Germany and Children’s Right to Have a Father

I have said many times that our struggle is not a speed race that will be won in a sudden blow, but a marathon that will be won with endurance and patience.  I have said also that our struggle has to be counted as the sum of many battles that have been won before and that are being won right now.  I have to add now that there are no small battles, that there are no negligible victories.

A man in Germany had a son out of wedlock.  When he requested custody of his son, it was denied because the mother refused.  He challenged the decision and went to the Constitutional Court.  This, the country's highest court, just have ruled that mothers should not be allowed to veto an unmarried father's request for custody, stating that such a veto is unconstitutional and discriminates against his parental rights (“Children Need Both a Mother and a Father”).

Until this ruling, in the cases of separated couples that have never been married, a father could only apply for custody if the mother agreed to.  The court ruled that, while the mother can continue to be initially granted custody, the father should be allowed to request it.

This ruling followed another by the European Court of Human Rights in 2009, which stated that German laws violated anti-discrimination laws and contradicted the European directive on the right to sustain and respect family life.

The German press greeted this judgement as a step forward of German family law.  The article in Der Spiegel that I am quoting quotes several of these enthusiastic responses:

Süddeutsche Zeitung:

"The constitutional court's decision on custody rights has put an end to an older, insensitive period of family law.  More than 60 years after the German constitution came into effect, it has finally fulfilled its duty to put illegitimate children on an equal footing with other children.  The judgement is a good example of the court's power to make the law adapt to changed family structures.  Almost every third child (in Germany) is now born out of wedlock.  The country's highest court is now trying, with much juristic finesse, to give these children the right to a father as well as a mother."

Financial Times Deutschland:

"First of all, a change in the law is required…  Unmarried and married fathers should be automatically given custody rights to their children when they are born, rather than having to apply for it."

"The reality is that the mother has long ceased to be the only important attachment figure in a child's life."

Die Welt:

"The judgement is a step in the right direction.  Unmarried fathers will in future have a better chance of securing custody rights.  However, to get this chance they have to still drag their ex-partner to court.  This is not only an unnecessary burden on the courts, it is also a burden on the relationship between the parents, which provides the framework for any joint custody of a child."

"It would make sense to give both parents automatic custody rights when a child is born -- including if they are unmarried."

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

"It cannot be the case that the mother can block a father's custody of his child, and in doing so interfere with their relationship.  The law cannot abet these kinds of power games that happen when relationships break down.  This is about the welfare of the child.  And family law is still infused with the spirit of the past, a different family reality.  The new ruling is only reflecting the deep changes in society."

"Children need both a mother and a father.  (…)  Those who bring a child into the world together should share responsibility for it."

Bild:

"Fathers are not per se the worst parent and mothers are not automatically the best.  Uncaring fathers and caring mothers -- these are clichés that since yesterday can be put where they belong: in the garbage can of prejudices."

"Of course the best thing is when a child lives with the father AND mother.  As a proper family.  But this ideal case is (unfortunately) not always reality."

"And if the parents split up, then there should be only one criteria for deciding who has custody: the wellbeing of the child."

For those who still had doubts about the power a lone man could have against the system: watch what just happened in Germany.

The Face of Melancholy

As everyone knows, I live in Montclair, New Jersey, a town that I have adopted and that have adopted me as my second home, after my hometown of Guaynabo.  Montclair is like a small Manhattan, refined, cosmopolitan, socially progressive, racially diverse and tolerant, very tolerant.

When summer arrives, those of us who have children strive to find fun things for them to do while they enjoy their summer vacations.  Since Montclair has three public swimming pools, two weeks ago I got the season pass for my daughter and me, and since then, whenever we can we go to "Essex Pool”, a public swimming pool we have just two blocks from where we live.

Adjacent to the pool is small park for children, where I take my daughter when she gets tired of being in the pool.  On Friday, while we were there, I saw a scene that brought me sad memories.  A young man, perhaps in his mid-thirties, played with a beautiful girl, no older than two years old.  Both showed the features that we usually associate with Slavic races, including light hair and very light blue eyes.  While talking to a friend of mine who at the time was also there, I could not help noticing that although the man could not stop smiling while playing with his daughter, behind his smile there was a clear hint of sadness, of ill-disguised melancholy.  Since I could not see a wedding ring on his hand, I concluded that this man was a divorced father, and I wondered if what I was seeing was just the little time that family courts award to the majority of divorced fathers to be with their children.

I could not help feeling sad myself.  This man, whose face mingled the joy of playing with his beautiful daughter and a painfully hidden sadness, reminded me that a year ago that man was I.  A year ago, before the court granted me a fairer schedule to be with my daughter, I used to feel that bitter joy, that sad aftertaste after each otherwise joyous moment.

I say that it is a tragedy that there are so many fathers suffering the slow hell to which the family courts subject them by excluding them from the lives of their children, and/or by subjecting them to the status of vassals of their former wives.  In most cases, divorced fathers are reduced to the humiliating category of second-class parents, parents of a second order.  The human need to feel worthy and valued prevents a father in this situation from enjoying the brief time that he shares with his children.

Earlier this week, talking about the social services that churches provide to their communities, I said that one of the tragedies of the human condition was that the only pain we can understand is our own pain.  Now I say that it is a tragedy that only the fathers who live these calvaries could understand the continuous and excruciating pain that feels to be in this situation.

To me, who have had the dubious privilege of having being there, those desolate faces of fathers bring me memories, and make me sad.

Always Dad, by Paul Mandelstein

The book Always Dad: Being a Great Father During & After Divorce, by Paul Mandelstein, is a very useful book for divorced fathers. Finalist for The Publishers Marketing Associations Benjamin Franklin Award, this book aspires to be a guide for those fathers who want to remain being fathers during and after divorce.

Mandelstein, a divorced father of three, founded in 1999 the nonprofit organization Father Resource Network (www.father.com), where he serves as chairman and executive director. This network helps divorced fathers, facilitating workshops and lectures focused on fatherhood in the 21st century.

In his book Always Dad, Mandelstein distills his years of experience working with divorced fathers into down-to-earth ideas and strategies to guide fathers to continue playing a crucial role in their children's lives.

Following is a summary of the chapters of the book:

Introduction - Lemons into Lemonade: Divorce as a chance for growth as a persona and as a father.

Chapter One - Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: On keeping healthy bonds with our children after divorce.

Chapter Two - Creating Your New Home: On how to make a new home and how to make room in it for your kids.

Chapter Three - Daily Life as a Single Dad: A typical day in the life of a single dad.

Chapter Four - The Non-custodial Dance: Establishing the grounds for raising children in two different homes. Earning the trust of your children in the new situation.

Chapter Five - Ex-Communications: 10 Ways to Make Talking to Your Ex Easier: Advice on how to communicate with your ex.

Chapter Six - Settling Up: Legal and Custody Issues.

Chapter Seven - Let's Get Real About the Kids: On becoming the parent you want to be for your kids.

Chapter Eight - Keeping Yourself Together: On recognizing and managing stress and depression.

Chapter Nine - Birthdays and Holidays: Tips for sharing birthdays and holidays with your ex.

Chapter Ten - Kids, Friends, Dating, and Lovers: On how to start dating again, and how doing this relates to your kids and your ex.

Chapter Eleven - Taking a Chance on Love Again: On remarriage and blending the new families.

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

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.