For all the talk about a new American father, Cosby-like dads who are just as involved in diapers and day care as any mom, the reality in many families is quite the opposite: a disappearing father who leaves his children emotionally and financially.
It long has been common knowledge that many poor children, especially those whose parents never wed, had little contact with their fathers, but 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 mirror the general population on factors such as race, geography, income and education.
Over all, the study found, more than half the children whose fathers did not live with them never had been in the father`s home; 42 percent had not seen their fathers 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 might reflect a changing concept of fatherhood, with many men behaving as if 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. 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; 58 percent slept at her house in a typical month.
But, Furstenberg said, 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-raising arrangements.
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. The estrangement occurred no matter how old the child when the parents 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.
Most women raising children without the father in the home receive no child support, so having an absent father can spell 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.
Now, Misty, 12, 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. I`m more than mad that he abandoned us; I`m disgusted.”
Norman Milot, the father, who 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. Once I got there, the kids were crying and cowering by the wall because she`d 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-based organization concerned with child support, said she never interfered with her former husband`s visits. About the only thing both agree on is that the divorce has been very hard on their children.
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 child support payments on herself.
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, 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 hard 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.
”Many men who become stepparents or surrogate parents in a new household transfer their loyalties to their new family,” Furstenberg said. ”Relations with their biological children become largely symbolic if they survive at all.”
Many parents who have stopped contact seek a relationship when their children reach late adolescence and become more independent of the former spouse. Few regain closeness, studies show, but many parents hold onto reconciliation as a fantasy.
”What I keep hoping is that when they`re grown up, mature and independent of their mother, they`ll come find me by themselves, and maybe they`ll be able to understand what`s happened,” Milot said.
