Parenting and Self-Esteem

We've all heard, at times with some incredulity, that women like bad men, that the surest way to lose a woman is to be kind to her, that if a man is too good, sooner or later your partner I leave it for a son of a ... Before discarding the idea as popular nonsense, please refer to a study titled “The supermom trap:  Do involved dads erode moms' self-competence?”.  This study, conducted by Osaka University of Commerce researcher, Takayuki Sasaki, with Nancy L. Hazen and William B. Swann Jr., his colleagues at the University of Texas, focuses on parents and their attitudes toward each other's parenting styles, using a sample of 78 dual-earner couples with 8-month-old infants.

The study gives evidence of two not-so-surprising facts.  First, that when wives perceived that their husbands were capable caregivers, the greater the husbands' contribution to caregiving and the more time they spent solo with children, the lower was their sense of self-competence.  Although mothers of the sample wanted fathers to take part in childcare, when fathers did it, and when they did it a lot and well, mothers' self-esteem suffered.  Men showed no such trend.

Sasaki believes that this is the result of cultural norms:   "In American society, women are expected to take a main role in parenting despite increasingly egalitarian sex roles…  (…)  Thus, we believe that employed mothers suffer from self-competence losses when their husbands are involved and skillful because those mothers may consider that it is a failure to fulfill cultural expectations."

The second discovery of the study was that wives only approved fathers' parenting when it was like theirs.  When dads deviate from mothers' expectations, they tended to be criticized.  Sasaki told LiveScience ("Helpful Dads Can Hurt Mom's Self-Esteem") that many wives would say care-giving by their husbands is helpful, but at the same time, they would give their husbands negative feedback because their care-giving style was different from their own.

Cathy Young and the Gender War

Cathy Young (Moscow 1963), an author, a public speaker, and a regular columnist for The Boston Globe and Reason, her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, The American Spectator, Salon.Com, National Review, and The New Republic. She published in 1999 the book Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality.

In her book, Young states that there is no war against women, and rebuts a series of controversial issues, from the incidence of domestic violence (it is not as frequent as the feminist media wants us to believe), the nature of domestic violence (she states that domestic violence is a two-way street: University of New Hampshire researchers consistently report women as often as men initiate physical violence. Furthermore, recent studies reveal that lesbians have also high rates of violence toward their own partners) Mainstream media hides or misreports these facts, fomenting this way legislation constructed on false assumptions), that male violence is directed primarily against women, or that girls are ignored in classrooms.

She offers evidence that these and other basic feminist credos are mistaken, mainly due to a feminist propensity for exaggeration, stereotyping, and over-generalization based on little or no evidence.

Young argues that the battle for equal rights is not an excuse for portraying men as fundamentally malevolent. She explains that in the '80s, a radical sector of feminism became mainstream, and equality for women began to mean inequities for men; is at this moment when she and many others became part of a new brand of feminism that looks for true equality.

One good example of this attitude towards an unequal equality, and the one that for our cause matters the most, is these feminists’ attitude toward joint custody. While they condemn men for not contributing enough in raising the kids, at the same time they demand that women should automatically have child custody following a divorce, because they have an inherent capacity to nurture children, while men do not. Young make an interesting point here: as Victorian morality believed, these feminists believe that women are the fragile guardians of good who must be placed on pedestals and protected. Young cleverly points out this "strange convergence of radical feminism and patriarchal conservatism - and the alienation of both ideologies from real life." Weirdly enough, the arguments of the Christian fundamentalist Promise Keepers and the National Organization of Women are based on the same premises.

Young believes that women and men need to learn to get along. Women have sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers. Because we have families, we cannot battle each other, we have to work together, and we have to look for each other’s wellbeing. In the final chapter of Ceasefire, Young proposes a twelve steps program for de-escalating the gender wars. These steps include:

-Do not assume sexism is the root cause of all women's problems.

-Rewrite sexual harassment law.

-Demand that husbands and wives serve as equal parents.

-Take gender politics out of the war on domestic violence.

-Stop acting as if women’s claims were more legitimate than men’s were.

In summary, the book is well written, well argued, and carefully reasoned, a book that should be read by anyone interested in real gender equality.

Kidnap As an Instrument of Punishment

Recently it has become notorious the case on which a Brazilian woman, Bruna Bianchi Carneiro Ribeiro, who lived and was married in New Jersey, kidnaps her child and takes him to Brazil (http://www.redbank.com/blog/sean-goldman-usa-parental-abduction-brazil), forcing the father to engage in an intense international legal fight to recover his child. Thanks to this sad case, there is now a public discussion of the great problem of parental kidnapping.

Although there are international laws against parental kidnapping, these are poorly enforced and frequently manipulated for the convenience of the kidnapping parent, who usually takes the child to his/her country of origin. Ironically, in the above quoted case, Bruna remarried in Brazil, this time with an attorney specialized in family law, who has even spoken at The Hague on the issue of parental kidnapping. Bruna dies and is this attorney who has stopped the child of being reunited with his father. Human nature never ceases to be perverse.

I also say that we should use this opportunity to discuss the negative effect that the physical distance between separated parents has on the children and on the bond between them and their parents, specially with their fathers. I say this, because in very few states (I only know the case of Pennsylvania) there are laws that stop that a parent with joint custody could leave the state where he/she lives, putting this way distance between the children and the other parent.

Kidnapping their children is a tactic that many women use once they loose the custody of their children to their father. And moving out, sometimes thousands of miles away, is a strategy frequently used by mothers once joint custody is awarded to the father of their children. What is the difference between kidnapping children and taking them to where it will be impossible for them to stay in contact with their fathers?

In the movie Jarhead, there is a scene on which the soldiers, already in a camp in the desert, put something like a wall of shame, on which they put pictures of the women that that have betrayed them. One of the pictures show a women with a child, with the words: “I loved her and she took my kid and disappeared.”

Next time your ex-spouse tells you the she will take your children where you cannot see them, do not ignore her. Maybe it is not a threat. Maybe it is a plan.

Joint Custody and Adopted Children

Let me start with clear and unquestionable truth: Sole custody endangers the bond between adoptive parents and adopted children.

For us, parents of adoptive children, divorce after adoption brings a special kind of tragedy that adds to the already tragic condition of living without our children. I have referred to Beck v. Beck case before in this blog for several reasons. This case set a precedent for joint custody cases, stated the primacy of physical custody as the factor that defines parent-child relationships, and stated that a children have equal need of their fathers and mothers. However, I have another reason far more personal. In this case, what is in dispute is the custody of adopted children.

While having children is always a blessing, being, like in my case, incapable of having biological children and receiving the gift of an adoptive child, is a very special privilege. This child is never an accident, an unplanned consequence: this child has been chosen by the love of his/her parents. I will not try to explain here how many and beautiful are the dreams of a parent who adopts a child. Neither will I try to explain the profound and tender love that adoptive parents develop for their children. Nevertheless, I will certainly try to highlight the importance of physical custody for the parents of adopted children.

The fact that allows people to adopt as their own other’s people children, is that what really makes a child your child is that he/she is raised by you, and what makes someone your parent is that he/she raised you, and by raising I refer to the day to day type of contact that only physical custody can provide.

Even when adopted children get to know their biological parents, the children will consider parents only the ones who have raised them. This fact implies a truth that should be considered here: that in the absence of a bloodline between a parent and a child, like in the case of adopted children, sharing the dynamics of day-to-day life is what creates the bond between them. For an adoptive parent, the physical custody of his child is not one of the ways to create a bond with his child, it is the only way. Beck v. Beck affirms this singularity of adopted children, stating:

…that because the girls were adopted, they needed “the benefit, contact, and security of both parents.” 86 N.J. 489 (1981)

Beck v. Beck admonished against endangering this attachment between the adopted girls and their father:

Viewing the issue in terms of the importance of fatherhood in the lives of the two girls, it (the court) concluded that the lack of real contact with the father would have negative developmental effects, particularly because the girls are adopted. 86 N.J. 492-93 (1981)

Depriving adopted children from one of their parents, as family courts usually do in custody cases, takes away for the second time what life has already taken once: the love, comfort, and security that only their father and mother can give them.

New Data on Fathers and their Children

Two recent articles on the relationship between fathers and their children give new data on this important issue. The articles are Our Fatherhood Crisis , by Glenn Sacks and Robert Franklin, published on June 21, 2009 in The Washington Times (http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/21/our-fatherhood-crisis/?feat=home_commentary), and Obama’s Father’s Day Criticism of Dads Misses Mark by Glenn Sacks and Robert Franklin (http://lifestyle.msn.com/your-life/family-parenting/article.aspx?cp-documentid=20440872&page=print). I want to quote some of the most relevant facts that appeared on these articles:

1 - Professor Rebekah Levine Coley lead a recent Boston College study of low-income minority families, and found that when nonresident fathers are involved in their adolescent children's lives, they worked as an important protective factor, decreasing markedly the incidence of substance abuse, violence, and delinquency.
Writing about this study, MSNBC health and science writer Linda Carroll explains that:

"When it comes to preventing risky teen sex, there may be no better deterrent than a doting dad. Teenagers whose fathers are more involved in their lives are less likely to engage in risky sexual activities such as unprotected intercourse, according to a new study...While an involved mother can also help stave off a teen's sexual activity, dads have twice the influence."

2 - Professors Kathryn Edin of Harvard and Timothy Nelson of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a study of low-income, unmarried fathers and found that most strive to be good parents but often are thwarted by the children's mothers' interference. They found that these dads provide what monetary support they could, but focused on the non-financial aspects of fatherhood. These aspects include educating their daughters about relationships with males and teaching their sons how to defend themselves.

Ms. Edin's soon-to-be-published subsequent studies (Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing) found that when mothers move on to have new partners their actions are "strongly associated with increases in the probability that the biological father will have no contact with his child.” When fathers move on to have subsequent partners and children, they largely retain their desire to be in their original children's lives. According to Ms. Edin: "The evidence points more strongly to the role of mothers 'swapping daddies' than it does to the role of fathers 'swapping kids.'" A single mother's new partnership "may provide strong motivation [for her] to put the new partner in the 'daddy' role." The biological father is then less likely to be involved because the mother is more likely to exclude him and/or because he may feel he's now redundant.

When a mother wants to exclude her children's father from their lives, she can push him out easily. Family courts usually award custody to mothers, and are extremely lazy enforcing fathers' visitation rights. In most states, mothers are allowed to move their children thousands of miles away from the children's fathers, destroying the fathers' bonds with their children.

3 - Dr. Perry Crouch is a gang intervention specialist in Los Angeles. He states that only about half of one percent of the gang members he deals with have fathers in their lives.

4 - Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, after examining hundreds of pre-sentencing reports detailing the family histories of convicted criminals, found that the common denominator of those cases was that one parent, usually the father, was missing from the home.

5 - In Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps, sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur analyzed data from five different studies and concluded that children of single parent families are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school as their peers with two parents, they're also less likely to go to college if they do finish high school, and more likely to be both out of school and out of work, proving that fathers and educational performance are also strongly linked.

6 - The Urban Institute report titled What About the Dads? tells that even when fathers inform child welfare officials that they would like their children to live with them, the agencies seek to place the children in the foster care system instead, pushing fathers away from their children.

Readers should also check out the statistics on these issues gathered by the people of Fathers and Families: http://fathersandfamiliesorg.siteprotect.net/site/infores.php

The singularity of fathers

On this Father’s Day, first I want to congratulate all those fathers who read this blog and who fight for the cause of joint custody. Second, I want to use this celebration to highlight the singularity of fatherhood.

In days like this, always someone, in all good faith, approaches us to congratulate us for being father and mother at the same time. Although I almost understand the goodness behind this congratulation, I should object it because it is born from a radical confusion between the roles of the father and the mother. Being father and mother simultaneously is impossible. Those of us who believe in joint custody, we do so precisely because we know that the roles of father and mother are not, I repeat, are not interchangeable. A child needs to have a father and a mother, and if one of them is not there, no matter how much the other could try to fill his or her space, filling it is impossible. Fathers and mothers bring absolutely different but equally important elements to the lives of their children.

Another face of this confusion is that many expect that fathers to be nothing more than a mother with testicles. The differences between men and women are not a mere cultural construction, but they are born at the root of male and female natures. Men are and should behave like men, in the same way that women are and should behave like women. We should not feel less for being men.

The fact that sole custody decisions are usually awarded to mothers indicates that in many cases courts tend to forget that in the development of a child, both parents have different but equally important tasks. One of the most important statements of Beck v. Beck, the 1981 case that set the foundation for joint custody in New Jersey, is:

…that although defendant’s care of the girls was more than adequate, she is limited by an inability to be both a father and a mother. 86 N.J. 493 (1981)

In other words, fathers are only capable of being fathers, but also mothers are only capable of being mothers, and their children need both: “there is a real purpose in fatherhood as well as motherhood.” (86 N.J. 493)

When courts award sole physical custody to mothers, the mother, they only repeat a gender biased prejudice that should be eradicated from the courts, especially when they are deciding the well-being of the children these courts are supposed to protect.

Padres Sí Somos (We Are Fathers)

At this moment, when after so many years of struggle, Puerto Rico at last is at the doors of having a so needed law of joint custody, appears the pro-joint custody group Padres Sí Somos (www.padressisomos.org). The organization has the purpose of grouping Puerto Rican single fathers to serve them as support, bringing them orientation and help to deal with the daily problems and situations that they confront as head of family, in summary, to promote the development of men in their role as fathers.

The group was established by José Raúl Morales. Morales is a single father who is raising his son 7 years old son Arnaldo Raúl Morales since his first year. The problems that he has confronted as a single father served him as motivation for the creation of the organization. Currently, Morales seeks to establish alliances with diverse government agencies so they could help to provide professional services for the fathers who his group represents.

This group is an important effort that could crystallize advancements in the struggle for equality between fathers and mothers. Apart from its function as support for fathers, the group has assumed a star role in the lobbying in favor of the law of joint custody that is now under the consideration of the Senate of Puerto Rico. Padres Sí Somos is part of a new paradigm in the Puerto Rican society, paradigm that assigns equal importance to fathers and mothers in the raising of their children. In a country like Puerto Rico, where divorce is a true social epidemic, efforts to integrate divorced fathers to the lives of their children are urgently necessary.

It amazes me the wholeness of their approach and strategy. The services that the organization offers include orientation, meetings in support groups, contacts with health professionals, contacts for legal assistance, lectures, family recreational events, and workshops. Even at the purely geographical dimension, the group as structured its expansion in stages, being the first one the metropolitan zone and its surroundings (San Juan, Bayamón, Carolina, Guaynabo, Toa Baja, Trujillo Alto, Cataño, and Caguas).

Currently, the organization has 300 members, and is growing fast. I firmly believe in the power of organizations, and I have insisted from the beginning that those of us who believe in the equality of fathers and mothers should get organized in order to articulate efficiently our efforts. Organizations like Fathers and Families (www.fathersandfamilies.org) in the United States and Amor de Papá (www.amordepapa.org) in South America have been determinant factors in the advancements that the cause of joint custody has had in the recent years. I encourage all to support those groups like Padres Sí Somos that make effort to organize fathers in their struggle for our children.

A Message for Inés Quiles

Last May 14th, the political analyst Inés Quiles, in her radio show “Si no lo digo, reviento” which is aired Monday to Friday from 10:00 to 12:00 in the morning by the Puerto Rican radio station Radio Isla 1320 (www.radioisla1320.com), Inés interviewed senator Carmelo Ríos, proponent of avant-garde joint custody law before the legislature of Puerto Rico. After the interview, the microphones were opened to the public and one listeners, a father who has the custody of his children, called to criticize the law and to oppose joint custody, on the grounds that a child can not healthily adapt to life between two houses. To answer this unfounded argument, that same day I wrote Inés the following e-mail:

Inés:

I hope that you and your loved ones are well. I am Vidal Guzmán, a Puerto Rican architect resident in New Jersey, pro joint -custody activist, and knowing your commitment to our children and to joint custody, I have contacted you previously to comment on issues related to our cause.

Listening to your show today, I heard one of your listeners saying several dangerous mistakes about joint custody. I tried to call your program to correct the listener, but it was impossible to me to get in, and for that reason, I am sending you this message.

The listener, from the comfortable position of a father who has the custody of his children, said that all the studies on the subject affirmed that moving regularly a child from the house of a parent to the house of the other was harmful for the child. That, as we would in my “barrio” Mamey of Guaynabo, was invented from air. Those studies do not exist. We should not confuse the opinion of a professional with the scientific studies done by a professional. And every study has proven once and again that if there is something really harmful for a child is the absence of the father. In fact, every statistic study done to date point out that the most certain predictor of depression, criminal conduct and social inadequacy in the adult life of a child, is having being raised by a single mother. The following link connects to a brief bibliography on the subject:

http://hijosdemamaypapa.blogspot.com/2009/02/una-bibliografia-de-la-orfandad.html

The listener should read the book by Ann Coulter, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (Crown Forum, January 6, 2009), on which the second chapter is dedicated to demystify single motherhood and to show how this supposed victims are in fact victimizing society and causing irreparable harm to their children. That chapter is rich in bibliographical references.

For a child, dividing his/her week between two homes, far from being a trauma, is an adventure that brings them fun and consolation from the real trauma that is the divorce of their parents. The listener should read the article titled “How I divide my life between my divorced parents' homes”, http://www.newsweek.com/id/174698), written by Charlotte Juergens, a 14 years old girl raised under a joint custody arrangement. In that article, she narrates how her parents divorced when she was only two years old, and how from that age until today, she sleeps at each parent’s house every other day, spending equal time with each one.

The listener complained also that joint custody would force the child to get used to two very different styles. I should remind the listener that that is was is supposed to happen in any traditional family, where father were men and mothers were women and therefore, those of us who had the privilege of having being raised by both of our parents, we developed under the guidance of two human beings distinct but equally important for our formation. Because the only way of having being raised by two parents of similar styles is having being raised by two parents of the same sex, what I see as totally acceptable, and even then there would have been differences between them. The idea of having a father and a mother is precisely to have the opportunity of receiving education from two human beings that are radically distinct, and that distinction is one that allows the development of human being that are complete, educated and used to the glorious complexity of the human race.

Feel free to share this e-mail with your listeners, and to air my phone 862-596-0118 and my e-mail vidalg@yahoo.com, in case that someone wants to contact me to discuss more about this issue.

Always at your orders,
Vidal Guzmán

On the Virtue of Patience

Turbulent river, fishermen gain.
Hispanic proverb

Provoking your enemy to make mistakes is an ancient war tactic used by strategist throughout history. Illustrious generals have done actions against their enemies with the only purpose of forcing them to react in a disorganized manner, allowing them to use that disorganization in their favor. A surprise attack or an act of exemplary humiliation has many times been the difference between victory and defeat.

But this tactic has many applications beyond the battlefield.

Muhammad Ali used to insult and to slap his opponents with harmless blows, just for making them lose their patience. During this moment of chaotic reaction, his opponent would lose also the rational control of his actions, making mistakes that under normal circumstances he never would have made, and Ali would perform then an attack that he had planned thoughtfully, wining easily over an extremely difficult opponent.

This tactic is no stranger to the field of family relations, especially when the subject under discussion is the custody of children. Many divorced men have been lured into situation of disorganized reaction with the only purpose of using their reaction to block their contact with their children and, ultimately, to cancel their possibilities of having their custody.

The most common avatar of this tactic would be as follows: A divorced father meets his ex-wife for any reason (picking up their children for parenting time or bringing them home after, a phone call between parents, etc.), his ex-wife inflicts him some kind of physical or verbal violence, the father reacts accordingly in an analog manner, the ex-wife goes to court to place a restraining order because the father was violent and threatening, the father cannot get near his ex-wife, and since she has custody of their children, he cannot get near his children neither. Mission accomplished. Her real purpose was never putting barriers between her and her ex-husband, but between her ex-husband and their children.

Be aware. Expect the hidden snake.

Though I know that it is easy to say and hard to do, the only adequate response is the old virtue of patience. Having your children in mind, envisioning the happy future that you will have with them, realizing that the current moment is just an entrapment to make you loose everything that you love, will make think twice before reacting to any provocation, to any challenge. And if you are Christians, and even if you’re not, meditate on Jesus’ words:

A woman has pain when her time to give birth comes. But after the child is born, she doesn't remember the pain anymore because she's happy that a child has been brought into the world. (John 16:21)

Patience. It will come a day when everything that you are suffering now will seem little, even laughable. Live for that day.

On the Equality of Parents’ Rights

Although in reality, it has nothing to do with the way that New Jersey courts deal with family issues, the fact is that the body of family laws in New Jersey establishes that the both parents have equal rights to the custody of their children. In Ali v. Ali (279 N.J. Super 154, 1994), a seminal case on which the divorced parents battled for the custody of their only child, the courts clearly stated that both parents have equal rights to the custody of their children:

There is no mechanical presumption that either the father or the mother is entitled to custody at a fixed age. Thus, New Jersey’s standard of the “best interest of the child” recognizes “that the paramount consideration is the safety, happiness, physical, mental and moral welfare of the child. Neither parent has a superior right to custody… 279 N.J. Super 168 (1994)

This case of 1994 reaffirms what Beck v. Beck had already clarified in 1981:

…parents involved in custody controversies have by statute been granted both equal rights and equal responsibilities regarding the care, nurture, education, and welfare of their children. See N.J.S.A. 9:2-4. (…) …this clearly related statute indicate a legislative preference for custody decrees that allow both parents full and genuine involvement in the lives of their children following a divorce. This approach is consonant with the common law policy that “in promoting the child’s welfare, the Court should strain every effort to attain for the child the affection of both parents rather than one. 86 N.J. 485 (1981)

The fact that sole custody decisions are usually awarded to mothers indicates that in many cases courts tend to forget that in the development of a child, both parents have different but equally important tasks. One of the most important statements of Beck v. Beck is:

…that although defendant’s care of the girls was more than adequate, she is limited by an inability to be both a father and a mother. 86 N.J. 493 (1981)

In other words, fathers are only capable of being fathers, but also mothers are only capable of being mothers, and their children need both: “there is a real purpose in fatherhood as well as motherhood.” (86 N.J. 493)

When New Jersey family courts award sole physical custody to mothers in the absolute majority of cases as they do, they only repeat a gender biased prejudice that should be eradicated from the courts, especially when the laws have done it already.

The Lucifer Effect

Social Psychologist Philip Zimbardo directed in 1971 the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which volunteer college students randomly assigned to be guards or inmates in a simulated prison. Those students playing guards found themselves enacting sadistic, cruel, authoritarian, and abusive behavior.

In his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2008), Zimbardo connects to historical examples of injustice and atrocity, especially the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He found that almost anyone, given the right "situational" influences, could be made to abandon moral scruples and cooperate in violence and oppression. He insists that in cases like Abu Ghraib ,we should blame the situation and the system that constructed it.

Any group that has power without supervision or accountability for their actions, will do the same thing that the student of the Stanford Prison Experiment did, becoming sadistic, cruel, authoritarian, and abusive. Remember when Arian Germans were allowed to do whatever they wanted to German Jews without any legal consequences. Remember the horrors of Rwanda, when Hutus where allowed and encouraged to murder Tutsis. We, human being, are a dangerous animal.

I have said this before: the problem with family courts is not women, is attaching almost absolute power to a specific gender in family courts, establishing a hierarchy that in this case is based on gender, but it could be based (and it has been before) on race, ethnic group, religion, etc. The problems that fathers now confront in the Western World, are confronted in an even more terrible way by mothers in the Eastern World and in Africa. The problem is not women, is the social, legal and political structures that sustain gender inequality.

Gender Roles and the Status Quo

Fact #1: Women are in a disadvantageous situation in the workplace.

Fact #2: Men are in a disadvantageous situation in family courts.

Fact #3: The legal system political purpose is to preserve the status quo.

The issue of the inequality between genders is in fact an issue about how societies develop their approach to gender roles. The traditional roles assigned to men and women, on which men were assigned to the workplace and women were limited to the domestic realm, are ruthlessly preserved by our legal system and the network of social structures that support it.

Someone would reply that the legal system has passed laws that state the equality of genders at the workplace and at family courts, but the reality is that the same legal system that passed those laws is the one that blocks their enforcement by the intricate placement of financial and procedural roadblocks, with the only purpose of discouraging the victims of discrimination of claiming their legal rights.

It is time already to update not only laws, but also the legal system processes of enforcing them, so that courts procedures match the current stage of modern societies’ development, on which women are a necessary part of our workforce, and men take care of their children in households headed by married couples. Genders should be equal in every field of our lives.

So let us fight for gender equality. The times demand it. And our children are waiting for it.

Joint Custody and the Rights of the Child

The basic goal of joint custody is not protecting the parents, it is protecting children by preserving their natural attachments to their parents. Beck v. Beck states that:

At the root of the joint custody arrangement is the assumption that children in a unified family setting develop attachments to both parents and the severance of either of these attachments is contrary to the child’s best interest. 86 N.J. 487 (1981)

Sole custody not only violates the rights of both parents to be considered equal before the Law, but also violates the rights of the child. New Jersey adopted the Bill of Rights of Children from decisions of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the Family Court of Milwaukee County. Among the rights of children mentioned in there, right number ten affirms that children have:

The right to recognition that children involved in a divorce are always disadvantaged parties and that the law must take affirmative steps to protect their welfare… (N.J.S.A. 4:10-11)

Trying to see things from children’s point of view, trying to get for them what they need and crave, should be the primordial task of any court. By awarding sole physical custody, the Court evaded this responsibility disregarding that:

…the paramount consideration of any Court is (…) to insure the safety, happiness, physical, mental, and moral welfare of children. In evaluating this concern, the Court must “strain every effort to attain for the child the love and affection of both parties rather than one.” (New Jersey Practice. Family Law & Practice, p. 445)

The court should try since the very beginning of its procedures to award joint custody, if not for the parents, for the child who is the most vulnerable party of this painful process.

Fighting for our children is more than fighting for equality between men and women. Our fight is the fight for the rights of our children. That is why we cannot afford to give up. Our children are waiting.

A bibliography of orphanhood

Has ever happened to you that during a discussion on joint custody, suddenly appears a wise guy accusing that your ideas are your personal opinion, or even worst, asking you for the specific study from which you took your ideas? (Yes, it is true, there are people that, lacking common sense, other people’s common sense seems to them as an anomaly.)

So that next time you meet with someone who needs evidence that the sky is blue and that the Mediterranean exists (and that is not good for children to be orphans, be it physically or legally), next I will give a list of references required in any discussion on the subject, an annotated bibliography of solitude:

Benett, Bill. The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators: American Society at the End of the Twentieth Century, New York, Broadway Books, 1994. State that 63% of all teenagers committing suicide, 70% of all pregnant teenagers, and 71% of all teenagers abusing chemical substances, come from single- parent households, as well as 80% of all prison inmates and 90% of all homeless and runaway children.

Colson, Chuck. How Shall We Live, Tyndale House Publishers, 2004, p. 323. State that 72% of juvenile murderers and 60% of rapist come from single-mother homes.

DeParle, Jason. “Raising Kevion,” New York Times, August 22, 2004. Calls single-parent families a “double dose of disadvantage” for the children.

Eddy, Chuck. “The Daddy Shady Show,” Village Voice, December 31, 2002. Indicates that children that were raised by single-mothers are 5 times more likely to commit suicide, 9 times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape, 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.

Harper, C. C. & S. S. McLanahan. “Father Absence and Your Incarceration,” paper presented at the annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 1998. States that “the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent.”

Horn, Wade. “Why there is no substitute for Parents,” Imprimis 26, no. 6 (June 1997) p. 2. States that by 1996, 70% of minors that dropout from school, commit suicides, and were inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long term sentences were raised by single mothers. States also that girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and are more likely to end up in divorce.

Lyken, David T. “Parental Licensure,” American Psychologist, 56: 885, 887 (2001) Another study that states that the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent.

Lyken, David T. “Reconstructing Fathers”, American Psychologist, 55: 681,681 (2000) States that 70% de teenage pregnancies happen to girls who were raised by single-mothers.

McLanahan, Sara & Gary Sandefur. Growing Up With a Single Parent. What Hurts, What Helps. The definitive text on the subject of father’s absence. Includes statements as strong as this one: “In our opinion, the evidence is quite clear: Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parent’s race or educational background.”

Newland, Martin. “Why England is Rotting,” Maclean’s, June 11, 2007. States that Britain leads Europe in the proportion single-mothers household, and also leads Europe in crime, alcohol and drug abuse, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases.

Redding, Richard E. “It’s Really About Sex: Same Sex Marriage, Lesbigay Parenting, and the Psychology of Disgust”, Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, January 1, 2008. States that 70% de runaways, juvenile delinquents, and child murderers were raised by single-mothers.

Some of these references will take you to others, so this bibliography will only be the tip of the golden thread that will bring you to other research papers and other studies.

Jesus said “You will know truth and truth will set you free”. Let us study and spread the truth so that truth and justice be spread too. Let us do it now. Our children are waiting.

For women’s rights

I say that men’s rights are not only their rights: they are also the rights of women.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because if it is true that at family courts the weighing scale is still leaning towards women, in a very near future, when laws Project both parents rights no matter gender, we should make sure that laws are formulated in such a way the weighing scale does not leans in the opposite direction, like it has happened infinite times before in history when it comes the time of adjustments and corrections (Remember the French Revolution? And the urban violence unleashed in the post-apartheid South Africa?). Only through clear laws and fair court we would be able to achieve this task.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because the present state of family laws is ideological fossil that states that men belong to streets and women belong to their house wit the children, limiting this way the spectrum of divorced women with children. And this goes from the extraordinary to the ordinary, from the woman who since divorced has been forced to relegate his professional career to a second plane because she does not have time for it, to the one who, as one woman confessed to a pro-joint custody militant in Puerto Rico, she had not been able to go to the movies in years because the situation after her divorce had killed her social life. We fight for fair laws that assign equal responsibilities to men an women, laws that insert men in the family life that they are entitled to by right, and liberate women from having the full load of raising children.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because in the present state of things, those women who live with divorced men with children live with the continuous stress of sharing the emotional, social, and economical pressure to which present laws submit them. There is no worst enemy for a new family than a former wife devoted to sabotage it.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because many aunts, grandmother, godmothers and other women relatives of children of divorced men find themselves without contact with the children they love, because when courts block contact between fathers and their children, they’re not only blocking them, but their whole families.

It is for all of the above that leaders of pro-joint custody groups, like Ana Isabel Gorduño of Amor de Papá in Mexico, and Anneliese Garrison of Parents Without Custody of Southern New Jersey are women. They have understood what is at stake in this struggle.

It is time that men and women to be equal for the law. Let us fight to achieve this equality. Our children are waiting.

The single mother industry

Last Sunday I discussed the subject of the elections in Puerto Rico and how these elections could signify a change in the state policies regarding family laws, a change towards laws that simultaneously protect children and treat fathers fairly.

I ask to my non-Puerto Rican readers a little bit of patience while I go back to my country to discuss a problem that I believe is not exclusive of Puerto Rico, since it has multiple more subtle incarnations in many other places.

In many contemporary societies single mothers have become a sacred object, something untouchable that cannot be questioned, because the universal consensus, sponsored by the political correctness tyranny, sustains that single mothers are a kind of social martyrs that we all have to pity and feel compelled to help and sustain economically. This notion is being spread by mass media, even though is evident that the proliferation of single mother is more than anything a symptom of a social disease, the dissolution of the family nucleus, which in turn creates a long sequence of other social evils: children raised without a father figure, children that due to this condition have more propensity to criminal behavior, depression, promiscuity, etc. (Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, propose that the drastic reduction of criminality in the United States after Roe versus Wade was due precisely to Roe versus Wade, because this decision reduced dramatically the amount of children raised by single mothers, children that, as many studies have shown, have twice the probabilities of becoming criminals than children raised by both parents.)

Puerto Rico is an extreme case of this canonization of the single mother and of the conversion of this canonization into an industry. Many women have discovered an easy way to earn a living: have children and live of child support. And I am not talking about that women who has had to divorce and who now struggles to rebuild her life and who receives child support to help her raise her children. I talk about those women that in Puerto Rico live of their motherhood, because the child support that they get is being used to support them and not their children, or even worst, because, because they are serial mothers who have children of different men in order to live solely of the child support checks that they get from those men.

The present laws of child support pervert the whole process of supporting economically our children, polluting it from its base. The present situation is supported by three equally pernicious legs:

First, the absolute disproportion between the obligations of both parties, demanding from one (the father) much larger money amounts than the ones required to the other (the mother). The disproportion is such and the load is so onerous for fathers that most times it is far beyond their real possibilities and ends up taking many of them to bankruptcy, many of them to jail, some of them to suicide, and blocks the possibilities of rebuilding their lives after divorce. To add insult, the other party can even stay without a job, because the State does not believe that it has to help with the financial burden of raising their own children.

Second, the absolute lack of controls that ensure that the child support money will be used for child support. I know of a case on which a father calls ASUME, the government agency that is in charge of managing child support, to denounce that one of his child support checks had been cashed in a San Juan casino, just to be told that his responsibility was to pay child support, and once it was in his ex-wife hands, she could use it as she wanted to. Now, give me a reason to pay child support. While the government does not enforce mechanisms that ensure that the money paid for the children is being used in the children, child support Hill remain being used by unscrupulous mothers as a means to earn a living.

And third and most important and revealing, the outbreak of single mothers in Puerto Rico is the direct result of the discriminatory policy of family courts, which award women child custody in the almost entirety of cases. Like in the urban legends on which a villain amputates the legs of a child to force him to beg for money in the streets, in Puerto Rico the State denies joint child custody to the fathers and then and ask the people to feel pity for the women who have to raise their children by themselves. There is no better example of an ill-intentioned social consciousness.

The single mother, as it is conceived in the Puerto Rican social discourse, is a political creation that has the purpose of creating a group of voters loyal to the political part that protects its privileges, no matter that in order to do so the rights of a great part of the population, children and fathers, have to be sacrificed.

I say something that because everyone knows, nobody says, but it is worth to be brought to this discussion: politicians do not look for the good of their countries, but for their own perpetuation in power. Because women are the majority of the Puerto Rican electorate, politicians have not taken the risk of losing the votes of this sector, and have turned it into a privileged sector, exempting it from the duties that are demanded from the others, in this case, of financially supporting their own children. Ask yourself: When was the last time that you heard of mother going to jail for not paying child support? Never? I thought so.

The insufferable passivity and cowardice of men have been the fundamental vehicles for this situation to reach this point. Without them, the present state of family laws would be unsustainable. It is time for this to change.

Our children are waiting.

Against giving up

The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.
Jesus Christ

Resignation is cowardice. Accepting life as it comes to us, accepting injustice and inequality as if they were unavoidable of life, is cowardice.

Because of that, because no human being should be forced to settle up for less than he/she deserves, because no human being has to suffer in silence the blows of life, the only choice that is left is to fight bravely, to fight relentlessly, to fight until the victorious end.

That is why every time I hear someone telling me that I should be happy because at least I can see my daughter, while other fathers cannot see their children, their words, instead of being a comfort, are nothing more than a well-intentioned insult.

I ask myself what would Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had replied, if during the effervescence of the civil rights movement, someone would have told them that should feel satisfied because, at least, they were not slaves. I am convinced that both of them would have felt as offended as I feel every time someone ask me to settle for the present state of custody laws, state that perpetuates inequality between genders by priming the role of the mother over the role of the father.

Human life without dignity is not human life. And there is no dignity in living a second-class life, being demoted from parent to vice-parent. Anything less than equality is unacceptable. No human being should accept being treated in way less than he/she should be treated. We are fathers, not babysitters of our own children, not the guys who visit them occasionally and who are important only because they supply the money. We are fathers and it is time to demand being treated as such.

We cannot accept that the immense majority of times child custodies are awarded indiscriminately to a gender, disposing of the rights of the other. We cannot accept that financial responsibilities of rising children to fall falls upon a gender, allowing the other to use the money assigned to the children without any control that ensures that the money is being used in what was assigned to. We cannot accept that children who are not orphans to be forced to live as such by court decree.

It is time for the fight to start.

Our children are waiting for us

On the privacy of pain

Mi dolor es mío (My Pain is Mine) is one of the classic boleros of the Puerto Rican composer Felipe Goyco, better known as Don Felo. Although it is not one of my favorite boleros (and bolero music is one my favorite musical genres), I want to quote its title for the terrible truth it expresses: Pain, due to its individual, private nature, is a condition impossible to share, impossible to express.

Our pain is our pain. Our pain is something that, no matter how many words we use or how many signals we give, no other human being will be able to understand. Nobody can imagine, much less comprehend the intensity and dimension of what we feel. Even those who have suffered the same pain, once they have survived it they forget it, and if they meet someone who is suffering the same situation that they already have lived, they tend to despise it as something that will pass or something to which we will get used to: “I remember when my father died.” “I had pneumonia once.” “My children grew without me, but they’re adults already.” etc. Even worst, many conversations between people in the same situation become wars to decide who is suffering the most: “You lost your dad, but I lost my mom and my dad.” “You have pneumonia but I have cancer.” “You see your children once a week, but I see mine once a month.” Human nature is, as other people wiser than me have said before me, selfish, miserable.

Only we care about our pain. And I say this to state, now from the viewpoint of the parents that believe in joint custody and suffer the sad consequences of the present state of our laws, that no one who is not a parent in this situation will be interested in solving the problem, and I suspect, and say this with deep sorrow, that no one who is not a parent in our situation will do nothing to solve it.

From these statements, I derive that the only ones who will fight to secure a right will be those directly affected by the lack of it. This is not unusual: With rare exceptions, the ones who fought for the rights of black people were black people, the ones who fought for the rights of women were women, and so did workers, gays, etc.

The only ones who will fight for the rights of non-custodial parents will be those non-custodial parents. Only us know and suffer what we know and suffer.

We need to get organized. We need to establish communication networks between those who fight for our children. We need to talk, not with our friends and relatives in private spaces and in low voice, but in public and making as much noise as possible. We need to fight, not as individuals who go to courts one by one, but as a pressure group that makes pressure system, politicians, judges, and government agencies.

Let’s start the fight. Our children are waiting.

Small Tragedies

No one cares about children. There are many reasons for that: Children don’t vote. Children don’t give money to the political parties. Children don’t dine with judges, don’t play golf with politicians, and don’t belong to the clubs that big entrepreneurs belong to. And if this wasn’t enough, children can’t even decide on what happen with their own lives. Then, why should we be interested in a group that has no power at all? Why defend those who cannot defend us? How does it help us to protect those who cannot do anything in return for us, nothing?

Because children don’t count in the circles of power, the state, that which is supposed to protect them by means of the so called family courts and agencies, those courts and agencies that are supposed to look for their rights, the state ignores them in everything that is most vital, most necessary for them: the laws of custody, the laws of child support, the laws of adoption...

In order to make us decide to protect children, maybe is not enough to use moral reasons (we should protect the defenseless), social reasons (children who are raised today without a father figure will become a social problem tomorrow), and psychological reasons (children raised today under the single parent custody regime will be more inclined to depression and suicide when they become adults). Maybe we need a reason closer to us, closer to our hearts. I propose one: we should protect children because they are our children, because they are the children of our brothers and sisters, of our friends, of our neighbors, in summary, because they are the children of another human being who feel for them the same unconditional and absolute love that we feel for our children. If no other reason is enough, I believe that this must be.

With this reason on mind, starting today I will publish a new edition of this blog every Sunday. My intention was to start doing it in September, but situations beyond my control didn’t allow that to happen.

I publish this blog with several purposes in mind: first, to expose the tragedy that the present state of laws regarding children welfare represent, by publishing those news on the subject that come to my knowledge. Second, to promote laws that affirm the rights of children, and the rights of their parents to raise them and to relate with them in a fair and healthy manner. The name Children of Mom and Dad summarizes my proposal; children must have mothers and fathers to raise them, no mothers or fathers: our children should not be orphans by decree of the courts, as they presently are. And third, but maybe even more important that all of the above, my purpose is to organize groups that implement actions that promote the goals already mentioned.

There are too many people that don’t have a voice. There are too many tragedies that, because happen in the small kingdom of children, are despised and ignored. Hopefully, from now on, the voice of this blog will be voice of those who have none.