Men's Rights Agency - Fatherless Children

Sydney Morning Herald Saturday 6th December, 1997

Dealing with dads who don't care

Adele Horin

To borrow a line from the Prime Minister, the pendulum has swung too far.

Ludicrous when applied to Aboriginal land rights, the pendulum image more aptly describes the current treatment of deadbeat dads. Dads who vanish from their children's lives after divorce, reappear at whim, or are seen only on poster from the Child Support Agency's most wanted list. In recent years, they have vanished from public consciousness, the media spotlight and Government concern. Instead, the focus has shifted to desperate dads and to the malicious mothers who thwart their access to the children.

From the Federal Government's own committee on child support arrangements to the pages of major newspapers, the plight of the excluded father has taken centre-stage. Let me say from the outset that the excluded father, at the mercy of a vindictive and irrational woman, has my sympathy. I have written my fair share of words in his defence.

But, the pendulum has swung too far. We may have exaggerated the number of new-age dads. And underestimated how many mothers battle alone and unsupported. The deadbeat dad is alive and well and living on the lam. His children, meanwhile, especially his sons, are suffering. A generation of angry; abandoned boys is in the making. And mothers are struggling to deal with them.

That's the message I got when I spent hours this week talking to a range of lone mothers. Poverty is there constant companion. But the topic they came back to time and again was their sons' anger at the fathers who disappeared, were erratic, forgetful, unreliable or irresponsible. The mothers cried out for the men to be more involved in their children's lives. They longed for a break. A father who took his children for a weekend, babysat or helped in a crisis was a national treasure. The women desperately needed breaks from the unrelenting job of raising kids alone on a poverty income.

But more than that, the women spoke of their children's emotional need - especially their sons' - for a father.

"Now that my older son is nine, he realises his father doesn't come to see him, and he's angry," said a woman who separated from her partner four years ago.

Instead,, deadbeat dads forget birthdays, neglect to ring when they promised, and fail to turn up when expected. Children are stickler for routines, and never forget a promise, as any mother knows. But too many fathers break the basic rules of parenthood. They break their word. They break their children's heart.

A capricious dad who constantly lets his children down is probably worse than a dad who took of at the start never to be remembered. Child psychologists see many aggressive, hard-to-manage little boys who do remember their dads. The boys feel a huge sadness at the loss.

"Mothers are left to handle their children's grief and distress about their fathers," says Mim Weber, a psychologist at the Northern Rivers Health Service.

And because mothers fear they will turn their boys into sissies if they get too close, they to back off. Some teenage are intensely lonely, abandoned, they feel, by both parents.

It is mothers, however, who get blamed for their children's unruly behaviour. And fathers get off scot-free. "No-one is bagging my ex-husband as a parent," said one woman whose partner bolted. "But in society's eyes, I am the sole parent so am the bad parent."

Yet adding fathers is not like adding fibre. Some deadbeat dads aren't good for you.

Father-absence had been blamed for a host of problems, including juvenile delinquency and lawlessness among young men. A British study by the University of Newcastle under Professor Israel Kolvin came to the not surprising conclusion that the sons of inadequate mothers, living debt-ridden lives of poverty, were four times as likely to have criminal records as those living in happier circumstances. Nearly half these "inadequate mothers" were sole parents.

But the same study showed than in two-parent deprived households, only 7 per cent of resident fathers were "effective, kind, considerate", and most did not take part in household tasks. It is hard to see that grafting such ineffective men onto unstuck families will help much. It's not that simple.

Nor is the answer to rail against divorce. These days adults won't endure till death a loveless sham marriage if they see alternatives. And when men are violent, or, "more childish than the children", as one woman said, the marriage has no point.

Children need fathers - but only effective, useful fathers. New-age fathers have learnt to be more like mothers - emotionally involved from the start. In divorce's messy aftermath, some new-age fathers confront the malicious mother, and their hearts are broken. But many more children are nursing broken hearts because their dads just don't care enough.