Men's Roles As Fathers: Equality in Divorce and Custody of Children

In the past decade, ever since President Clinton's 'welfare reform' of the mid-1990's, there has been a re-emphasis, in economically-deprived families and/or those on welfare or in Head Start programs, on fathers playing a greater role in the lives of their children. The government chose this policy, in part, to display it's realization of the value of fathers after four decades of pushing fathers out of the home [families received fewer or no welfare benefits if the father was around the home], but more importantly because it wanted to save money. This 'cost cutting' was one of the primary motivations of the 'reform', which forced welfare families to get off welfare by taking low-paying jobs, often which didn't sufficiently cover their expenses, especially after the cost of childcare was factored in (though, in some high-profile examples, families were able to completely move beyond the minimum wage/welfare cycle altogether). The problem was that after many years of discounting the value of fathers -- of, in fact, acting as though the government itself was sort of a 'big daddy' that could, via welfare payments, replace fathers [ignoring, in the process, the emotional value of fathers in families] -- the government turned around and acted in a rather haughty manner and demanded that fathers take a more active role in the lives of their children without constructing a social service delivery system that supported that change.

As an example of this, several years ago I was involved with the Father and Family Committee of the St. Louis [Missouri] Consortium on African American Male Survival. We were working with a lot of fathers who had been incarcerated due to failure to pay child support. The policy of throwing fathers who were delinquent in their child support payments into prison, as the members noted, was somewhat contradictory: the state wanted fathers to make the child support payments that had been ordered by the court system, but incarcerating fathers for failing to do so was rather counterproductive. They surely could not earn money in prison, at least not enough to send any sort of sufficient payments to their families, and once having been incarcerated, their economic value on the labor market was reduced, since they now had a prison record.

The Consortium felt that motivating the fathers to take a more active role, after divorce, in the life of their children, helping them with job training and employment programs, and then garnishing a portion of their wages -- while still leaving them enough to support themselves economically -- was a more viable [and more cost-effective] solution for the government to engage in. Such a policy would allow the fathers to maintain personal pride and a potentially positive role in the life of their children, other than simply being the providers of child support payments to the mothers. Critical to this policy, though, was to not so harshly garish the wages of the fathers -- many of whom were only able to secure minimum wage employment -- that the fathers would be left with insufficient means to provide for their own minimal needs and, as a result, be motivated to avoid the economic support of their children, the very problem the government was trying to resolve.

A further problem for fathers, generally, whether poor or otherwise, was that when the school system would sponsor 'parent meetings' to support the educational progress of the child -- or for a meeting concerning disciplinary or truancy problems the child was having -- the invitation would be sent solely to the mother of the child, not the father [in non-custodial families]. The very idea that the concept of 'parent' only applied to mothers was rather short-sighted. The school system, in direct contradiction to its own stated mission of promoting family cohesiveness as a better predictor of the child's educational advancement, was in fact promoting a 'social construct' that assumed the only parent of value was the mother. While it was often the case that the fathers had, for various reasons, dropped out of the family system, the school system's invitation mechanism reinforced the very lack of mutual parental involvement that they publicly disavowed. Additionally, fathers who cared a lot about their children, but who had been forced, via various emotional and legal means, out of the family structure, were further discarded by 'the system' that supposedly cared about the father's involvement with the children. Members of the Father and Family Committee actively intervened on behalf of the fathers, when they could, by showing the school system how ignoring the fathers in such 'parent meetings' was thoroughly counterproductive to the emotional support of the children and discounting of any potential ongoing involvement by the fathers.

The contradiction that the educational system faced was often rooted in the way in which the court system handled custody of children in divorce cases. Often, custody was awarded to the mothers -- on the assumption that they were more 'stable' and could provide the children with a 'nurturing home' that the fathers could not or would not provide -- regardless of the mother's emotional or economic capacity to care for the children. The result, in far too many cases, was that the children were, de facto, raised in single-parent households. This legal solution was not particularly helpful to either the mother or the father of the children. The mother was left with an egregious economic and emotional burden, trying to raise the children unilaterally, often dependent on unstable child support payments, welfare assistance and/or income from minimum wage jobs to support themselves and their children. The fathers were either 'left off the hook', in terms of emotional support of the children, or, in situations were the fathers wanted to have an ongoing involvement with their children, often excluded from family activities due to emotional conflicts between the parents.

The tendency of the courts to award sole custody of the children to the mother, with the father's sole responsibility -- or 'right' -- being to provide child support and alimony payments [but not being allowed an emotional relationship with his children] has been increasingly challenged by father's rights groups, with mixed results. In some cases, the courts have been willing to accept the fathers as legitimate caregivers of the children, more so than the mothers, and grant them primary custody, or has been motivated to view both parents as equally caring toward the children and been willing to grant mutual shared custody [with its own struggles in the emotional lives of the children]. In either solution, the rights of the fathers and their value in the family structure has been 'legitimized' by the court system, after decades of viewing fathers as having less value in the life of children than that of mothers. While it may or may not be true that being raised by a single parent [mother or father] can result in an emotionally stable child, there is at least some anecdotal evidence that both sons and daughters who are raised in homes where the father is not present have greater problems with delinquency and/or teen pregnancy. Having positive role modeling from both their mothers and fathers appears to provide children with a more solid emotional foundation in their growth and maturation.