The Disenfanchised Father.

[onegirl]

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[Feckless]

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[onegirl]

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Has everyone read it?

This part relates to my husband and I found it VERY enlightening:


STAGE 5: UNMARRIED FATHERS: A UNIQUE AND SPECIAL TRAGEDY

If the road to single fatherhood is rocky, the road to unwed fatherhood is all but impassable ....
The more than two million unwed teenaged fathers in this country have very little chance of playing an active role in their children's lives.

Women become mothers in the hospital, but men don't become fathers .... We have created a system in which we make sure that fathers don't get involved with their kids. 66

The young man whose girlfriend (or casual partner) bears their child faces complex and usually insurmountable problems as (and if) he struggles to assert and establish his parenthood.
For him, there exists more than mere malignant sexist assumptions that (divorced) mothers care more for or are more appropriate parents for their children. There is an assertive belief that this young man doesn't care at all or at least shouldn't. Correspondingly, mother should not be "interfered with" as she struggles to bring up "her" child.
If it is ever granted that this is his child as well, it is in the context of a "child support" obligation, such "support" being defined as exclusively financial. 67
If the young man rightly defines his obligations toward his child as encompassing
emotional, nurturing, and physical care, as well as financial support, and whether or not he is able to provide financial support, he is rebuffed by lawyers and judges as well as the young mother and her family, who will regard his request for unsupervised parenting time with his daughter as arrogant and as "dangerous to the baby, who needs "stability" and needs "her mother." His own family may be pressuring him to "drop out."
Such assumptions regarding stability, maternal primacy, and fathers not caring are erroneous. 68 Stability can be found in a loving parent-infant dyad in either parent's home (or in another home) and can be much more appropriately defined for an infant as a constancy of loving care rather than a constancy of one human rendering it at one location. 69
It is well established that (1) infants can and do establish loving bonds with persons other than their mother, 70 (2) frequently in intact married couple homes, infants are more strongly bonded, or as strongly bonded, to their fathers 71 and (3) significant bonds with fathers often enrich and improve maternal-infant bonds. 72
Should an unwed father ask for custody or joint custody of his baby, he is almost always kept out, or laughed out, of court. If he gets there, his "fitness" as a person and a parent will be intensely evaluated, and any negative factors in his past or present life (i.e., drug or alcohol use, previous unwed fatherhood, school problems, or unemployment) might well be used against him. Mother's fitness as a parent, either at or after delivery, is almost never evaluated or even considered worthy of discussion. 73

Should an unwed father ask for custody or joint custody of his baby, he is almost always kept out, or laughed out, of court.

Mothers are automatically accepted as capable, knowledgeable, and nurturing as parents, or at least potentially so. If parenting deficits (e.g., psychiatric, drug, or alcohol problems) are obvious, she will be deemed to be in need of massive social, economic and psychiatric support. A father with similar deficits is deemed unworthy of any father-child contact whatsoever. Even visitation will be denied.
Despite overwhelming popular opinion to the contrary and overwhelming odds against meaningful involvement with their children, unwed fathers do care and worry about their children 74 If many, seem to have "abandoned" them, it is almost always because they were "aborted" as fathers totally extruded from meaningful parental contact with and knowledge of the child. Legal, social, and financial pressures to drop out are usually overwhelming and unrelenting.
Unwed fathers who continue a relationship with the mother (and tenuous ones with the
children) quickly find that they, also, have no definable or meaningful legal rights to their
children when the relationship with the mother is over. 75

Most young men in this situation are financially insolvent, often in school or unemployed.
As such, most are unable to financially support their children. Since many states require repayment of welfare benefits, and all require payment (and retroactive payment) of child
support, a "wall of debt" 76 essentially separates them from any parental standing with their
children, if such standing had not already been lost on a social or s access-denial basis.
Again, the poignant question is not "Why do unwed dads disappear?" involved in their parental roles do it?"Rather, it is "How do the courageous and fortunate few who remain



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