Today is the 100th Anniversary of Father's Day which was first celebrated in Spokane, Washington.
Barack Obama endorsed the vital role of fathers in a 2008 speech: “Of all the rocks upon which we 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.”
In that 100 years we have seen fatherhood, once respected as the pillar of the family, denigrated into a figure representative of abuse of children and repressive of a woman's freedoms. Judges and lawmakers have seen fathers as nothing more than a cash machine whose sole purpose is to provide financial support for the children and their mother while being sterile in impacting the emotional development of those children.
The data is returning on a regular basis now which is showing that the 30+ year government mandated experiment in raising fatherless children is a failure. Despite government efforts fathers are still managing to be involved.
Decades ago, non-resident fathers were largely a result of the divorce process. Valarie King, a sociologist and demographer at Pennsylvania State University who just completed work on a five-year grant studying non-resident fathers and other researchers say many non-resident dads today were in a non-marital relationship that didn't last. Divorced fathers have been shown to be more involved, on average, than those who were never married to the child's mother, King says.
"People don't realize how much things have changed, but if we look at the numbers, we see big increases in fathers' contact with children and big increases in fathers' payment of child support," says Paul Amato, also a Penn State sociologist and demographer.
Efforts by father's rights organizations and child advocacy groups who have influenced legislation have had an impact on the ability of judges to break or prevent the child-father bond.
Research co-written by Amato and published last year in the journal Family Relations reviewed changes in non-resident father-child contact over three decades. The study, based on four national surveys using reports from 5,244 mothers of children ages 6-12, found significant increases in contact. In 1976, 18% of non-resident fathers saw kids at least weekly. By 2002, it grew to 31%. The percentage of dads who had no contact declined from 37% in 1976 to 29% in 2002.
Sexual partners and marriages may last for a short tie but being a parent is for life. There can be difficulty for fathers to maintain a parent-child relationship since physical distance spawns emotional distance and courts had often let mothers relocate children as though they were property. Government institutions still want to define a primary parent and a parent with visitation rights regardless of actual circumstances.
There still exist a mandated bias against fatherhood. Family service agencies are missing huge opportunities to help children by choosing to focus only on mothers and ignore fathers. This is the conclusion of a study by some of the nation’s top family and child development researchers.
The scientific study published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family found that when mothers and fathers enrolled together in 16-week sessions to work on their relationships as parents and partners, their children were much less likely to show signs of depression, anxiety and hyperactivity.
There may be a biological basis for child well-being necessitating both parents. According to a study published in the February issue of the journal American Anthropologist, fathers among our earliest human ancestors may have helped jump-start the modern human population explosion by helping mothers with child rearing. Fathers in early human species would have aided in carrying children, as well as in their bathing, feeding, playing and teaching them the lessons of prehistoric life, said Northwestern University researcher Lee T. Gettler. They traded these services with the females for access to mating which allowed for monogamy and the modern family structure to develop.
It is this structure which profiteers who have heavily influenced government policy decisions have sought to breakdown. Just as we have seen in many health related consequences of trying to short-change biology such as the dangerous side-effects of fat or sugar substitutes we have also seen the dangerous side-effects of father displacement.
However, changes in custody laws, including Shared Parenting and parenting plans required by some states are providing children with more access to their fathers today and reducing many of the harms caused by father absence.
There is still much work to be done though. Not only is there anti-father bias still existing in the laws of many states and the minds of many judges and policymakers but it still exist among many institutions.
Google is one example of a company that presumes fathers to not be as equally important in the life of a child as a mother. Go here and see the bias displayed by Google.
In the 2011 session of the Indiana General Assembly I will be having parenting time coordination and presumptive Shared Parenting bills introduced.
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