Roanoke Times Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: TUESDAY, June 5, 1990 TAG: 9006050574 SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING SOURCE: TAMAR LEWIN THE NEW YORK TIMES DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
While it has long been common knowledge that many poor children, especially those whose parents never wed, had little contact with their fathers, a research paper has found the phenomenon of the disappearing father alarmingly widespread.
The paper, by Frank Furstenberg and Kathleen Mullan Harris, both of the University of Pennsylvania, was based on a study that followed more than 1,000 children in disrupted families nationwide from 1976 to 1987.
The families were selected to be a representative sample, mirroring the general population on factors such as race, geography, income and education.
Over all, more than half the children whose fathers did not live with them had never been in the father's home, the When I see him, if I ever see him again, all I want to do is beat him and spit on him and then laugh when I'm done. Misty Milot, 12 study found, and 42 percent had not seen their fathers at all in the previous year.
Only 20 percent slept at the father's house in a typical month, and only one in six saw the father once a week or more, on average.
The problem of maintaining contact with an absent father affects millions of children, and the number is growing.
More than 21 percent of all American children lived in families headed by women in 1988, almost twice the percentage that did so in 1970.
"The whole abandonment thing is terrible for the children," said Paula Roberts, a senior staff lawyer at the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington. "In terms of the possibility of these kids' making healthy long-term relationships for themselves, it's very troubling."
Furstenberg said the results of the study, published this spring, might reflect a changing concept of fatherhood in American society, with many men behaving as though their responsibilities to their children last only as long as their relationship with the children's mother.
"Men regard marriage as a package deal," said Furstenberg, a sociologist who studies families. "They cannot separate their relations with their children from their relations to their former spouse," he said.
"When that relationship ends, the paternal bond usually withers within a few years, too."
Children who live apart from their mothers are a far smaller group, representing only one in nine single-parent families nationwide, but according to the study they fared substantially better in contact with the absent parent.
Only 7 percent had not seen the mother at all in the previous year and 58 percent slept at her house during a typical month.
But, Furstenberg said, both mothers and fathers who live apart from their children find it hard work to maintain a close relationship.
Doing so is often complicated by geographic distance, remarriage or an inability to negotiate amicable child-rearing arrangements with a former spouse.
"We tend to think of abandoning children as a bad personality trait, but it seems that there are real mechanical obstacles to maintaining a relationship when you're excluded from the household, even for moms," Furstenberg said.
The study found surprisingly little difference between fathers who had divorced the mothers and those who were never married.
For both groups, contact with the children dropped off sharply the longer the father had been gone.
And the estrangement occurred no matter how old the child was when the father and the mother separated.
Fathers of all races lose contact with their children: in the study, 60 percent of the black fathers had not seen their children in the previous year, as against 47 percent of the white fathers.
Since most women raising children without the father in the home receive no child support payments, having an absent father can spell both emotional and economic problems for children.
Misty and Joey Milot of Dallas have not seen their father for six years.
Their parents divorced in 1981 when the children were small.
For a while, their father visited occasionally and paid child support regularly. But in 1984 he stopped coming, and in 1988, the payments trickled to a halt.
And now, 12-year-old Misty says what she feels toward her father is simply rage.
"When I see him, if I ever see him again, all I want to do is beat him and spit on him and then laugh when I'm done," she said. "I'm more than mad that he abandoned us, I'm disgusted."
Milot, who now lives in Arizona, blames his former wife for the estrangement.
"We had a very bitter divorce and I moved away, but whenever I came back to Dallas to see the kids, their mother would always get in the way," he said.
"Once I got there," he said, "the kids were crying and cowering by the wall, because she's been priming them against me, so they were petrified. After that, I sat down and said to myself, `Norman, what's happening to those kids isn't worth it; let them get on with their lives.' I'm convinced I've done the right thing."
His former wife, Lynda Milot Benson, who heads the Texas chapter of ACES, the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support, a Toledo, Ohio-based organization concerned with child support, said she never interfered with her former husband's visits.
"I can't think of anything that in any way resembled that," she said. "It's the typical thing you hear from abandoning fathers, that the moms are psychotic, and it's all their fault."
About the only thing they both agree on is that the divorce has been very hard on their children.
"The sad part is that kids need two parents," Benson said. And Milot said, "Kids don't deserve to be torn up like that."
Experts in family matters say the pattern of separation, bitterness, accusation and counteraccusation, and guilty misery on the part of the children is so common as to be predictable.
Almost always, they say, the fathers who stop visiting and stop paying child support accuse the mother of being a bad parent, interfering with visitation, or spending past child support payments on herself.
"Those accusations are usually a red herring, either to cover up lousy behavior by the abandoning parent, or as a bargaining chip to make the custodial parent accept less child support," said Roberts, of the Center for Law and Social Policy.
Many mothers report they have heard from the father of their children only rarely since he left, have no contact with his family, and little sense of his whereabouts, a state of affairs the children often find bewildering.
Frances Snyder of New Carrollton, Md., never married the father of her daughter, Chelesea, and he moved across the country before the baby was born five years ago.
"He called when she was 18 months old to ask what I'd had," she said. "And then I didn't hear from him again until last year. Chelesea asks where he is, and why he doesn't love her or come visit, and I don't know all the answers."
Children's advocates say it is difficult to find a policy solution that would change the behavior of fathers.
"You can't legislate a parent to have a good relationship with a child," said David Liederman, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America in Washington.
"The only thing we can really address is the economic abandonment, the fact that so many of these children are left in poverty when their father fails to pay child support."
Despite increasingly tough child-support enforcement laws, federal statistics show that about $18 billion of owed child support is unpaid.
For example, Milot, who once earned $100,000 a year, was ordered to pay $750 a month for Misty and Joey, but he says he has not held a regular job in two years and cannot make the payments.
In many cases, children whose biological fathers leave them will eventually see the father role filled by another man who comes into the household.
"Many men who become stepparents or surrogate parents in a new household transfer their loyalties to their new family," said Furstenberg. "Relations with their biological children become largely symbolic if they survive at all."
Benson, who has remarried, said Misty and Joey are far less upset about the loss of their biological father now that they have a stepfather who can coach them in sports and go to school activities.
Milot, too, remarried and had another child in Indiana, and another divorce.
He says he fought to maintain contact with the child and that she lived with him briefly. Now, because of problems with the girl's mother, he has not seen the girl for more than a year.
by CNB