sense of superiority, which can feel like a protective shield against freak accidents like this.

Taking refuge in a social media mob provides more than just an outlet for outrage; there's safety for the accusers in that mob. Together, its members share the sense that their superior judgment and actions would never allow such a tragedy to occur. And in an age where we are confronted daily with how little is in our control, social media offers an anxious subconscious a way to calm itself through blame: The more we blame this other person, the less likely it seems such horrible accidents could befall us.

A petition created on Change.org demands that the child's parents be "held accountable," and more than 350,000 people have signed it so far. A logical follow-up is to ask what accountability looks like in a situation like this. What sort of punishment fits the crime, if one has been committed, in such a case?

For those who blithely said "shoot the mother instead" -- even the gorilla, in its confused and startled state, showed more restraint.

Now, who is behaving like animals?