Breit and partner Beverley Mason lived together for years, and in 2008 decided to have a child together.  Unfortunately for them, they were unable to on their own, so they sought the services of a physician who was expert in the art of assisted conception.  With Mason providing the egg and Breit the sperm, the doctor was successful at implantation.  Mason carried the child to term during which the pair continued to live together and Breit attended medical appointments as well as the birth on July 13, 2009.  Breit is listed as the child’s father on her birth certificate and one of her names is that of his maternal grandmother.  Her last name is Mason-Breit.

Prior to the birth, Breit and Mason entered into an agreement providing that Breit should have reasonable visitation and agreeing that same was in the girl’s best interests should Breit and Mason split up.  On the day after the birth, the two signed an “Acknowledgement of Paternity” stating that Breit was the child’s legal and biological father.  The couple sent out birth announcements and told friends and relatives that Breit was the girl’s father.

But, in a switch whose significance escaped the notice of both the state Supreme Court and the Washington Post, the pair split up a mere four months after their daughter’s birth.  Despite the split-up, Breit continued to maintain his paternal role including visiting her, supporting her financially and carrying her on his policy of health insurance.  That went on until August, 2010 when Mason cut off all contact with Breit and barred him from seeing his child.

Now, to those familiar with the ways of family courts and family laws, Mason’s behavior shouldn’t be a surprise.  After all, when a couple stays together for years, decides their relationship is solid enough to have a child, has a child and then four months later splits up, something smells fishy.  My guess is that Mason knew about a Virginia statute that states that any sperm donor who’s not married to the mother of the child produced using his sperm cannot be legally deemed the child’s father.  (Of course if the mother receives federal welfare benefits, regardless of what the Virginia statute says, that man will be established as the father, made to pay child support and be accorded parental rights.  So the statute is solely aimed at cutting off the father’s rights, not his duties.)

Breit filed suit to assert his rights and, tellingly, Mason doggedly resisted every step of the way through the judicial system.  Given the facts that (a) the two split up just four months after the birth, (b) Mason terminated all contact with Breit when the girl was only 13 months old, (c) Mason did everything she could legally to deny him parental rights and (d) there were never any allegations that Breit was anything but a good, loving and responsible father, it seems obvious that Mason had planned this for some time.  It looks like Mason figured she had Breit set up; due to their unique circumstances, he’d given her a child that, in her understanding, she could take from him at will and he would have no recourse.

And the trial court agreed saying Breit had no parental rights despite being the girl’s father biologically and playing an active role in her life both pre- and post-birth.

Unfortunately for Mason, both the state Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court disagreed.  Part of that disagreement has to do with applying two different state laws at the same time to the situation before the court.  But the Supreme Court also ruled that, to allow Mason’s take on the law to stand, would violate Breit’s 14th Amendment Due Process rights and would therefore be unconstitutional.  It would also violate Breit’s fundamental liberty interest in caring for and raising his child.  Finally it would violate the child’s fundamental liberty interest in having a relationship with both her parents.

Constitutional Law Places Fathers’ Rights in Mothers’ Hands

But.  (It seems there’s always a ‘but’ when it comes to fathers’ rights in family courts.)  The court made it clear, as do U.S. Supreme Court precedents, that a father’s biology isn’t what gets him  parental rights.  No, what vaults him to the modest level of father is his active involvement with his child.  In the timeless words of Lehr v. Robinson, “When an unwed father demonstrates a full commitment to the responsibilities of parenthood by coming forward to participate in the rearing of his child, his interest in personal contact with his child acquires substantial protection under the Due Process Clause.”

The same holds true for the child.  When Dad does that, she’s constitutionally entitled to a relationship with him; if he doesn’t, she’s not.

What both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Virginia Supreme Court miss is that, in so ruling, they clearly place a father’s parental rights and a child’s rights to its father in the mother’s hands.  Not a word in Lehr acknowledges that simple concept.  By conditioning a single father’s rights on his “coming forward to participate in the rearing of his child,” the Court frankly allows Mom to prevent that and therefore deny him parental rights.  Indeed, that’s precisely what happened not only in Lehr, but in countless other cases.  The dissent in Lehr describes in detail the extent to which the mother went to deny the father access to his child and the extent to which he tried to locate her and become a part of his daughter’s life.  To the majority, that was all just fine, thank you.  Lehr’s rights were denied to him, by a state law that empowered the mother to completely control an unmarried father’s rights and, by extension, those of their child.  That is the state of constitutional law on the rights of unmarried fathers.

In addition to the frank anti-father discrimination of saying on one hand that fathers have parental rights, and on the other, taking the exercise of those rights from them and giving them to someone else, there’s another problem.  The Bill of Rights and other amendments to the Constitution limit the power of government over individuals by giving those individuals certain rights.  Those rights like free speech, free association, free exercise of religion, the right to confront one’s accuser in criminal court, etc. and parental rights are erected by the Constitution against the power of government because we consider them important.  Indeed, parental rights may be the most important of all.  At times, the opinion in Mason v. Breit reads like a hymn to the importance of the parent-child relationship, not only to the child, but to the parents and the state.

The preservation of the family, and particularly the parent-child relationship, is an important goal for not only the parents but also for government itself…  Statutes terminating the legal relationship between [a] parent and a child should be interpreted consistently with the governmental objective of preserving, when possible, the parent-child relationship.

Thus spake the Virginia Supreme Court, and rightly too.  So isn’t it odd that the same document that has been interpreted as preventing the might and majesty of governments from interfering in the parent-child relationship simultaneously permits mothers to do exactly that?  Father-child relationships are so important (as all acknowledge) that governments may only intervene in them if the father is declared, by due process of law, to be unfit.  But a mother is legally permitted to cut the most loving and responsible of fathers out of his child’s life on the merest whim.

And of course it’s not just fathers who are affected; their children are too.  After all, it’s one thing to tell a father “you should have stepped up to the plate, and, since you didn’t, you  lose you’re rights.”  But the U.S. Supreme Court has been as clear that children have rights to parents just as much as parents have rights to children.  So how is it that we allow mothers to decide children’s rights to fathers based, not on the children’s behavior, but on the fathers’?  That makes even less sense than allowing them to toss aside a father like so much garbage.

The concept is simple.  A single document – the Constitution – cannot rationally be held to say at once that a father’s parental rights are so important the government may not infringe on them and that they’re so trivial that an individual mother may do just that for any or no reason.  Some day some enterprising lawyer will make that argument and some day courts will notice the outrage they’ve perpetrated for decades.

And some day we’ll have laws that say that no father may have his parental rights diminished nor parental obligations established by anyone’s actions but his own.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

Achane and his daughter’s mother were married when the child was conceived and when she was born in Texas.  But Achane was away from home performing his duties as a drill instructor in the U.S. Army.  That gave the mother, Tira Bland, the opportunity she needed to abscond with the child to Utah, the state of choice for all mothers bent on depriving a father of his child and a child of its father.  Bland didn’t want the child and, despite being married to Achane, decided he shouldn’t have her either.

As I said in my previous post on the case, for an unmarried woman, that’s a slam dunk.  Utah and its large adoption industry will reliably do what’s necessary to ensure that (a) the child is successfully adopted, (b) all parties, i.e. the mother, the adoption lawyer and the adoption agency, get paid and (c) Dad is kept in the dark about the whole business.  Yes, that usually involves multiple lies under oath by multiple parties, but that’s all in a day’s work in Utah adoption cases.

But Achane and Bland were married, and that’s supposed to make adoptions different in the Beehive State.  When Dad and Mom are married, the consent of both is supposed to be required before an adoption can go forward.  But the lawyer, the would-be adoptive parents, Jared and Kristi Frei, and the Adoption Agency of Choice, all decided to go forward as if Bland were single.  That of course meant more lying by all concerned, but, as I said, it’s all in a day’s work, so that’s what they did.  Even when informed that Achane would vigorously oppose the adoption, the adoption agency and the Fries, doubtless on the advice of their lawyer, decided to go ahead and try to get the deal done anyway.

Sure enough, when Achane figured out what was going on, he immediately hired an attorney, went to court and stopped the proceedings.  The judge in the case excoriated AAC, the Freis and their lawyer for their outrageous behavior and ordered the child turned over to Achane.  Due to legal procedure, that hasn’t happened yet, but, with the state Supreme Court’s refusal of the stay request, it will soon.  Even now, Terry Achane is eagerly anticipating the arrival of the child who’s always been his.

She’s over a year old.  The only home she’s ever known has been the Frei’s and they’ve been her only parents.  Getting used to her new dad and new environment will take some time and surely cause some real emotional trauma to the little girl.  Let’s be clear; that emotional upset was caused by the Freis, their attorney and Adoption Agency of Choice.  Their dogged determination to violate the law at any cost, to shanghai a little girl away from her father will surely cause lasting emotional damage to an innocent child.  And let’s be clear as well, that, in the case of the agency and the lawyer, they did it for one reason only – money.

Legal System Gives Mothers Control Over Rights of Fathers, Children

Tira Bland?  She was just doing what the legal system permits (and some say encourages) every mother to do – control a father’s parental rights at her whim.  True, she wasn’t quite smart enough in how she went about it, but just one more well-placed lie, and she’d have been home free.  All she had to do was say she wasn’t married and didn’t know who the child’s father was and Utah courts would have rubber-stamped her decision in a heartbeat.  Now it looks like she’ll be on the hook for child support for a child she did her utmost to get rid of.

Once Terry Achane finally gets custody of his daughter, it should be time for him and his attorneys to start filing some lawsuits, particularly against Adoption Agency of Choice and their attorney who intentionally tried to deprive him of his daughter.  He should sue them on behalf of his daughter as well.  Given the fact that his lawyers have already called what happened “human trafficking,” my guess is he’ll do just that.

So, in this case at least, all’s well that ends well, particularly if Achane and his daughter can pick up a thick wad of AAC’s ill-gotten cash.  But we shouldn’t get too caught up in the happy outcome of a single case.  Face it, Achane got lucky.  He happened to be married to the mother of his daughter and she happened to be dumb enough or honest enough to tell one lie too few for her scheme to work.  The simple fact is those things don’t always happen.  The adoption industry in this country is set up to deny single fathers notice when their children are placed for adoption.  That denies fathers their rights to their children and children their rights to their fathers.

As practical matter, it also uses the scarce resource that are adoptive parents on children like Achane’s who don’t need to be adopted.  That’s triply wrong.  Notice to the father should always be a requirement for any adoption to be finalized.  And there should be clear and severe consequences for mothers, lawyers and adoption agencies who lie in court.  This case will end well, but nothing about Utah adoption law prevents another father in Terry Achane’s position from losing his child.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

Because he’s dealing with long stretches of time and large macro-economic concepts, Lind necessarily paints with a broad brush – too broad in some cases.  So, for example, he accurately points out that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, children were taken care of at home by both parents.  Under Feudalism, a family typically had a small plot of land it could work and a few animals to provide milk and eggs.  Dad did most of the heavy work of tilling the soil and likely kept the farm implements in repair.  Mom did most of the childcare and cooking, as well as spinning, weaving and sewing.  Either or both may have done some artisanry for sale in the market to earn spendable currency.  But however individual families arranged their duties, both parents were home and children were cared for by both.  Shared parenting was the unquestioned rule.

Along came industrialization that required the concentration of labor in a single place, i.e. where the machinery of production was, so either Mom or Dad had to leave the home and provide that wage labor.  Overwhelmingly Dad was that person, and so, about 500 years ago, for the first time in human history, fathers were separated from their children most of the time.  Of course conditions in the mines and factories of early industrial capitalism were brutal and the hours long, so fathers’ relationships with their children were reduced to almost nothing.

And it’s here that Lind’s broad brush obscures some important things.  Basically, he skips about 500 years (let’s call it 1500 – 2000) during which much of our concept of fathers and fatherhood has been established and ingrained.  Put simply, families were faced with an enormous threat to their well-being (how could a single family’s agriculture or cottage-made wares compete with their capitalist counterparts?), so fathers sacrificed not only life and limb, but their connection to their children and wives, to go to work to support and preserve what was left of their families.

For hundreds of years, those sacrifices and the men who made them were respected by women and society generally.  But fifty years or so ago, feminism decided that men were bums and their great sacrifices constituted the oppression of women.  Just in time for laws and regulations making the workplace a reasonably safe place, feminists demanded equal access to it.  And, justifiably, they got it.  What’s not justifiable however is that they’ve also managed to turn men’s sacrifices for their families against them.  Now, according to the accepted wisdom of the press and family judges everywhere, the fact that a man goes off to work every day to support his wife and child becomes One! Two! Three strikes you’re out! at the old ballgame played in custody court.  For reasons I can only guess at, putting a diaper on a baby is considered beneficial to the child, but earning the money to buy the diaper is not.  Neither, apparently is putting a roof over the child’s head, food on the table, sending the child to school, paying its doctor bills, etc.

Lind skips all that.  So when he gets to his real topic – how a capitalist economy meets its need for childcare – he forgets who’s been doing what and why all these centuries.  That turns out to be telling.

Lind’s main point is a valid one.

Ever since a majority of Americans and others in developed nations became dependent on wages for household income, there have been only two options: a breadwinner wage or the socialization of caregiving.

That is, families either earn enough so that one of them can stay home and care for the children (or pay someone else to) or they don’t.  If they don’t, childcare becomes socialized, i.e. the public pays for it.  Either way has economic consequences.  If employers must pay a wage that’s sufficient to support a child and an adult care giver, consumers end up footing the bill for that higher wage.  If the parent isn’t employed or isn’t a fit parent, government pitches in and taxpayers pick up the tab.

All that is fair enough.  And Lind is also correct to say that, as long as we’re dependent on wages paid by an employer, we’ll always be stuck with higher consumer costs or higher taxes or both.

But Lind’s broad brush paints over some important details.

The breadwinner wage system, never universal in the U.S., collapsed in the late 20th century, as a result of multiple forces: the triumph of “unisex feminism” over “maternalist feminism”; the declining bargaining power of unions; the entry of wives into the workforce in return for stagnant or declining male working-class wages; and, not least, class- and race-based resentment against policies that allegedly pay the poor to breed instead of work (the widely popular but unacknowledged motivation behind the abolition of welfare as a federal entitlement under Clinton and the Republican Congress of the 1990s).

Hmm.  It’s a bit much to claim that “the breadwinner wage system… collapsed.”  It didn’t.  Sadly, Lind is one who seems to believe that the capitalism that thrived in the United States after World War II was in some way typical.  It was anything but.  The U.S. economy post WWII had no competitors worldwide; the industrial infrastructure of the world had been destroyed except for ours, which, given massive government spending during the war, had never been more up-to-date.  And our workforce, trained by the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard during the war, had never been more hardworking and efficient.  The GI Bill educated veterans, while U.S. foreign aid propped up foreign markets for U.S. goods.  That lasted a little over a generation.  By about 1973, Germany and Japan were well on the way to catching up with us.  In short, the post-war U.S. economy was a one-time thing, a convergence of circumstances never seen before and never to be repeated.

That’s what “collapsed in the late 20th century.”  But for the great majority of people, we still have “breadwinner wage system.”  Yes, women are now many of the breadwinners and it generally takes two instead of one to support a family, but we do precious little when it comes to socializing childcare.  Face it, Temporary Aid to Needy Families and the Women, Infants and Children programs offer some valuable assistance, but no one would want to try to live on them, much less raise a child.  The median household income in this country is over $50,000 and that’s down about $4,000 from its pre-recession highs.  That’s not a lot, but you can raise two or three children (i.e. the average per family) on it without socializing their care.

That of course brings me to the most important thing Lind left out.  The need for socialized childcare comes from essentially one source – mothers’ behaviors.  One of those behaviors is the decision to bear children without a husband or partner who’ll shoulder half the load of support and childcare.  As we know, some 42% of children in the U.S. are born to unmarried women and, of those who are married, almost half will divorce.  Thirty-five percent of children have essentially no contact with their father.

The second of those behaviors is the decision to not earn much money.  It’s not that their single-mother status prevents them from earning.  We know that because single fathers in this country out-earn single mothers by over 50%.  The median annual income for single mothers is a little over $23,000; for single fathers it’s over $35,000.

The same holds true for the rest of the population who’s neither a single mother nor single father.  The U.S. Census Bureau tells us that the median annual income for men working full-time is about $50,000 while that of women working full-time is an astonishing $17,000 lower – $33,000.

To his credit, Lind doesn’t do this overtly, but we often see the suggestion made that the government, already trillions of dollars in debt, should do more subsidizing of childcare.  To the extent those arguments have any validity at all – and that’s not much – we should be clear about what that socialization of childcare actually would mean.  It would mean a massive transfer of taxpayer dollars to women who don’t support – or support very poorly – the children they choose to have.  We’d be far better served to teach women and girls the many values of involving fathers in the lives of their children and encouraging everyone not to produce children until they’re prepared to support them.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

But I neglected to point out one thing in my last piece on the XX blog.  It wants incurious readers to believe that somewhere there’s some social science to back up their patently false claims.  So XX pretended that social science exists by linking to a beneath-contempt effort in the same vein by Katie Roiphe.  For her part, Roiphe cited a single sociologist, Sara McLanahan, who explicitly stated that what Roiphe claimed she said in fact “does not describe my work.”  As I said, Roiphe would have had to read all the way to the end of page one of McLanahan’s book to learn that what she was saying was false, and, well, we can’t expect her to do that.

Isn’t that interesting.  I’ve read numerous articles promoting the wonders of single motherhood.  I’ve taken part in a ”point/counterpoint” writing exercise in which my opponent tried to make the case for single motherhood.  And what leaps out at me every time is this: if the pro-single motherhood crowd had some science to back up their claims, don’t you think they’d show it to us?   After all, they’re trying to convert the skeptical to their way of thinking, so you’d think they’d bring out their best arguments, wouldn’t you?

But they never do because there isn’t any.  Science refutes what they say and so they resort to silliness like that of XX.  The intro is a flim-flam scam.  What cup is the social science under?  Oh, too bad!  There’s not any.

Then there’s the article itself by single-mother, Pamela Gwyn Kripke.  Her claim is that children of single mothers have, er, “grit.”  Her other claim is that kids in intact families don’t.  Of course, in keeping with the finest XX tradition, she offers not a single bit of evidence for her proposition.  No social science, not even discussions she’s had with other single mothers, nothing.

She wants us to believe that her two daughters in some way have demonstrated the “grit” she neither defines nor describes, but her girls have barely reached adolescence – not much to go on when assaying grit.

Kripke, like so many who feel the need to defend single motherhood, has an imperfect grasp of what an intact family really is.  To her it’s a “father living in the house,” or “the number of adults sleeping down the hall.”  If that’s what she thinks an intact family is, it’s no wonder she’s not interested, but of course it’s vastly more.  Fathers and mothers together give kids a plethora of things no single parent can match.  Mostly those benefits come from the synergy that arises from the male and female ways of parenting.  Then there’s the extra money that two-parent families have.  And of course two parents have extended families that single parents don’t.  And they model male and female behavior that single parents can’t.  And they add all the social investments outside of extended families that single parents can’t.  And two parents have more time for their kids than single parents do.  Then of course there’s that University of Chicago study that suggests that single mothers invest less emotionally in their sons than in their daughters.

Again, both sociology and psychology show the value of two parents, and preferably two biological ones, to children.  Neither Kripke nor anyone else can toss that aside with a few condescending words.

And, just like Roiphe, when Kripke does bump up against social science, she gets it wrong, I suspect intentionally.

Kids of unmarried parents, according to all of those studies (of rich moms and poor, educated moms and not-so), are supposed to be failures.

Nope, the kids aren’t failures, their parents are.  The children have deficits that often prove to be life long, and those come directly from the family structure their mothers chose for them.  Trying to pass the buck is never pretty, Pamela, particularly when it’s an adult passing it to kids.

There is of course no data suggesting that these particular kids might have had similar paths regardless of the number of adults sleeping down the hall.

No, actually there is.  Indeed, comparisons of the outcomes of children of single mothers with those of intact families is one of the main ways we know the former tend to do worse than the latter.  From where does Kripke imagine sociologists get their conclusions?  But, as we’ve come to expect, Kripke, like all those in whose steps she follows, either knows nothing about the social science so patiently built up over half a century, or she’s so desperate to defend her position she’s driven to make stuff up.  I’m going with the latter.

Who’s Dad, Where’s Dad? XX Doesn’t Tell Us

And, like so many of those single mothers writing before her, Kripke never gets around to describing how she came to be a single mother.  On that topic she’s suspiciously vague at best.  She mentions a divorce, which leads me to believe the girls once had a father, but no longer do.  What happened?  Did he die?  Become disabled?  Vanish in a puff of smoke?

Kripke never says, and because of that, I suspect bad faith on her part.  That and the fact that, close by her mention of divorce, she also says she “went to court for five different lawsuits” and describes dodging process servers for years.  Who sued her, her ex?  What were the suits about?  Who won?  What were the claims, what was the evidence?  My guess is that her ex was trying to make get some sort of a say in his children’s lives, and she was fighting him.  Apparently, she won, but by doing what?  We all know what it takes for a mother to separate children from their father.  I’d like to know what his side of the story is, but of course, that’s not exactly XX’s stock and trade, now is it?

Can single parents raise healthy, happy kids?  Of course it’s possible, but, like so much else in life, the decision to have kids is a bet against odds.  If Prospective Dad is over 50, the chances his child will be schizophrenic go up significantly.  Pregnant Mom can probably drink a glass of wine occasionally with no ill effects, but half a bottle a night’s not such a good idea.  Can the child turn out OK?  Sure, but the odds just went way down.

And so it is with single motherhood.  Not all single mothers intended to raise their children without a partner.  Maybe their husband died or was put in prison.  Maybe he turned out to be a father no one should have to live with.  Those are possibilities.  But for decades now, millions of mothers have acted like it doesn’t make any difference if their children have a father or not.  They’ve been egged on by countless books, articles, movies and TV shows that want us to believe that single motherhood is “just another lifestyle choice.”

It can be for the mother, but not for the kids.  In this life that’s plenty tough enough as it is, women who decide to keep their children from having a father just made their chances of success, happiness and contentment go way down.  XX is there to applaud them.  Overwhelmingly, their children are not.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

XX has apparently decided to run a series of articles on the wonders of single motherhood, so they’re soliciting submissions.  Will any of the pieces that find their way onto the pages of XX be negative in any way?  Will they tell about the hardships of single motherhood?  Will any of them write frankly about their decision to raise children without a father?  Will we hear from the grown-up offspring of single mothers?  Will any of it be aught but sweetness and light?  My guess is ‘no,’ given the fact that the conditions for submission of an article are as follows:

Readers, we invite you to submit your testimonies on why being raised by a single mother, or being a single mother, has its benefits and might even be better than having both parents around.

Well, that narrows the field.  For now, we have only the submission of Pamela Gwyn Kripke, single mother of two daughters.  Her piece is dodgy enough, but it’s not why XX was awarded the coveted award mentioned above.  No, that honor goes to the introductory paragraphs that announce XX’s latest effort to get people to believe that children don’t need fathers.

The intro begins by referring to a piece by sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox that recited the usual long litany of reasons why trying to raise children alone is not a good idea.  His points have all been made countless times before and decades of sociology and psychology back them up.  But, by way of counterpoint, XX shares this with us:

But in an age when single motherhood is becoming more common, these mothers (and social science research) are starting to challenge that view.

Slate’s ‘Social Science’ Isn’t

In that sentence, the parenthetical phrase, “and social science research” is in blue, indicating a link.  Now, the casual reader, the reader with too little time to click on the link  and read it might come to the conclusion that Wilcox’s accurate summary of the literature on single parenting has been supplanted by something new.  After all, there’s a link provided by the XX editors to that social science, right?  I’ll go so far as to say I think that’s exactly what the kind folks at XX wanted readers to believe.

Because if you do click on that link, what you get is not social science at all.  It’s a piece written by Katie Roiphe for the New York Times.  Roiphe is the furtherest thing from a social scientist; in fact, she’s more of a shoot-from-the-hip opiner on whatever subject she thinks will sell an article.

So, for starters, there’s a link that’s meant to convince you there’s reputable social science showing that single motherhood is better than parenting by two biological parents.  There’s not, so the editors hope readers won’t notice that the link is not to a study, not to a book and not even to any words of any kind written by someone who’s knowledgeable about the subject.

But it gets worse, far worse.  Roiphe’s piece for the Times is just flat wrong.  Like every article I’ve ever read defending single motherhood, Roiphe’s is written by a highly educated, well-to-do single mother.  “Her kids are fine, ergo, single motherhood is fine” is the invariable message, and so it is with Roiphe.

But Roiphe goes further.  Few people, particularly few educated people, are eager to announce their mistrust of science, but Roiphe is not so squeamish.

I am not a huge believer in studies because they tend to collapse the complexities and nuance of actual lived experience and because people lie to themselves and others.

So much for science.  (What’s next, creationism?  Holocaust denial?  Stay tuned.)  Having tossed aside decades of scrupulous research that countless reputable scientists respect, Roiphe frees herself to rely on her own anecdotal experiences to comfort her and, she hopes, her readers.

But something concerns her about that approach.  Despite having clicked her read shoes together and wished herself back to Kansas, Roiphe still feels an urge to convince readers that social science isn’t really the smack-down of single motherhood everyone thinks.  So, in the time-honored tradition of charlatans everywhere, she makes stuff up.  Too bad for her.

Roiphe makes the fatal mistake of attempting to recruit the excellent Princeton sociologist Sarah McLanahan to her anti-father cause.  McLanahan is one of a handful of sociologists who’ve done the best and greatest work on families and parenting.  She, along with Irwin Garfinkel, Kathryn Edin, David Popenoe and others have contributed immeasurably to our understanding of what does and doesn’t work in family structure and parenting.  Roiphe made the mistake of misrepresenting the work of a heavyweight.

PROFESSOR McLANAHAN’S studies over the years, and many others like them, show that the primary risks associated with single motherhood arise from financial insecurity.

Wrong.  In fact, had Roiphe bothered to read all the way to the bottom of page 1 of McLanahan’s and Gary Sandefur’s fine book “Growing Up with a Single Parent,” she’d know that the authors directly and unambiguously refute the notion that the children of single parents are just suffering a relative lack of money.  That’s important of course, but far from the whole story.  The absense of a father, particularly a biological father, results in a lack of social investment in the child that can’t be gotten elsewhere.

That’s the “social science” XX links to.  It’s not social science in the first place, and when it addresses social science, it gets it completely wrong.

But, as Mr. Creosote says in Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life,” “Wait, there’s still more.”  Not content with calling a piece “social science” that’s not, a piece written by someone who says she doesn’t even trust science, and that, in any case, frankly gets the social science wrong, XX neglected one minor matter.  Shortly after Roiphe’s piece appeared in the Times, Sara McLanahan wrote a letter to the editor tersely stating that those claims “do not accurately describe my work.”

Of course, if XX made the slightest pretense of intellectual honesty about the subject of single motherhood, the last thing it would do is cite a piece that was explicitly contradicted by the very social scientist whose work Roiphe pretended to describe.

But no.  After all, you can’t win an Oscar for shameful display of intellectual dishonesty and be honest too.  Hey, what’s an editor to do?

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

The piece is so wrong-headed, I fear I can’t truly do it justice.  For starters it makes no effort to (a) support the claim that “America” blames women for divorce or (b) if it does, why it “must stop.”  So it starts with the U.A.E., but immediately veers off into a Huffington Post article here (Huffington Post, 1/2/13).  Needless to say, the Alternet writer, Lynne Parramore (interesting name) utterly misrepresents the Huffington Post piece by Laura Doyle.

The Doyle article is simple and inoffensive, but never underestimate the ability of the anti-father, anti-child, pro-divorce crowd to be offended, and so Parramore is.  High dudgeon has led many a person to get things wrong, miss obvious points, etc., and Parramore is no exception.

Doyle styles herself as an intimacy expert specializing in women.  Briefly stated, her article says that women in relationships with men may not realize how their own behavior contributes to a lack of intimacy, communication or understanding.  So she gives them five handy tips for making things better.

She does this after carefully stating that some men, due to various personality problems may not be worth the effort or amenable to change.  About those, Doyle says “If your husband is actively addicted to drugs, alcohol or gambling, or is physically abusive, or not capable of being faithful, yours is a divorce I endorse. Safety comes first and you’re not safe in those situations because his compulsion will always come before you.”  That was supposed to ward off silliness like Parramore’s, but I could have told her it wouldn’t work.

To Parramore, Doyle is showing “a clear tendency to blame women for not keeping their husbands happy.”  Doyle’s message would “make an old-school patriarch proud.”  She’s “hectoring women for sins.”

In Doyle’s binary universe, wives are tasked with creating intimacy in the home and men are emotionally deficient beings who require their guidance.

Nope.  Not even close.  In fact, all Doyle is trying to do is to acquaint women with the notion that they don’t always know how their behavior affects their husbands/partners and to try some very simple things to improve intimacy.  She makes it clear she isn’t blaming women or placing the whole burden of marital felicity on them.  She’s just suggesting they do what they can and see if it works.

You might wonder why there’s no article for men explaining what they can do to improve their marriages. Even if there was, you couldn’t make your husband read it or do what it says. You can change yourself, and he will respond to you differently.

The onus isn’t on women alone and men aren’t depicted as “emotionally deficient.”  Far from it.  But Doyle’s modest suggestions, aimed as they are at improving male-female love relationships, threaten Parramore’s worldview in which divorce is a good thing and the more of it the better.  So she moves on to the main point of her article.

Parramore is all in favor of divorce herself.  For her, the greater the distance between men and women, the better.  But she has the uneasy feeling that others may not be so enthusiastic about men’s and women’s estrangement, so she tries her best to explain why we should all laud divorce and why those who criticize women for initiating it, well, they just don’t understand.

Finger-wagging at women usually comes along with the oft-cited statistic that women file for divorce twice as often as men. What we hear less often is straight talk about the social and economic factors that drive the engine of divorce.

That may or may not be true, but you won’t get any “straight talk” from Parramore.  Most obviously, you can read her whole piece and never get the hint that we really know why women are the ones to seek dissolution of marriage, and it’s got nothing to do with anything Parramore mentions.  No, she claims that it’s all about economic factors.

Now, it’s true that the poor tend to divorce more than do the better-to-do, but that clearly explains nothing about why women do the filing.  Memo to Parramore: women and men in poor families are about equally poor; women in men in wealthy families are about equally wealthy.  And, since single women with kids are much more likely to live in poverty than are single men with kids, it becomes obvious that the economic argument explains nothing about why it’s women who are the ones leaving.

Research Shows Women Seek Divorce Because They Know They’ll Keep the Kids

But researchers Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen long ago explained why women file for 70% of divorces – they know they’ll get the kids.  The pair studied every divorce case that occurred in four states in the year 1995.  The variable that “swamped all the others” in explaining why it’s women who split is that they know they won’t lose their children when they do.  Men, by contrast know they will lose their kids, so they don’t seek a way out of the marriage.  Do I have to say that the Brinig/Allen study goes completely unmentioned by Parramore?

By the way, the one study Parramore does cite concludes that it’s external factors like the threat to leave that can ameliorate certain behavior that otherwise might doom a marriage.  So, according to the Stevenson/Wolfers study cited by Parramore, the easy availability of divorce tends to reduce the level of suicide in women (by 20%) and domestic violence in marriages generally (by 33%).  Those are good things, of course, but what neither Parramore nor Stevenson and Wolfers mention is that divorce has its negative effects as well.  Interestingly, those negative effects are on men.

For example, sociologist Augustine Kposowa found in 2003 that divorced men’s rate of suicide is nine times that of divorced women.  In the population at large, men’s suicide rate is 3-4 times that of women.  So the easy availability of divorce, so lauded by Parramore turns out to not be so great for men.  But Parrmore doesn’t mention that inconvenient truth either because it interferes with her happy talk about divorce or because she truly doesn’t care about its deleterious effects on men.  In either case, her failure diminishes the force or her argument and our respect for her.

But of course all of this is as nothing compared to divorce’s impact on children and sure enough, the little tykes make no appearance in Parramore’s article.  As in every article I’ve ever read extolling the wonders of divorce, single motherhood, etc., in Parramore’s, the subject of child welfare is scrupulously avoided.  It’s no mystery as to why.  We’ve long known that divorce harms children, sometimes, depending on the age of the child when it happens, for life.  Divorce harms children’s ability to form relationships, it increases anti-social and self-destructive behaviors, it impairs academic performance and increases the likelihood of illness, just to name a few.

Now, many of the harms associated with divorce are more accurately understood as stemming from the loss of the father.  After all, that’s basically what divorce is for children.  One day they’ve got a dad who helps support the family, reads to them, plays with them, teaches them, protects them, advises them, guides them, and the next day they don’t.  If they’re lucky, they see him a four days out of a month, but when they do, he’s not the same guy they used to know.  Divorce has damaged him, his self-esteem, his identity as a father; he’s had his moral authority taken from him.  He’s what sociologist Susan Stewart calls a “Disneyland Dad,” an entertainer, a glorified babysitter.

And that’s if they’re lucky.  If they’re not, Mom is busily alienating them from Dad, a process that at least includes denying him his already meager visitation with them.  What Parramore never mentions is that divorce, as it’s practiced in all parts of the English-speaking world, results in the loss by children of their fathers.  That’s why, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 35% of children have no relationship with their father.

It’s the loss of their father that so damages the children of divorce, and so Parramore can’t mention the realities of the matter.  The shocking suicide rates for divorced fathers, the horrible impact on children and the decline in the standard of living for everyone aren’t pretty pictures, so Parramore just leaves them out.

For some reason, we’re still fighting this fight.  There are those among us who will stop at nothing to promote the separation of men and women, and children from their fathers.  Lynn Parramore is one of them, and their words would disgrace a person of the slightest integrity.  But Alternet and Salon.com seem always willing to propagandize for what is surely the worst social trend of modern times – the destruction of the family.  For shame.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

Back in 2009, Bauer and Schreiner advertised for a sperm donor.  They already had seven adopted children as old as 22, but they apparently wanted a biological child.  Marotta answered the ad and the three signed an agreement under which Bauer and Schreiner agreed to not seek financial support from him and he agreed to not pursue parental rights.  The two women further agreed to not place Marotta’s name on the birth certificate when the child was born.  In due course, Marotta provided a container of his semen to the women who used it to inseminate Schreiner.  She became pregnant with a daughter who was born in 2010.  Everyone kept their part of the agreement they signed.

But then, as so often happens, Bauer and Schreiner split up and Bauer contracted an incapacitating illness.  Lacking her income, Schreiner sought and received public assistance from the state to the tune of about $6,000.  Now the state is seeking reimbursement of that amount from Marotta.  As the Topeka Capital-Journal described it,

Bauer was diagnosed this past March with what she only would describe as “a significant illness” that prevents her from working. Schreiner then went to the state to obtain health insurance for their daughter. The DCF demanded Schreiner provide the sperm donor’s name, claiming if she didn’t it would deny any health benefits because she was withholding information.

Marotta is resisting the state’s effort.

Marotta said Monday he doesn’t resent Schreiner’s having given the DCF his name.

“I resent the fact that Jennifer was pressured into doing that in the first place,” he said. “That was wrong — wrong by the state.”

According to Kansas law, an agreement of the type signed by Marotta, Bauer and Schreiner is only enforceable if the insemination procedure is performed by physician.  Since no doctor was involved, the agreement is void and Marotta has to pay.  Having paid, he is then entitled to assert his parental rights although there’s no indication he intends to do so.  Marotta is married and he and his wife provide foster care to children in need.

I must say, the fact that this case is getting so much attention perplexes me.  Now, it’s true that the Kansas statute requiring a doctor to perform the insemination is a strange and, to my mind, pointless one.  What the connection is between Marotta’s privacy and Schreiner’s use or non-use of a doctor escapes me entirely.  I suppose the state sees a need to protect the small industry that’s grown up around assisted insemination.  Clinics that do that routinely maintain the anonymity of the donors, so, in situations like Marotta’s, the state would be unable to learn the identity of the father and the mother would be unable to provide it.  In the event, however, Schreiner did know Marotta’s identity and was required by law to provide it to the state so it could recoup its payments to her.

Marotta Case Just Like Millions of Others With Non-Sperm Donor Dads

And in that way, this is a case just like millions of others nationwide.  Those don’t generally involve sperm donors or lesbian mothers, of course; they involve single mothers and fathers.  She gets pregnant and eventually receives some form of state welfare; the state comes to him for reimbursement.  It happens countless times every day of the year.  The State of Kansas is being not one bit more intrusive or overbearing toward Marotta than it’s been to countless other men for decades.

So why the big national whoop-di-doo about this case?  Why not report one of those millions of other cases of single mothers being forced to cough up the names of the fathers of their children in exchange for health care for the child?  It’s called “paternity establishment” and it happens all the time, so what’s the big deal about William Marotta, Jennifer Schreiner and Angela Bauer?

One possibility is that they had an agreement, but does anyone seriously pretend that states will ever allow mothers and fathers to hide behind a piece of paper to prevent those states from recovering welfare payments?  That will not happen in a million years, and a very cogent argument can be made for why it shouldn’t.  After all, we want mothers and fathers to be responsible for their children, and paying their expenses, where the parents are able to do so, is one good way in which to show that responsibility.  Do we really want the state to just fork over the money to support the children of single mothers?

Another possibility is that the state held health insurance for the little girl hostage until Schreiner told the Department of Children and Families who the dad was.  That’s a pretty hard line to adopt considering the little girl has absolutely no say in who knows what about her father.  But again, exactly that refusal of state assistance has been the policy of the state and federal governments for many years, and no one has so much as peeped.  Indeed, early efforts at paternity establishment were met with stony silence by single mothers.  It was only with increased sanctions for refusal to name the father that paternity establishment became at all reliable.  In the ensuing decades, millions of mothers have been browbeaten into revealing the name of the father and USA Today, ABC, CBS, et al haven’t printed a word about it.  So the question persists, “why now?”

I don’t have a good answer to that question, but what’s plain is that the press is now exhibiting a solicitude for William Marotta and the woman who bore his child, that it’s never shown for everyday dads who have sex with women who give birth to their children and then receive state benefits.  If what the State of Kansas is doing is questionable in Marotta’s case, it’s been questionable all along.

However the courts decide his case, a couple of things need to be made clear.  First, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Men, never ever believe that you can sign an agreement relieving yourself of child support obligations. You can’t.  I don’t care how official the wording sounds or how sincere the mother of the child is; the state doesn’t care what you sign.  Into the bargain, if the mother decides at any time to renege on the deal, she can do so.  She can come to you at any time for child support and get it, agreement or no agreement.  That’s because those agreements are considered to be void as against public policy.  They’re not enforceable, so don’t try to.  If you want a child, understand that, in all likelihood, you’ll end up supporting it.  If you don’t want a child, wear a condom, get a vasectomy or don’t have sex.

Second,  men should be aware that what works against them can also work for them.  So, if William Marotta had decided that, contrary to his intention when he signed the agreement, he wanted a relationship with his daughter, Bauer and Schreiner could no more have used their agreement to prevent it than he can now use it to avoid repaying the state.  The agreement is as void for them as it is for him.

Third, oddly enough, once Marotta pays the state and begins paying child support, he’ll have parental rights.  It makes no difference that he’s never had anything to do with the little girl.  Indeed, if this had all transpired when she was, say, 16, he’d still have the right to establish a relationship with her.  As long as he’s paying child support, he has parental rights.  That of course is a strange result, given the fact that, in other situations such as adoption, a father’s rights can be extinguished for even the briefest of gaps in his relationship with his child.  So it goes.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

As I’ve said before, the report is about teenage fathers in the United Kingdom and includes the stories of several of those young men.  Unsurprisingly, they have a lot in common, but I’d like to discuss two threads that run throughout.  These common elements recur not just for teen dads, but for their older counterparts as well.

First, here are a few quotations from the stories that make up much of the report:  Nick became a father at 17.  ”After his child is born, Nick becomes withdrawn because his ex-girlfriend and her family won’t let him see his daughter.”

Luke was 18 when he’s surprised to learn his girlfriend Amy was going to have his child.  ”Luke and Amy’s relationship breaks down just before the birth.  The baby is born, but Amy doesn’t inform Luke.  This causes problems in their relationship and he doesn’t see his baby until he is four weeks old, which he finds very difficult.”  Those things happened despite the fact that Luke voluntarily withdrew from the university and took a job he didn’t want in order to support his child and its mother.

Ethan was 19 when his child was born.  ”Ethan and his partner have a rocky relationship and split up soon after the baby is born.  Ethan’s partner is angry with him and decides that he shouldn’t see his daughter.”

So, the first thread consists of mothers exercising power over fathers’ access to their children.  We know how this goes, because we see it, not just among teen mothers and not just in the first months/years of a baby’s life.  Time and again we see mothers deciding on their own whether a father will have access to his child and if so, how much.  From the simple fact of breaking up with a man and not informing him of the existence of his child or, if he learns of it somehow, saying it’s another man’s, to surreptitiously placing the child for adoption, to refusing or limiting his visitation, to child abduction, to false claims of abuse, to maternal gatekeeping, to parental alienation, mothers maintain all but complete power over a father’s ability to have a relationship with his child and, of course, the child’s ability to have one with its father.

Needless to say, the legal system, replete with its vast array of guardians ad litem, psychologists, social workers, child protective services, custody evaluators, police, domestic violence institutions, state legislatures, etc., pitches in on Mom’s side.  There’s very little that she can do to make them turn against her.  On rare occasions, a particularly cruel, incompetent, mentally defective or drink- and drug-addled mother may manage to so offend common decency as to throw the machinery of family courts into reverse gear and give custody to the dad, but overwhelmingly, everything about family law abets mothers’ power over fathers and their children.

And so we see the same in the stories of Nick, Luke and Ethan.  Mom elects to keep him  from his child and that’s an end to it.  If Mom changes her mind, then he may have contact with little Andy or Jenny, but otherwise, it’s his tough luck.  Of course, he can always hire a lawyer/solicitor, but we all know these kids don’t have that kind of money and even if they did, there’s nothing to prevent her from going to Plan B which, often as not consists of a domestic abuse charge.  That’ll hold him at bay for a good long time, and once Plan B is exhausted, there’s always Plan C, D, etc., (see above).

Report Shows Fatherhood Changes Even the Youngest Men

Second is the profound ways in which fatherhood affects the young men in the report’s stories.  Again, this phenomenon is scarcely confined to young fathers, but we empathize uniquely with them because fatherhood forces them to grow up faster than it does older men.

So, Luke had just begun his curriculum at the university when he learned about his child.  Now, abandoning a university degree must have been a huge decision for an 18-year-old to make, but Luke did just that, taking a job as a sales adviser to help support his partner and child.  Soon Luke was caring for his daughter “several days a week” and then full-time for two months when Amy decided to quit motherhood for that time.  (Notice how Amy went from denying him all access to his daughter to turning her over to him 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  In each case, it was at her whim.)  Luke moved on to pursue a National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) in childcare.  In other words, he’s not just caring for his own child, he’s getting trained to do so as a vocation.  Into the bargain, that training will likely do his own child worlds of good.

Dominic too wanted to go to the university, but put that aspiration aside to care for his child.  He needed and sought guidance at age 17 to learn to cope with his new identity, not as young man about to start college, but as a father.  This took a lot of getting used to; his whole self-concept had to change.  But Dominic did it.  Against everything he desired, he took a job at a bank to support his son and partner.  ”He still has ambitions for his life, but doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to fulfill them.”

“Ethan realizes that his lifestyle has to change.  His friends are still drinking and fighting and several of them are in custody.  Ethan decides to leave his friendship group for the sake of his child.  This leaves him feeling isolated but pleased that he is changing his life to be a better dad.  Ethan wants to become his daughter’s primary carer, looking after her full-time.”  Social services attempted to thwart Ethan’s desire, but he persevered.  The problem was that he needed to find a job that could accommodate his need to care for his daughter.  Eventually he did, and, by her second birthday, Ethan got full custody of his daughter.  He was still only 21, and being a full-time parent and full-time wage-earner left Ethan feeling isolated – like he was the only man on the planet in his situation.  Despite the isolation though, he was happy with his relationship with his daughter and the position of trust and maturity he enjoyed in her life.

The lesson?  Fatherhood changes men.  It does so profoundly and for the better.  Not only that, but men embrace that change.  Remember, all the young men described in “Are We Almost There Yet, Dad” were barely more than children themselves when they became fathers.  They were no better prepared to take the enormous leap into adulthood than any other young man of their age is.  But when their children came into the world, they answered the call and, in all cases, overcame many institutional obstacles to do so.  Each of those young men and millions more who aren’t profiled in the report, should receive our applause and our support.

But they don’t.  Time and again in popular culture and the news media, such young men are portrayed as useless, dangerous, incompetent and uncaring.  None of those adjectives apply to the young fathers described in the report.

More important is the fact that, if we want a stable, productive society, we want men of whatever age to be fathers.  Study after study, data set after data set show fathers to be stabilizing influences on society.  Exactly as we see in the report, young men who would otherwise be unemployed and involved in drugs, gangs and criminal behavior, become sober, hard-working members of society when their children are born.  That’s no accident.  Children give men a purpose they may not have had before.  Whether we admit it or not, we all want and need that.

Needless to say a society like ours that comes between its fathers and their children is a society that is asking for trouble.  It’s a society that is begging for more crime, more drug and alcohol abuse, more unemployment, and the like.  As I say so often, someone should inform our legislatures and judges.  Everyone knows but them.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.

An important part of the report entitled “Are We Nearly There Yet, Dad,” consists of the stories of six young fathers and their experiences with coming to grips with fatherhood and the obstacles placed in their way by governmental and private organizations.  As I said in my previous piece, the format of these stories truncates them considerably, but Nick’s story gives an idea of what young fathers face.  Here it is (Barnardo’s, 12/2012):

Age 17:  Nick and his girlfriend find out they’re going to have a baby, and their relationship breaks down during the pregnancy.  After his child is born, Nick becomes withdrawn because his ex-girlfriend and her family won’t let him see his daughter.  He is referred to Working with Men (WWM) by his sixth form teacher who sees he needs support.

WWM put Nick on an Expectant Fathers Course which allows him to meet other young fathers, learn about the practicalities of parenting and get advice from a midwife.  Nick becomes more determined to see his daughter and develops his confidence to speak up at meetings about his situation.

His support worker carries out an assessment of his needs and realises mediation is needed to enable the two families to talk.  The maternal grandparents are resistant, but eventually both families agree to attend a meeting supported by WWM.  The young parents’ families are heavily involved in the situation and become angry and upset with each other during the meeting.  Eventually the maternal grandparents agree Nick can see the baby at specified times at their house.

Nick and his ex-girlfriend get back together.  Her mother is angry about this and kicks her out of the family home.  She and the baby go to stay with Nick and his mum.  This causes further tension between the maternal and paternal grandparents.  Nick and his girlfriend approach housing services for support and the mother and baby are placed in a mother and baby unit.  As Nick is aged under 18, he is allowed to visit but not live with them.

Age 18:  Nick is living at home with his parents while his partner is moved to semi-independent housing.  She is struggling to cope and begins drinking heavily and having inappropriate relationships with other men.  She is under social care supervision and there are concerns for her baby.  At this time Nick is seeing his daughter weekly and looks after her at his parent’s house.

Social services decide the baby needs to be taken into care after the mother goes missing and is found in a risky situation.  The baby becomes a looked after child but stayed with the maternal grandmother, who becomes her primary carer.

Nick wants his baby to live with him.  Social services feel that he is too immature, isn’t working regularly and lacks life skills.  However he is looking after her for half the week without financial support.  He is told that his daughter will stay with the maternal grandmother until she is 18.  WWM helps him find a solicitor for advice.

Age 19:  Nick’s daughter is two-and-a-half.  His life has changed dramatically.  He attends a young fathers group and has developed a commitment to fathers’ rights issues.  He didn’t finish sixth form but started a training course to become a carpenter and has been employed for over a year.  He has legal parental responsibility but only sees his daughter for one overnight stay each week.  The involvement of the maternal grandparents has had a significant impact on his engagement with his daughter, and he is still seeking legal advice on getting a residence order.

Government Actively Blocks Father-Daughter Bond

The salient features of Nick’s story are several.  First, both Nick and his girlfriend are both young, but social services treats them differently based on their sex.  For example, although extended families play a vital role in child care, particularly when the parents are young and inexperienced, social services clearly favors her parents over his.  That’s true despite the fact that her mother tosses the girlfriend and the baby out on the street, an act that shows no great regard for the baby.  Nick’s mom takes the three of them in, but somehow that act of kindness and good sense doesn’t rate with social services.

Second, when Nick and the baby’s mother seek public housing, she gets it, and it’s here that public policy actively intervenes to ensure that Nick and his child are separated.  Supposedly because he was not yet 18, Nick was prevented from being with his child or her mother.  Plainly this housing regulation, designed for who knows what purpose, accomplished the destruction of Nick’s family.  It shoved him out of his child’s life and established his girlfriend as the only appropriate care giver for their daughter.  Are young fathers required to pay child support before they’re 18?  You bet they are, but when it comes to living with his child and being the active, caring father Nick wanted to be, well, that’s a different story.  For that, he was too young.

Third, when the baby’s mother starts “drinking heavily” and abandons the child for an untold period of time, social service finally figures out that maybe mom care wasn’t such a good idea after all.  But still it opts for a caring arrangement that keeps Nick at arms length.  Yes, he wants to care for the baby and in fact does so half-time without assistance.  And yes, his own mother has already demonstrated that she’d be willing to help care for the child, but social services opts for the maternal grandmother – the one who threw her daughter and granddaughter out of her house.  Again, despite his efforts and his proof of his commitment to caring for his daughter, despite the fact that his extended family has proven its willingness to provide care, social services was dead set on keeping Nick out of his daughter’s life – forever.  Note that, regardless of his demonstrated desire and abilities, he was told that the child will be in her maternal grandmother’s care until she’s 18.  That is, Nick is out of the picture. Period.

Finally, notice that, despite the fact that Nick has legal rights to his child, he’s afforded no access to legal counsel with which to enforce them.  Social services is neither judge nor jury, but in fact it’s both.  From start to finish, it decided who would be allowed to care for Nick’s daughter and from start to finish that person was anyone but Nick.  Could an attorney have assisted him in asserting his rights and his fitness?  Probably so, but with all the emphasis on getting public service to young fathers, the services Nick needed most – those of an attorney – were absent.  He gets parenting classes till he’s blue in the face; he gets employment training so he can earn a living and pay child support.  But when it comes to obtaining an effective advocate for his child’s right to her father, the British system turns its back on him.

That’s no accident.  As in this country, England likes to appear father-friendly, but just let a dad try to actually assert his parental rights and he soon finds out the vast network of courts, custody evaluators, CPS, guardians ad litem, etc. aren’t interested in him.  Neither is the rest of the government.  For example, state and federal governments provide child support lawyers to custodial mothers free of charge, but if a father wants to contest a child support order, he has to do so on his own nickel.  Is he destitute?  That’s his problem and states have no obligation to provide him an attorney to assert the matter.  Once again, he’s on his own.  And, just like Mom and her child support order, Dad has his order of visitation.  But unlike Mom and her child support order, if Mom decides to ignore her obligations to him, he has to pay to try to enforce his order out of his own pocket.  And of course, if he elects to try to do so, he’s usually ineffective.  Family judges don’t enforce visitation orders in most cases.

Again, the message is clear.  In the UK as here, the state prefers fathers bound and gagged and above all out of their children’s lives.

Fathers and Families is a Shared Parenting Organization

Fathers and Families is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the Fathers and Families team. Second, Fathers and Families is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting.  Thank you for your support.