It is fatherhood that makes childhood possible.

The Case for Father Custody

“It is fatherhood that makes childhood possible.” ~ Daniel Amneus

A judge will try a divorce case in the morning and place the children in the mother’s custody. He will try a criminal case in the afternoon and send a man to prison for robbing a liquor store. The chances are three out of four that the criminal he sends to prison grew up in a female headed household just like the one he himself created that morning when he tried the divorce case.[1] He can’t see any connection between the two cases. The time lag prevents him: the kids he placed in the mother’s custody were toddlers and the criminal he sent to prison was in his teens or twenties. Toddlers don’t rob liquor stores.

Besides, most fatherless boys don’t grow up to rob liquor stores and most fatherless girls don’t grow up to breed illegitimate children. Therefore what? Therefore the legal policy of giving custody to mothers is OK? Therefore we can ignore the increased probability that fatherlessness will create delinquency?

This is the “safe drunk driver argument.” Most drunk drivers don’t get in accidents. They get home safely and sleep it off. Therefore drunk driving is OK.

It’s not OK.

And exiling fathers from families is not OK. The fact that will not go away is stated by sociologist David Popenoe in his book Life Without Father:

The negative consequences of fatherlessness are all around us. They affect children, women, and men. Evidence indicating damage to children has accumulated in near tidal-wave proportions. Fatherless children experience significantly more physical, emotional, and behavioral problems than do children growing up in intact families.

Why do Judges routinely award custody of children to mothers when they try a divorce case?

No individual is completely free.

 

Both legally and socially, society imposes a multitude of restrictive “shoulds” on its individual members. The “shoulds”, developed over a long period of time, serve as a major vehicle for maintaining order. While they evolve and change, and sometimes allow for limited individual variation, they represent a powerful and ever-present influence on behavior.

One of the ways in which the “shoulds” function is by defining social roles — the what and the how of everyday but important behaviors, like being a spouse, parent, child, employee or neighbor. It has also been society’s practice, however, to further many roles by gender — a spouse is either a husband or wife; a parent, either a father or a mother; a child, either a son or a daughter — and to require particular and different kinds of behaviors, thoughts and feelings from the males and females occupying these roles.

We have heard in some detail from the women’s movement how such sex-stereotyping has limited the potential of women. More recently, men have become increasingly aware that they too are assigned limiting roles which they are expected to fulfill regardless of their individual abilities, interests, physical/emotional constitutions or needs. Men have few or no effective choices in many critical areas of life. They face injustices under the law. And typically they have been handicapped by socially defined “shoulds” in expressing themselves in other than stereotypical ways.

Society has taught us, for example, that a “real” man is strong… courageous… knowledgeable… disciplined… level headed… competitive… successful… in control …unemotional… heterosexual… sexually aggressive… sexually competent… and silent-suffering. A man is also dependent on women for satisfying relationships, for child rearing and for routine home and health maintenance like housekeeping and cooking. All of this and more, society has taught us, constitutes a man’s role privilege or burden as the case may be.

Many men, however, are no longer comfortable with the traditional male role. Emotionally adrift, they are searching for a new identity; yet they find few viable alternatives to traditional masculine behavior (and even these few are narrow and limiting).