Fathers’ Rights: A Primer for Dads

 

By Ursula Furi-Perry, Esq.

Parenthood is always a challenge, but for some dads, fatherhood comes with the added challenge of dealing with custody and child support issues. Read on for some valuable family law resources—just for dads.

 
  Custody Issues

There is no question that fathers’ involvement is essential in the lives of children, says Ned Holstein, M.D., Executive Director of Fathers and Families in Boston, which is a nationwide family court reform organization. Holstein cites better school performance and higher graduation rates, lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse and depression, and less legal problems among children whose dads are involved. Holstein also says he’d seen many studies that show that children want more time with their non-custodial parents pretty much across the board. Yet, according to Holstein, fathers often get the short end of the stick when it comes to custody, resulting in little time with their children.

 

The family court uses the “primary caretaker presumption,” explains Professor Taylor Flynn of the Western New England School of Law in Springfield, who teaches Family Law. That means the court looks to see which parent spends more time with the child when granting custody—often, that tends to be the mother, making it more difficult for fathers to get custody at the starting point.

Still, Flynn adds that there is a wide variety of options when it comes to custody. “The best custody situations tend to be the ones that the parents work out themselves,” she says. There are no guarantees as to how the court will decide, Flynn explains, or what the court’s interpretation of the “best interests of the child” standard will be. “The best thing [parents] can do is to see if mediation works,” Flynn adds. She also recommends a technique called collaborative lawyering, where each party’s lawyer strives to work out an agreement between the parties without going to court. With collaborative lawyering, if one party does file suit, he or she will lose the attorney as well as the attorney’s work product—a huge incentive to keep the case out of court.

Flynn also warns about relying on theories or facts that are unsubstantiated; in particular, she cites the contentious “parental alienation syndrome,” coined by controversial psychiatrist Richard Gardner. “I worry that a father could unwittingly rely on this theory without realizing that it's widely regarded as junk science by mainstream medical experts,” Flynn explains. “Particularly after Gardner's tragic, and, sadly sensationalized suicide in 2003, many family law judges are familiar with the controversial nature of his work; a father's reliance on PAS could hurt, rather than help his case.” Flynn adds that fathers should strive to be as involved with their kids as possible and express their desire to spend time with the kids early on during a custody battle.

 

For Holstein, the bottom line is including both parents in the kids’ lives. “The courts ought to adopt as their goal shared parenting, which is a flexible concept that has to be worked out family by family,” Holstein believes. Fathers “need to stand up for their children in the process of standing up for themselves,” says Holstein. “A lot of fathers don’t realize until later how painful it is, personally” not to be involved in their children’s lives, Holstein says; he adds that many of the effects that the lack of fathers’ involvement has on children don’t show up until later.
 

Custody Enforcement and Removals

Holstein also says that the non-custodial fathers are often plagued by the failure to enforce their time with the kids. “We have members who haven’t seen their kids in months,” he says, adding that some custodial mothers will give excuses – like the kids being sick or the mom taking the kids on vacation – for missed appointments with dad. “The courts really don’t take measures to enforce the parenting time that they themselves had ordered,” Holstein believes.

 

Furthermore, Holstein says non-custodial fathers can encounter problems when the custodial parent attempts to move, taking the kids with her and away from the father—sometimes across state lines. Though the court’s permission is needed to move kids to another state, Holstein says that permission is often freely given to custodial moms, making it difficult for dads to spend time with their children. He cites a recent case where two school-aged boys – who had a very close relationship with their father – were moved to South Carolina by their mother and new husband. Though the trial court opposed the move, the appeals court allowed it, disregarding a court psychologist’s finding that the kids needed their dad close by, Holstein says.
 

Child Support

When it comes to child support, there is less room to negotiate than there is in custody issues, as the formula the courts use to calculate child support is pretty constant. “The formulas are fairly rigid, but…the judges can deviate from the formulas if there’s a reason to,” says Flynn, as long as the two parents agree to modifications and the court is satisfied that there are plenty of resources for the child. But to Holstein, the rigid guidelines “can be quite punitive,” he says. “A father may be asked to provide a large amount of child support for a child that he largely won’t be allowed to see.”

 

Links to resources available online at www.wickedlocalparents.com

     Work Life Balance The National Center for Fathering, www.fathers.com

The Families and Work Institute, http://www.familiesandwork.org/

  Child Custody

Massachusetts Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, Planning for Shared Parenting: http://www.mass.gov/courts/courtsandjudges/courts/probateandfamilycourt/...

 

Massachusetts Bar Association, Who Will Get Custody in a Divorce? http://www.masslawhelp.com/lawhelp/legal_info/?sw=3124&full_id=209

 

Divorcenet.com Massachusetts Child Custody FAQ, http://www.divorcenet.com/states/massachusetts/mafaq_02

 

The Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries’ web resource on child custody and visitation at http://www.lawlib.state.ma.us/custody.html

  Child support http://www.lawlib.state.ma.us/support.html       Work-life Balance

Work-life balance usually gets presented as an issue that affects working mothers, yet many fathers are also increasingly struggling to maintain balance between work and family time. In fact, according to a 2007 survey by CareerBuilder.com, nearly one in four dads surveyed said that they feel their work is negatively impacting their relationship with their children.The survey also reports that nearly half of all dads have missed a significant event in their child's life because of work and that nearly one in five dads has missed four or more events.