Time to get serious about child visitation

Time to get serious about child visitation
by KATHLEEN PARKER

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Bitter parents who try to block their formerly beloved's access to the couple's child(ren) following divorce might think twice in New Hampshire, where a proposed bill aims to make life difficult for uncooperative custodial parents.

How difficult? By inviting the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to investigate the offending parent for child abuse and neglect.

The idea behind such legislation is that children of divorce should continue to have access to both parents, assuming there's no reason to protect a child from one of his parents. While child visitation orders are taken seriously in theory, the legal process of enforcement is usually time-consuming, laborious and expensive. In practice, the failure to take them seriously leads to an ever-widening, and predictable, trajectory of distance between the child and visiting parent.

Bickford's bill (HB 1585) would make it easier for parents denied visitation to seek remedy, while promising grief for parents who don't cooperate.

First, the non-custodial parent would get an expedited court hearing rather than take a docket number and possibly wait three to four months. Next, if the judge determines that the custodial parent is blocking access for no legitimate reason, then the Department of Health and Human Services would be notified of a possible case of child abuse and neglect.

Common sense tells us what we seem to need studies to demonstrate — that children need two parents and manage divorce best when they have equal access to both.

While family courts are increasingly trying to ensure that children have that access by awarding joint or shared custody, emotionally distraught humans don't always follow directions.

Meanwhile, courts and the state historically have been more effective in enforcing child support than visitation such that we have entire bureaucracies built around support collection tied to federal incentives. For every dollar that states put up to collect child support monies, for example, the federal government matches with two dollars. Other incentive funds are also available to reward collections.

But the proposed bill is not without critics. As with any law related to personal relationships, this one could be tricky to enforce. Imagine a HHS social worker knocking on your door to ask why you didn't let Johnny see his daddy last weekend.

Such well-intentioned laws also could backfire. As one close observer put it in an e-mail exchange, "Getting (HHS) involved is usually the worst thing to do. They usually side with the 'Mom who is concerned about letting the kids go to their father' and, they (investigators) may decide that neither parent is fit. And take custody of the kid(s)."

Fathers deserve more than a day

Kathleen Parker: Fathers deserve more than a day

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But none of our personal anecdotes changes the fact that fathers are critical to children's lives, just as mothers are, and that the diminution of Father in our culture may be the single stupidest turn in human history yet. The proof of our folly is all around us as measured in the pathologies afflicting our young, yet we persist in denial lest truth inconvenience our next act of self-affirmation.

That a father revolt is inevitable seems a matter of cultural physics and human nature. Human beings can withstand only so much contravening pressure against what is in their interest or necessary to their survival. Men do not do well without families, as George Gilder wrote as long ago as 1973 in his landmark book, "Sexual Suicide," subsequently expanded to "Men and Marriage."

Gilder argued that men need marriage and the social unit of the traditional family as a means of channeling their inherent aggressiveness toward providing for family. Without it, they are vulnerable to mental and social problems and tend to be less successful. When men through divorce are deprived of their children, they become what in healthier circumstances we would wish them to be: ferocious in trying to gain access and protect them.

A time of reckoning can't be far off given that family courts have made divorced fathers visitors to their children's lives - 40 percent of children live in homes without their fathers - as society has embraced the "deadbeat dad" as a prototype rather than a deviation from the norm. Studies show that women file the majority of divorces, and that fathers (almost 80 percent) who have regular contact with their children pay their child support in full and on time.

To be blunt, raising boys and girls without their fathers is simply another, if mysteriously accepted, form of child neglect. Obviously some parents don't deserve their children; and some children, like me, lose a parent to death. We can't make the world perfect for everyone.

But purposely creating ways to keep fathers from their children - either because personal bitterness makes it preferable or because moving far away makes his participation impossible - is not forgivable. When hurt fathers contact me for advice, knowing my concern about the long-term effects of father absence on children and ultimately society, I urge them to keep to the high road.

To be patient and understanding, to be strong and reliable, to be fatherly - in other words - in the old ways. That so many try in spite of the forces arrayed against them is reason enough to celebrate this day. Even to give ol' dad a call.