Glenn Sacks and Robert Franklin of Fathers and Families explain why men and fathers need advocacy.
Fathers and Families is actively engaged in creating a society which treats fathers and mothers as equally important to the wellbeing of children. We welcome this opportunity to contribute to the Good Men Project Magazine’s Men’s Rights series, to highlight some specific challenges fathers face.
Our first issue concerns fathers and adoption or, more specifically, the way the adoption system and related family court 
proceedings disregard the love that fathers have for their children, and instead allow (and at times actively facilitate) their children’s adoption to strangers.
In the United States today there are roughly 425,000 children who do not have living or functional biological parents in their lives. Most of these children are in the foster care system. At the same time, there are only about 75,000 non-stepparent adoptions each year. Around the world there are millions of children without parents who live in grim, understaffed, underfunded orphanages. Compared to the demand for people to raise parentless children in the U.S. and worldwide, qualified adoptive parents are in very short supply.
Given that, one would think that public policy would strive to ensure that as many of those kids got adopted into loving homes as possible. Instead, we often do the opposite—we deny capable unwed fathers the right to raise their own children. These children are instead given against the fathers’ will to adoptive couples. Beyond the terrible injustice to the father and every child with a fit father onto whom we force adoption, we are also denying needy children the opportunity to be raised by loving adoptive parents.
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Part of the problem is the Putative Father Registries that 29 states employ. Officially, the PFRs are intended to provide legal recognition to the biological father of a child, provided the father registers within a limited (usually 30 day) time-frame. Fathers who register are then to be notified if the mother decides to put their children up for adoption. However, regardless of the PFRs’ official intent, the result is to prevent fathers from being able to assert their rights to parent their newborn children.
Here’s how they work: if an unmarried man fathers a child, he must file a form with the state bureau of vital statistics or other agency. But if he doesn’t, and the mother places the child for adoption, the father is not entitled to notice of the termination of his parental rights. His child is taken without his knowledge, regardless of his desire and ability to care for it.
In many states, Putative Father Registries are a closely guarded secret. Texas, for example, does not budget money to publicize its registry. Not surprisingly, men are almost entirely unaware of its existence or of its effect on their parental rights.
California has no PFR, but it too undercuts the rights of single fathers whose children are placed for adoption. According to the California Supreme Court, an unmarried father must “physically bring the child into his home” and care for it, in order to retain his parental rights. Needless to say, that’s impossible to do when his child is living with adoptive parents.
In the recent cases of Kevin O’Dea in Utah, John Wyatt in Virginia, 17-year-old Christian Diaz in California, and Benjamin Wyrembek in Ohio, the fathers believed, up until shortly before their children’s birth, that they would soon be the active, hands-on dads they wanted to be. But they were wrong. In each case, the mothers managed to turn the children over to adoption agencies and adoptive parents without the fathers’ knowledge.
In two of those cases (O’Day and Diaz), the fathers lost their children for good. It took Wyrembek three years of bitter litigation to obtain the return of his son. (That process has just ended by the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusing to grant the adoptive parent’s writ of certiorari.) Wyatt still awaits a decision on whether he will lose his daughter.
In none of those cases was there any allegation that the father is unfit. Rather, the adoption agencies were allowed to play a largely successful game of legal hide-and-seek in which the longer they kept the child away from his or her father, the less chance there was that a court would void the adoption and give the father custody.
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The second issue we raise concerns the child welfare/foster care system. Fathers and Families is aware that mothers are sometimes mistreated by the child welfare system, and has been involved in legislative efforts to improve the system for both mothers and fathers. This particular injustice, however, mostly affects fathers and their children.
The heartbreaking Melinda Smith case, in which a San Diego father and daughter were needlessly separated by the foster care system for over a decade, is a good example. Smith was born to an unwed couple in 1988. Her father, Thomas Marion Smith, a former Marine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, saw Melinda often and paid child support. When the girl was 4, her mother abruptly moved away without leaving a forwarding address, taking the girl with her.
Two years later, Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services received two complaints of child abuse against Melinda’s mother. Though the social worker for the case noted in the file that Thomas was the father, he was never contacted, and his then 6-year-old daughter was placed in the foster care system.
Thomas—whose fitness as a father was never impugned nor legally questioned—continued to receive and pay his child support bills. Authorities refused to disclose his daughter’s whereabouts, and didn’t even inform him that his daughter had been taken by the County. Smith employed private investigators and attorneys to try to find Melinda and secure visitation rights, but he eventually ran out of money.
Rather than allowing Smith to raise his own daughter, the system shuttled Melinda through seven different foster care placements. An understandably angry child, her outbursts led authorities to house her in a residential treatment center alongside older children convicted of criminal activity—when she was only 7 years old.
Melinda says that during this period she was told that her father was a “deadbeat dad” who had abandoned her. When Melinda was 16, she told an investigating social worker that the “most important thing” for her was to find her dad. Moved by her story, the social worker began searching for Melinda’s father–and found him in one day. In 2005, Thomas and Melinda were finally reunited.
Unfortunately, the Smith case is no aberration. When a mother and father are divorced or separated, and a child welfare agency removes the children from the mother’s home for abuse or neglect, an offer of placement to the non-residential father, barring unfitness, should be automatic. Yet the Urban Institute’s 2006 report, “What About the Dads? Child Welfare Agencies’ Efforts to Identify, Locate, and Involve Nonresident Fathers,” presents a shocking finding: when fathers inform child welfare officials that they would like their children to live with them, the agencies seek to place the children with their fathers only 15% of the time.
Fathers can offer their children a sense of permanence, security, and emotional support that a foster family (or a succession of foster care placements) cannot provide. Many foster children are pushed out of their homes and into a tenuous existence when they turn 18 and the foster parents no longer receive state subsidies. Fathers could be a valuable source of long-term resources and sponsorship for these young adults.
Child welfare agencies often operate on the assumption that the fathers of the children they’ve taken away from their mothers are, like the mothers, unfit or uninterested in parenting. Yet many of these men are loving fathers who have been forced out of their children’s lives by mothers who denied visitation, moved away and/or hid the children, or employed spurious abuse charges.
“What About the Dads?” makes it clear that many child welfare workers treat fathers as an afterthought. The report found that even when a caseworker had been in contact with a child’s father, the caseworker was still five times less likely to know basic information about the father than about the mother. Just as with Thomas Smith, 20 percent of the fathers whose identity and location were known by the child welfare agencies from the opening of the case were never even contacted.
These policies are harmful and misguided. One shudders to think how many little Melinda Smiths are lost in the foster care system right now—being raised by strangers, and denied their father’s love.
There are myriad ways in which the family law system separates decent loving fathers from their children, and the above are merely two examples. Regardless of our varied beliefs, fathers being allowed to step up and raise and nurture their children should be something that all of us support.
—photo by RodrigoAmorim/Flickr
About Glenn Sacks and Robert Franklin
The prevalence of this arbitrary and ideological driven rending of families is heartbreaking.
It really is. It legit upsets me. Upon reading this article, my common sense meter went off and told me this needs to be made illegal. It’s also infuriating that there are mothers out there who do this probably due to some resentment they harbor against the fathers. That ticks me off to no end because they are only thinking about themselves and not about what benefits their children will gain by being in the custody of a parent that wants them–obviously the mother doesn’t!
The best way to prevent this kind of state-sponsored child abuse is to have the fathers in the lives of their children from the start. Two parents take better care of a child than one.
I cannot understand why the National Organization for Women is opposed to shared parenting, even in extreme cases. Every time it comes up, the NOW fights against it.
Feminists oppose any possibility of fathers playing a role in their children’s lives. They enforce this “fathers out” policy via numerous powerful institutions and lobbies, such as the NOW.
Source ?
Tim,
Here is the notification… you can follow the links from there:
http://www.glennsacks.com/enewsletters/enews_11_28_06.htm
NOW doesn’t like the authoritarian fathering agenda of Glenn Sacks, and I agree with them. The name of his organization is “Fathers and Families.” If he is genuinely interested in shared parenting, they might change their name to “Mothers, Fathers and Families” or something similar.
1) Glenn Sacks did not propose the new law. The legislature did.
2) The legislation was called “A bill to amend 1970 PA 91, entitled Child custody act of 1970″
3) In response to the bill, the NOW initiated an “action alert” calling for protests
4) The NOW argued that joint custody would not be beneficial to WOMEN
5) This is not about Glenn Sack’s agenda. This is about the feminist agenda of hate.
6) The bill was entirely gender neutral. Here is the text of the bill:
“IN A CUSTODY DISPUTE BETWEEN PARENTS, THE COURT
SHALL ORDER JOINT CUSTODY UNLESS EITHER OF THE
FOLLOWING APPLIES:
(A) THE COURT DETERMINES BY CLEAR AND CONVINCING EVIDENCE THAT
A PARENT IS UNFIT, UNWILLING, OR UNABLE TO CARE FOR THE CHILD.
(B) A PARENT MOVES HIS OR HER RESIDENCE OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL
DISTRICT THAT THE CHILD HAS ATTENDED DURING THE PREVIOUS 1-YEAR
7 PERIOD PRECEDING THE INITIATION OF THE ACTION.
If he is genuinely interested in shared parenting, they might change their name to “Mothers, Fathers and Families” or something similar.
If feminists are genuinely interested in helping men, they might change their name to include men. Or maybe the National Organization for Women should change to the National Organization for People (NOP?) as well?
Yeah I don’t really believe that I’m just pointing out how empty your complaint is.
NOW, the National Organization for Women, is only concerned about women, to the detriment of everyone else, and they’re mad that “Fathers and Families” doesn’t mention “mothers” in the title, and concludes that the F&F organization is sexist and authoritarian?
Hi, Kettle, This is Pot. Umm, I hate to break this to you….
NOW and “mothers” have campaigned to reduce the role that fathers have with their children, and have done little other than portray men as violent sexual deviants. The gross injustice in the family court system is largely due to the actions of NOW in the first place. They are the LAST group I would look to for a rational, equitable solution, and for them (and you) to sit on the sidelines and croak “sexism” or complain about non-inclusion, after 30 years of representing a militant, intolerant devicive and sexist brand of feminism, it the pinnacle of hipocracy.
NOW is NOT about equal rights. NOW is about female preference, and reducing female accountability, and establishing men as a permanent, presumed guilty underclass.
Yes, this happens more than we know. Women’s groups in regards to this subject – their claws come out. Unfortunately, as a woman- I know how vindictive, gaddy, and the flat out lying can be. And it does! They can be very narcissitic, and the problem is they are hurting themselves in the long run. But it is their poor innocent children they hurt the worse. And the fractured Family Legal System,
believes this. If your a man you are just basically a deadbeat father. Again, this is so far from the truth. Just because a mother is a mother does NOT mean she is the better parent. Fathers play a major role in the growth of a child. And children thrive with both parents (Good parents) in their lives
this is proven. Don’t take that away from them people. It is all so tragic what happens in our court systems, and nobody cares what is in the best interest of the child. It starts at the top and filters down to the so called experts they hire to implement these terrible laws. And the biases, greed, and incompetence runs rampid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What really bothers me about how the system would rather put a child in the foster home than with their fit and willing father (meaning the hierarchy is mother<foster care<anyone and everyone else<???<???<father) is that those stable and loving foster homes would be put to so much better use by placing children who really don't have a home to go to. There are kids out there who are homeless, being abused, being abandoned, have nowhere else to go. But no we see a regular flow of stories where adoptive parents would rather pretty much kidnap a child that has an otherwise fit and willing father ready to take them in. But we're supposed to believe that they, those adoption agencies, the courts, and those vindictive moms are really looking out for "the best interests of the children"?
In none of those cases was there any allegation that the father is unfit. Rather, the adoption agencies were allowed to play a largely successful game of legal hide-and-seek in which the longer they kept the child away from his or her father, the less chance there was that a court would void the adoption and give the father custody.
I wonder how many kids that really need help that adoption agency could have put in good homes with all the time, money and effort they spent on play that shell game with Wyatt’s daughter?
One question I have is how much money is involved in this process, both in terms of what the state, foster care, and adoption agencies gain by keeping these kids and what they would stand to lose if they had to contact the fathers.
I am a female lawyer who works on these issues and I just wanted to comment that Mr. Sacks is not entirely transparent about his agenda.
I am a strong supporter of shared parenting, especially of people setting up their families with both parents working and both parents doing half the unpaid work and parenting. I am also a fan of books on fathering by John Badalement, “The Modern Dad’s Dilemma,” Marc Vachon “Equally Shared Parenting,” Stephan Poulter, “Father Factor,” Jeremy Adam Smith “The Daddy Shift.” I often do this in opposition to both women and men.
I am opposed to the authoritarian fathering agenda of Glenn Sacks. The name of his organization is “Fathers and Families.” If he is genuinely interested in shared parenting, he might change the name to “Mothers, Fathers and Families” or something similar. He also is preoccupied with the experience of the father and does not ever talk about how to parent well or the effect on the child of the father except in abstract terms where he misquotes studies by these other fathering authorities, who are much more skilled and knowledgeable.
Terry Real’s books on the trauma of being the son of an authoritarian father – such as “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” and “How Do I Get Through To You” – may also be helpful to people wanting to understand how this hurts boys and men as much as it hurts girls and women.
John Dean (of Watergate fame) has also written a book called “Conservatives Without Conscience” that illustrates how this type of narcissistic, authoritarian fathering is causing many problems in our political system. Dean is a Republican for those who follow party allegiances.
So, in your opinion we should ignore his good points because he failed to put mothers first in the name of his organization and you can draw dubious parallels with the agendas of other individuals? If you disagree with him wouldn’t it be better to address his points, rather than make sweeping generalizations?
As I said previously, Sacks was not involved with the legislation. The legislature proposed a gender neutral law that would protect the parental rights of BOTH parents, and the NOW had a hissy fit because in their view only women have parental rights. Men are just mobile ATM machines. The NOW declared an action alert to protest the legislation, and Sacks pointed out the hypocrisy and self centred egotism of the NOW’s bigoted agenda.
Sacks is not the answer. These other men – Badalament, Poulter, Smith, Vachon, etc. are much better examples. They got equal parenting. Sacks and his disciples are never going to get equal parenting without being inclusive of the mother, rather than antagonistic of her. If he doesn’t want to be excluded as the father, he needs to learn not to exclude the mother. It’s parenting 101.
So, Contributor, you think that since the family court system typically gives a non-abusive Dad (meaning a father whose wife was moral enough not to falsely acuse him of abuse) visitation for two weekends a month and two weeks in the summer, or about 21% of the non-working, waking time, while all the meta-studies conclude that a parent-child relationship goes to hell if visitation is less than about 35 %, that Sacks should have focused his efforts on protecting Mother’s Rights?
Basically, you seem to be saying that Fathers should rely on the sanity and decency of the women with whom they have a child. What if the woman is nuts or vengeful, or just plain thinks as many women do that they are inherently better at raising kids than men and should have 79% of the non-working waking hours?
Fair default rules exist in the law for people who are not sophisticated enough or rich enough to hire attorneys to do up custom-made contracts.
And while we’re at it, what do you think about decision in Oregon Court just this week to sentence a 30-something Astoria, Oregon woman who drugged and then raped a 14 year old boy a 30-day sentence? Or is that just another example of male privilege? Don’t believe me? Go to the KOIN 6 website.
I have already dared GMPM to do a story on this latest judicial outrage. I do not plan to hold my breath.
I think if you set your family up in the one breadwinner/ one parent model you can’t be surprised when upon divorce you owe money and can’t get much custody. I think this is what you guys are really bitter about – but you chose this path; it is now possible to have equal marriage (thanks in no small part to feminists and men who are genuinely interested in quality with women) – it is not society’s fault that you chose to do things otherwise.
I would think you would know before you have sex with and/or marry a woman whether “she is is nuts or vengeful, or just plain thinks as many women do that they are inherently better at raising kids than men and should have 79% of the non-working waking hours.” Why did you choose these women? That’s your responsibility; not that of feminists.
I agree!
And when a woman chooses an abusive man, that’s her responsibility, not society’s. So we should do away with women’s shelters! And society shouldn’t concern itself with date rape either, after all the woman *chose* to date/have a relationship with the man.
And since women choose to go into lower paying work–just like men choose to go into higher paying work–they should stop complaining about the wage gap. And if there really is discrimination–like there is in the court system against fathers, even stay at home or equal parenting time fathers–well women workers should just suck that up too I suppose.
Also, since women choose to conform to the beauty ideal they should shop whining about that too. After all men choose to conform to the pay stub ideal in order to attract a mate which is exactly why they’re behind the child support/custody eight ball in divorce court–as you so rightly pointed out.
Wow. If you applied the same ‘man up’ standards to standard feminist concerns as you’ve just applied to men and their concerns… feminists wouldn’t have any legitimate concerns at all.
Moral consistency is a beautiful thing.
I cannot possibly match typhonblue’s response.
So i merely write to correct a fundamental misunderstanding of my point in your response, Contributor.
I was focused on the problem with the legal system, not with women or feminists. You chose to make this about men and women, not me. You see, I don’t expect people to argue anything but their self interest. I do expect a judicial system, especially one theoretically focused on the “best interest of the child” to take that responsibility seriously and not to impose visitation limits that are demonstrably contrary to the best interest of the child based on the available research.
As for knowing who one is getting into bed with, I would just point out that there is oodles of psychological literature about how people are literally different people during courtship and later on, both as a result of hormonal chemistry and due to the natural tendency to of lovers to engage in mutual projection. This is hardly the fault of men or women (although with maturity sometimes folks can get a handle on their projections, both good and bad).
Anyway, my fundamental point remains that we have a very broken legal system that is not in the long-term interest of either men or women or the boys and girls who will become men and women. We should fix it and men like Glenn Sacks, among others, are part of the solution, not part of the problem. And, last point, never, never, never, underestimate the ability of judges to look out for themselves and their prerogatives and always be convinced that they know best. The judicial system as a whole (not just the family court system), is about as arrogant and change-resistant an institution as exists.
The real kicker is that most feminist “research” continues to claim that family courts routinely award custody to men in disputed cases, particularly, as they say it, “abusive men.”
If you listen to the femninist ideologues not only are women are oppressed EVERYWHERE, but women are even getting the shaft in family courts, the one institution that is massively biased in their favor.
And people wonder why savvy men tune out anything they hear coming from a feminist or “Women’s Studies” “scholar.”
“… family courts, the one institution that is massively biased in their favor …”
Almost all institutions are massively biased in the favor of women:
1) Family courts award custody to female 95% of time
2) Criminal courts sentence women to 1/3 the incarceration time compared to men convicted of the same crimes
3) There are 1700 women only Domestic Violence shelters in the US, compared to 2 for men
4) OSHA imposes draconian penalties on employers that fail to protect female workers from repetitive motion injuries (eg sore joints), but care nothing when scores of men die in mining, construction, waste disposal, and other highly hazardous occupations
5) Women account for 60% of health-care spending (even though men pay more into medicare)
6) Social security pays 60% of benefits to women (even though men pay more into SS)
7) Universities award 60% of all bachelor’s degrees (and 70% of all masters degrees) to women
I could go on all day. The challenge is to find any institution that is NOT massively biased against men. As far as I can tell, there are none.
The great majority of custody cases, in which shared parenting is a legitimate option, are settled or resolved privately. But of the 15 percent that go to family court—the cases that fathers’ rights groups target—at least half include alleged domestic abuse.
This makes me wonder… how many rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth MRAs here fall into that 50% of domestic violence cases.
The reality is that most custody does not need to go to court. It just doesn’t. Only a small portion is battled out in court. So this picture you are trying to paint of an epic, widespread injustice just doesn’t ring true. Its more about vengeance and retribution.
“The reality is that most custody does not need to go to court. It just doesn’t. Only a small portion is battled out in court. So this picture you are trying to paint of an epic, widespread injustice just doesn’t ring true. Its more about vengeance and retribution.”
Most states REQUIRE mediation in divorce proceedings, before litigation through Family Court. And you are correct that the majority of them are settled there. However, most men are FORCED into settlement during mediation because they have no money to hire attorneys and realize that even if they COULD afford legal help, they STILL would have no chance of getting shared parenting due to Family Court bias.
I spent $35K on legal fees to gain shared parenting during my divorce fourteen years ago, and was told by the judge “I would never even consider giving a man shared parenting with a child in her tender years.” I was a great and loving dad, well qualified in every way, from financial to no criminal record of any kind.
According to the 2009 US Census, women get the children 83 percent of the time. Men are FORCED to lose contact with their children. This is not something they want and is the number one complaint amongst the MRAs. If that is not a widespread injustice, I don’t know what is.
>This makes me wonder… how many rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth MRAs here fall into that 50% of domestic violence cases.
Likely none.
Do you know how I know this? Because people who do bad things and get away with them usually don’t want to revisit the issue.
> Its more about vengeance and retribution.
So you think that most men don’t have an interest in maintaining equal parenting time with their children’s mother?
I disagree.
great article.
“This makes me wonder… how many rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth MRAs here fall into that 50% of domestic violence cases.”
Ad hominem.
You lose.
Go peddle your hate elsewhere.
Has anyone actually set down and read any of their state laws or the Title IV-D Federal laws ? That is always the best place to start and then follow the money trail from there. Section C under the IV-D section of The Child Support Performance and Incentive Act of 1998 has a provision in it for all non-custodial parents to provide health insurance. Notice the word Incentive ? The Feds give the 50 states billions every year because of this law and shared parenting would put a dent in the Federal tax dollars a state receives. In essance a Federal mandate to buy health insurance.was passed in 1998. Now I am NOT making an argument for or against the new health care law, but I do see the hypocrisy. I did not see any of the Attorney General’s up in arms about the constitutionality of mandating a non-custodial parent to have to buy it because it saved the states a lot of money (and a parent should want to cover their children if at all possible). Fast forward to 2009 and now that it is going to cost the states a bunch of money, they say it is not constitutional to mandate anyone to have to buy anything. I have to pose this question since a divorced person has not broken any law. If it is constitutional to mandate a non-custodial parent to buy health insurance, would it not also be constitutional to mandate married people ? Or if it is not constitutional to mandate anyone, how can one constitutionally mandate a divorced parent ? Surely it would be In The Best Interest Of The Child for children with married parents to have health insurance too. Again, I am not advocating either side, I just want to point out the hypocrisy. Divorced non-custodial parents are treated like second class citizens and they love their children just as much as the custodial parents.
That’s weird how a child given up by the mother does not automatically go to the next of kin, the father, provided he’s financially and fit to care. I think it’s better to have at least one biological parent in your life than none at all.