Quote: Opponents point to domestic violence as reason enough why shared
parenting is not an option. But what they suggest is that the domestic
violence tail should wag the Family Court dog. Domestic violence is not
the norm in family breakdown. Basing policy on the worst-case family
severs relationships for tens of thousands of children for no good
reason.

The same goes for child sexual abuse ... is not the norm and should not
"wag the Family Court dog".

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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,6393275,00.html

The Australian
7 May 2003

Fathers are not optional
By Janet Albrechtsen

In the photograph, the father is holding a tiny baby, a few weeks old,
maybe less. 

The father is looking down at the baby in wonder. His first child. He is
oblivious to the camera. I didn't notice how much love was in that photo
until I had a child. That photo of my father is on my fridge as a daily
reminder of his love. 

Fatherhood is like that. So often the deep bond between father and child
goes unnoticed. It is underestimated and sadly misunderstood. How else do
you explain a society where fatherlessness is so common? 

In Australia upwards of 1 million children live separate from their
fathers. More than one third of children who still see their dads never
spend the night with him. These children and their fathers never
experience typical family life together - being kissed goodnight, waking
up together, starting the day over breakfast, being more than a "visitor"
in each other's lives. These are the distressing findings of Bruce Smyth
and Anna Ferro, from the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

Here's a flash. Parenting is in the doing. It's not babysitting. It's the
whole bedevilling, demanding, riveting and privileged experience of
raising children. Given the chance, most fathers are eager to embrace
that because, like mothers, fathers have the same need to be with and
near their child. 

Imagine if 1 million Australian children lived apart from their mothers,
and study after study showed that these children were generally worse off
than those who enjoyed meaningful relationships with both parents. Voices
would be raised, forums convened, radical solutions pushed. 

Just look at the attention devoted to motherhood. Yesterday, high-profile
American feminist and author Naomi Wolf was in Melbourne to give the
motherhood cause a kick along at a forum with Sex Discrimination
Commissioner Pru Goward. As the hype around Wolf shows, motherhood and
its woes are fashionable. And we're moving in a forward direction trying
to make it easier for mothers. 

Last week on Andrew Denton's Enough Rope, Wolf said that society's
reluctance to pay mothers to care for children revealed a contempt for
motherhood. The child's unconditional love is not payback enough; mothers
deserve more, said Wolf. At least, Wolf says men should also be paid.
"It's Stalinist to designate one gender to be responsible for
child-rearing," she says.

Yet that is where we're at. Fatherhood is still grappling to find a
voice, let alone a foothold, in the national conscience. Too often
fathers are optional extras in children's lives. That's contempt.

A small upward blip in the percentage of fathers granted residence -
formerly called custody - orders by the Family Court in the year
2000-2001 was recently hailed by one academic as a "massive cultural
shift in favour of fathers".

Yes, residence orders now favour fathers in almost 20 per cent of cases -
up from 15.3 per cent in 1994-95. But in an extensive study of contested
parenting cases from 1988 to May 2000, Lawrie Moloney, senior lecturer at
Melbourne's La Trobe University, found that fathers tend to succeed only
where the mother is judged inadequate - they win by "default" - not
because of their own capacity as parents. Hardly a cultural shift.

And thousands of children still go to bed each night unable to say
goodnight to their dad. The only cultural shift they know is
fatherlessness, which David Popenoe, Professor of Sociology at Rutgers
University, describes as "the most basic, unexpected, and extraordinary
social trend of our time". Says Popenoe in his book Life Without Father:
"Father absence is a major force lying behind many of the
attention-grabbing issues that dominate the news: crime and delinquency;
premature sexuality and out-of-wedlock teen births; deteriorating edu
cational achievement; depression, substance abuse, and alienation among
teenagers; and the growing number of women and children in poverty."

There is something profoundly wrong when, in full knowledge of these
costs, society does little to protect the love and intimacy between
father and child. 

Unfortunately, the Family Court remains captive to the more illogical
parts of feminist thinking that stakes out a paradoxical, myth-like power
over children-rearing upon divorce. Shared responsibility may be the
theme song during the marriage, but when it collapses the holiness of
motherhood is resurrected to deny father and child the right to a
meaningful relationship. 

A detailed study last year by Robert Bauserman in the American Journal of
Family Psychology found children in joint custody enjoy higher
self-esteem, better family relationships and higher school performance
than those in sole custody (usually maternal). 

The Family Court has ignored that message. Of the 13,194 orders made by
the Family Court in 2000-01, there were only 329 shared parenting orders.

Opponents point to domestic violence as reason enough why shared
parenting is not an option. But what they suggest is that the domestic
violence tail should wag the Family Court dog. Domestic violence is not
the norm in family breakdown. Basing policy on the worst-case family
severs relationships for tens of thousands of children for no good
reason. 

Has the fatherless child become the inevitable consequence of the new
order of no-fault, drive-through divorce? I look at the black and white
photograph on the fridge and wonder why the falling in love with baby
that is so central to most women's being, and the obvious value of that
love, is so easily dismissed in the case of fathers. 

For all the progress, in other ways society has changed inexorably for
the worse.