Category: Blog

Below are some recent articles and items of interest from Fathers & Families’ latest News Digest.

Sweep in Burton nets deadbeat parents, cash for child support payments (The Flint Journal, 6/19/08)

Fathers’ rights campaigner remanded after bridge stunt (Northern Echo, 6/19/08)

Employment slump, economy cause raise in delinquent child support (Baker County Press, 6/19/08)

Ottawa man says divorced dads duped over deduction (Canada.com, 6/19/08)

Tricked ‘fathers’ may get bill’s help (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 6/20/08)

Child support OK’d after father’s death (Boston Globe, 6/20/08)

Support group helps individuals recover from divorce (Fort Bend Sun, 6/20/08)

State’s divorce laws hurt (Boston Globe, 6/22/08)

New measures target parents dodging child support payments (Melbourne Herald-Sun,6/23/08)

Strong measures to revamp CPS operations heading now to Napolitano, awaits signing (Daily Dispatch, 6/23/08)

Glasgow, Scotland–The Sunday Times of London reports that large numbers of school children in Scotland were prohibited from making Father’s Day cards a couple weeks ago in this article.School officials claim they didn’t want to embarrass students who come from single mother and lesbian households.

Is this simply another episode of “political correctness run amok?” Is it yet another example of public education systems trumpeting self-esteem above all else?

According to the Times, Mother’s Day cards were not generally restricted, even though not all children have mothers. But Father’s Day cards were banned for thousands of kids in cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow.

We think the explanation is simple: fathers are held in such low regard that no issue is too small to merit throwing fathers under the bus.  Is this how low the bar has sunk for cutting dads out of the picture?

The reasons given for the Scottish prohibition are pretty flimsy when you stop to think about them. To state the obvious, most children with single mothers most certainly do have fathers. (To say otherwise reminds me of the time the Boston Globe ran an editorial lamenting the fact that if single mothers who are soldiers were killed in Iraq, their children would be “orphans.’) And the feelings of children with lesbian parents could have been protected by inviting them to send a card to a grandfather, or perhaps an uncle, coach, or male teacher.

Speaking of teachers, perhaps part of the problem is that there are so few male teachers. In 2003, Scotland’s General Teaching Council warned of a “gender crisis” as the number and percentage of male teachers had “dropped to an all-time low.” Read about it here.

The Council warned back then, “the problem will only increase unless there is a recruitment campaign aimed specifically at men.” 

Since then, male primary school teachers increased by 142, improving their numbers by a mere 1% – from 7% to 8% of the teacher work force. See here.

As the Teaching Council’s chief stated here in 2003, “there’s still a widely held perception that teaching was a ‘woman’s job’.”

When we see how low fathers are esteemed in the schools of Scotland, is it any wonder there are so few male teachers?

Gloucester, MA–Right on cue, real life illuminates the truth.

As I described a few days ago, Senator Obama gave a Father”s Day speech calling for “responsible fatherhood.’ He, like President Bush, lays all the blame for rampant fatherlessness on irresponsible fathers who are “acting like boys, not men.’

Now along comes Gloucester High School to show that the Senator got it only part right.

TIME magazine and the CBS Evening News report a surge of pregnancies among high school girls in Gloucester beginning last October. Seventeen girls are expecting babies in this 1,200-student school. None of these girls is older than 16. It now turns out that nearly half these girls have confessed to making a pact to have babies and raise them together–a sad adolescent fantasy if ever there was one.

Senator Obama, this proves my point, that irresponsible fathers are just one part of the problem. Women too are choosing fatherlessness for their children–single mothers by choice, single mothers by semi-choice (if the kid can have a father great, but if not, no big deal), and divorcing mothers who obstruct shared parenting, who move far away, or who obtain false restraining orders against the father.

Gloucester High School shows us that both males and females have decided that children having fathers is not nearly as important as adult narcissism–men who can have sex without consequences, and women who can have babies to love them without the bother of a partner.

Gloucester officials and the media are debating all the wrong points, and are neglecting all the important ones. During the school year, the school nurse and a local pediatrician wanted to prescribe contraceptives without parental consent. But the girls wanted to get pregnant, so this would have prevented nothing. Besides, this is a terrible idea; what we need is more parental involvement, not less.

The school nixed parentless contraception. Instead, it touts its on-site childcare center, another non-solution. The CEO of the childcare center, sensing more business, said, “We”re proud to help the mothers stay in school.’

Here are the real issues —  the ones nobody is discussing, at least not publicly.

Why did these girls feel so unloved that they needed babies to feel whole? What”s going on in their families? Here”s my wager:  most of these girls are fatherless – the strongest predictor of teenage pregnancy is fatherlessness.

Is anyone counseling these girls to adopt out their babies (with the consent of the fathers)? This is the best solution for the babies. There are long waiting lists of loving, fit, middle class parents trying to adopt newborns. Where is the concept of “best interests of the child’ when we need it? It will be painful for the girls and boys who have produced these babies, but we all suffer pain when we make a bad mistake, and it will be far less than the chronic pain for girls of single parenting and for boys of crushing child support payments.

 Who are the fathers? How old are they? Will the parents of the babies marry, and if not, what role will the fathers be allowed to take in helping to raise the children?

If these babies grow up fatherless, how will we prevent them from becoming the next generation of single parents when they become teens?

Senator Obama, President Bush and all other advocates of “responsible fatherhood’: You are making fathers the scapegoat for a deep-rooted problem created by both men and women – a cultural attitude that these babies don”t need fathers. Your vision is too narrow, your remedies a placebo. It”s always easier to find a scapegoat than to solve a problem.

Give us your take on this below.

Boston, MA–In a sport that has had more than its share of poster boys for “bad dads,” it was refreshing to see the prominent displays of positive fatherhood from the new NBA champions.

As the Celtics beat the Los Angeles Lakers in game 6 to win the series, several players were seen throughout the post-game festivities holding and hugging their sons, including Ray Allen, PJ Brown and Leon Powe. Allen, in particular, held his son Walker close, as the toddler had been diagnosed and hospitalized with diabetes just days earlier. As a result, Allen’s performance suffered in Sunday’s Game 5 in Los Angeles. Said Allen, “I can truly say my mind wasn’t in the game.”

Other fatherly examples include Eddie House (married, 3 sons), whose son Jaelen has been a regular presence at Celtics games to the extent he’s been called the team’s “good luck charm.”

But the most poignant story has been that of Celtics coach “Doc” Rivers, whose father Grady passed away early in the season. Jackie MacMullan writes on ESPN.com, “As Boston’s dream season has unfolded, Doc Rivers has privately struggled to balance the jubilation of his lifelong dream with the devastation of losing the person he aches to share it with the most.”  To read more, click here.

In post-game interviews, Rivers was asked twice about his first thoughts as the buzzer counted down to 0:00. “My first thought was what would my dad say, and honestly I started laughing because I thought he would probably say, if you knew my dad, ‘It”s about time. What have you been waiting for?” So that was my first thought.’

The ESPN article (“Doc Rivers adhering to his father’s lessons”) and an Associated Press article, Celtics coach influenced by father’s guidance were amongst many news accounts of the influence of the coach’s father on him, and in turn, the coach’s successful influence on his players. Lessons like hard work, perseverance, team work and family.

Fittingly, Rivers’ team won the Championship on June 17th – Grady Rivers’ birthday.

Lastly, we note the passing of NBC News Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert, who wrote two books celebrating fatherhood, “Big Russ and Me”  and “Wisdom of Our Fathers”. Russert collapsed on the Friday preceding Father’s Day. Local bookstores sold out of both books that afternoon and both are currently sold out on Amazon.com

Boston, MA–MSNBC has an interesting and telling story about the issue of maternal gatekeeping. In When moms criticize, dads back off of baby care (MSNBC, 6/12/08) they write:

During the first few months of a new baby’s life, every parent suffers moments of self-doubt. But new research suggests that dads might be especially susceptible to that lack of self-confidence — and that moms may be partly to blame.

Moms’ words of criticism or encouragement directly affect how involved their husband or partner becomes in the day-to-day care of their infant, finds a new study published in the June issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. When a mother criticized her partner’s child-care efforts, it often caused him to lose confidence, and even withdraw from caring for the baby. But when a mom praised dad’s efforts, he took a more active parenting role…

“Most couples said they believed fathers and mothers should spend an equal amount of time with their children,” Schoppe-Sullivan says. But after their child was born, it didn’t matter what they had said in those initial interviews; it was the mom’s behavior that dictated the dad’s involvement.

About two-thirds of the couples were first-time parents, but whether or not they already had kids at home didn’t affect the outcome, Schoppe-Sullivan says.

When the baby was 3 or 4 months old, researchers visited the families to observe them in their homes. They asked the couple to change the baby into a new outfit, and watched how the mom and dad interacted: Did the mom completely take over, while the dad stepped back? Or did they work together?

They found that the dads who knew what they were doing had partners who encouraged and complimented them as they changed the baby’s clothes. But the dads who looked less confident were accompanied by partners who critiqued their methods during the entire observation.

For Paul Skabish, a 31-year-old who lives in Garden Grove, N.J, the physical act of changing his son Paulie”s clothes was never the problem. It was the mismatched outfits he chose — and his wife”s reaction to them — that eventually caused him to resign from wardrobe duty.

“I do try to match … but my wife is kind of anal about that,” he says. After his wife’s critique of his haphazard fashion sense, he backed away from his brief stint as family fashion director, and has stayed far from it ever since. Paulie is now 4.

Of course, both Skabish and his wife, Melissa, say that their wardrobe skirmish is a small issue. But Diana Solomon, who helps facilitate parenting groups at Community Birth & Family Center in Seattle, says that many parenting disputes are over the seemingly simple tasks: What’s the best way to soothe the baby? Should we use a pacifier or not?

“There’s a lot of judgment, a lot of ‘you’re not doing it right,'” says Solomon. “Which really means, ‘you’re not doing it the way I do it'”…

A few comments:

I’ve always believed that it’s the same fallacious attitude that makes a dad think he can’t care for his baby as well as a mom that leads to male passivity in divorce. As a physician, I was always frustrated by dads who habitually deferred to moms whose caretaking of the children was clearly inferior to theirs. And, as bad and unfair as our family law system is, some dads make it worse by believing that they’re not that important to their kids, that “what they really need is their mom,” or that every other weekend visitation is acceptable.

This passivity percolates through various levels of society and sometimes leads legislators and the media to figure there’s nothing wrong with the current divorce system, that 12 days with mom and 2 with dad sounds about right.

Washington, DC–Barack Obama delivered a major address on family policy at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago on Father”s Day.

In his speech, Obama honored fatherhood, but denigrated fathers. To his credit, he said, “Of all the rocks upon which to build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation.’

He then noted the appalling amount of fatherlessness, including the fact that “half of all black children live in single-parent households…’ He also noted the devastating effects of fatherlessness: five-fold increase in poverty and crime, nine-fold increase in school drop-out, and twenty-fold increase in incarceration.

Then Obama reverted to the usual simplistic analysis of the causes of fatherlessness: “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.’ He went on, “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception.’

Forgive the digression, but what is truth, and what is half-truth? If we say that some immigrants commit murder (true), but neglect to mention that Americans also commit murder, have we told the truth about immigrants, or about murder? If we write that some Jews cheat on taxes (true), but neglect to mention that other Americans also cheat on taxes, have we told the truth about taxes, or about Jews?

In my view, by laying the blame for fatherlessness solely at the feet of fathers, Obama did not tell the whole truth. Don”t mothers share some of the blame? Don”t some mothers have unprotected sex with people they would never dream of living with as a partner? Don”t most pregnant single women choose single motherhood over adoption? Don”t some mothers reject shared parenting, take out false restraining orders, interfere with fathers” access to their children, or move far away?

Worse, Obama did not bother to talk about the irresponsibility of some fathers–he was content to denigrate all fathers in familiar stereotypes, such as, “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception.’ Also, “It”s a wonderful thing if you are married and living in a home with your children, but don”t just sit in the house and watch ‘SportsCenter” all weekend long.’

Although it was a Fathers Day speech, the only actual fathers who were honored were Michelle Obama”s father, and Obama himself (with some self-deprecating humility thrown in).

In contrast, mothers were set on a pedestal. They are raising the kids by themselves, dropping them off at school, working two shifts, making dinner, paying the bills, fixing the house, etc. “So many of these women are doing a heroic job…’  True enough, but in many cases, they have chosen single parenthood, and in many cases, they have actively excluded the father. 

The truth is, both sexes are responsible for fatherlessness, together with archaic traditions of the family courts. But we did not hear that from Obama.

In summary, Obama”s analysis of the problem is exactly the same as President Bush”s: fatherlessness is a problem that has been caused solely by irresponsible fathers who need to be improved through government programs.

Obama”s specific proposals to address our “national epidemic of absentee fathers’ are found in a bill he and Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) introduced on June 29, 2007, called the Responsible Fatherhood Act. Glenn Sacks described it in some detail in a newspaper column written shortly thereafter. Glenn describes it as a carrot and stick approach in which “the carrot is too small and the stick is already too big.’

There are numerous provisions. Basically, they increase government funding of child support enforcement, and fine-tune the flow of child support payments among the father, the government and the mother. As Glenn pointed out, the bill mentions “child support’ 65 times, but does not mention “custody,’ “visitation,’ “parenting time,’ or “access denial’ even once. It is hard to see how such a bill will address our “national epidemic of absentee fathers’  — once again, it is just about the money.

Obama is the new Bush.

Below are some recent articles and items of interest from Fathers & Families’ latest News Digest.

This father knows best (Boston Globe, 6/11/08)

Child support sweep in NJ (Newsday, 6/13/08)

Dads get the royal treatment on Father’s Day weekend (Detroit News, 6/14/08)

Dad embraces title, role as stay-at-home Mr. Mom (Daily News, 6/14/08)

Blind justice: do fathers get a fair shake in child custody cases? (Burlington Times-News, 6/14/08)

When Mom and Dad share it all (New York Times, 6/15/08)

Single fathers learn a difficult lesson on how to raise children (Ft. Worth Star Telegram, 6/15/08)

Parenting together after a divorce (Savannah Morning News, 6/16/08)

Fathers and Druthers: Dads are still saddled with detached image (Washington Post, 6/17/08)

Man cleared in sex case has award upheld (Connecticut Post, 6/18/08)

Los Angeles, CA–My new co-authored column Media Unfairly Stereotypes Dads (Orange County Register, 6/13/08,  Wisconsin State Journal, 6/14/08), criticizes how fathers are portrayed in the media. While there has been some improvement in the past few years, fathers are still frequently unfairly depicted as slackers or deadbeats.

I co-authored the column with family law attorney Jeffery M. Leving, Chairman of the Illinois Council on Responsible Fatherhood.

To write a Letter to the Editor of the Orange County Register, a 300,000 circulation newspaper in the greater Los Angeles area, concerning Leving & Sacks: Dads still dissed in the media (6/13/08), click here.

To write a Letter to the Editor of the Wisconsin State Journal concerning Media still unfairly stereotypes dads (6/14/08), click here.

Media Unfairly Stereotypes Dads
By Jeffery M. Leving and Glenn Sacks

The image of fathers and fatherhood has taken a beating over the past several decades, and the media has been part of the problem. While there has been some improvement in the past few years, fathers are still frequently unfairly stereotyped.

For example, in April the Council on Contemporary Families issued a report on men and housework. CNN”s headline to the story was typical of most media– “Report: Men still not pulling weight on chores.’

In reality, studies which account for the total amount of work that husbands and wives contribute to their households–including housework, child care, and employment–confirm that men contribute at least as much to their families as women do. What the CCF study actually said was that the amount of child care fathers provide has tripled over the past four decades, and the amount of housework men do has doubled. Moreover, men have accomplished this in an era where the average workweek has significantly expanded. The papers reporting the story barely noticed.

Ex-NBA Player Jason Caffey was widely vilified in April for being behind in his child support. Caffey had paid over 90% of what he was ordered to pay, but fell behind when his post-career income dropped, and was threatened with jail. Neither CNN commentator Nancy Grace nor Caffey”s other critics stopped to ponder the absurdity of calling a father who had already paid millions of dollars in child support a “deadbeat dad.”

Similarly, in April Chandra Myers made national headlines when she took the unusual step of suing New York bakery worker Robert Sean Myers” employers Sara Lee Bakeries and Bimbo Bakeries for allegedly failing to garnish his wages. Yet while Robert was labeled a “deadbeat dad,’ the media didn”t even notice that a court had obligated Myers to pay $2,000 a month in child support for one child–on an income of only $1,600 a month.

USA Today financial columnist Sandra Block recently explained that widows receive significantly more social security benefits if their husbands delay retirement. She could have written, “Men, we know your wives and children appreciate the sacrifices you”ve made as family breadwinner, and delaying retirement will help ensure your loved ones are provided for.’ Instead, Block wrote:

Los Angeles, CA–My new co-authored column, Protect Fathers’ Loving Bonds with Their Children (South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 6/13/08), criticizes the way family courts fail to protect fathers’ relationships with their children after divorce or separation.

To write a Letter to the Editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a leading newspaper with a circulation in the 300,000 range, regarding Family courts still treating men poorly, click here.

To post a comment about the article, click here.

The column, co-authored with Mike McCormick, Executive Director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, is below.

Protect Fathers’ Loving Bonds with Their Children
By Mike McCormick and Glenn Sacks

Chicago father Joseph Richardson gave his life to save his child last month. According to one newspaper report, “With an out-of-control car bearing down, Richardson grabbed his 4-year-old daughter and held her up out of harm’s way. It was his last act — and one that apparently saved his daughter’s life.”

Earlier this year San Francisco father Albert Collins gave his life to save his family. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Collins’ last act was to throw his body over the top of his daughter to shield her from [errant shots] that would leave him dead…[his mother] watched helplessly, as her son made what would be his final request…’look out for [my] son and [my] daughter.'”

There certainly are fathers (and mothers) who don’t come through for their children, but the average dad loves his children as much as Richardson and Collins did. Unfortunately, you’d never know it from the way our family court system treats fathers.

Millions of divorced or separated men are not permitted any meaningful role in their children’s lives. Many get to spend only a few days a month with their kids, and once mom finds a new man, they’re often pushed out entirely in favor of the child’s “new dad.” Yet when we talk about fatherless homes, it’s only in the context of the “paternal abandonment” script.

Fortunately, some legislators are finally starting to rethink fatherlessness. One of them is former Iowa House Speaker Pro Tem Danny Carroll, who never knew his father. Carroll refuses to make the standard assumption that his dad abandoned him. Rather, he publicly speculates that had the family law system protected fathers’ relationships with their children, perhaps he would have had his father in his life.

The benefits that divorced or separated fathers can provide their children are substantial. For example, a recent study of low-income African-American and Hispanic families by Boston College found that when nonresident fathers are involved in their adolescent children’s lives, the incidence of substance abuse, violence, crime, and truancy decreases markedly. The study’s lead author, professor Rebekah Levine Coley, says the study found involved nonresident fathers to be “an important protective factor for adolescents.”

Family courts often facilitate outcomes which damage children’s relationships with their fathers. While child custody laws are often neutral on paper, in practice they favor awarding sole custody or primary residency to mothers and visitor status to fathers. Misguided women’s advocates such as the National Organization for Women have repeatedly beat back attempts to change this.