The women (and I’m sorry to say women but most often it is) who won’t let their kids fathers see them.
Even before I had a child I was still upset by the number of women I know who will not let their children see their fathers.
As the mother of a son whose father didn’t care, I just want to smack them. How can you separate your child from a parent who loves them?
These women usually have NO good reason. They are pissed at the father because the relationship didn’t work out, or they have moved on and as one said, “I am building a life with my new husband and I don’t need reminders of the past are around”.
The ones I know don’t cut off just the fathers, but the father’s family too.
I would have given anything for my son’s father to be a part of his life. I would have chosen having him in my son’s life over receiving child support. I know the hurt a child goes through when a parent is missing from their lives.
An ex went through this, two current friends are going through this, and my current SO went through it, (he fought back in court and won). These men love their children, they are fantastic fathers, they would never hurt their children. I have friends who have lost contact with their grandchildren.
I’ve known women too who felt it was the best for their child. The fathers were not good people and they felt like they had to protect their child.
Unless the former spouse was outright abusive or a truly unfit parent, there is absolutely no excuse for this whatsoever. It sickens me how selfish some people can be.
It was actually my Mom who convinced me, when I was 12, to have my bio Dad’s parental rights terminated. I mean she didn’t force me into it, but she brought up the possibility. I think it was really what I wanted, and I think it was what was best for me at the time, but he blames her and felt deeply betrayed. I honestly don’t know if I would classify him as an unfit parent or not.
As for ‘‘their fathers are not good people,’’ oh the fuck well. That’s something a kid has to discover for him or herself. Usually the custodial parent has a very distorted view of the other person anyway. If I were to get a divorce I would never trust my own perception about something like that.
It’s despicable. A dad friend would come over every Sunday after trying to visit his kid. It’s a terrible, terrible thing to see a grown man cry for his child.
Apologies if this is threadshitting, but I bet a lot of these women would let the father see the kids, it’s just the father has no interest but tells everyone that she’s stopping him, so that’s why he doesn’t.
I’ll let you all go back to bitching about the evil single mothers now :rolleyes:
Obviously views can vary depending which side of the fence you are on. It must be a really difficult and toxic situation where either of those described above (by the OP and Cinnamon Imp) are reached.
In my so’s case he was seeing his daughter every weekend. The mother was living with another man, having their daughter calling the other man ‘dad’. Everything was okay until she found out about me. I didn’t break them up, he wouldn’t have gone back with her whether I was in the picture or not, but once she found out he was seeing someone else she flipped out, decided she wanted him back and refused to let his see his daughter as long as he was dating someone else.
The ex bf, he and his family saw his daughter on a regular basis, until she got pregnant with her new husband. Then she told his parents she was starting a new life with a new man and they weren’t welcome in her daughters life anymore.
One of my friends did this. She couldn’t even give me a reason why, she just didn’t want her ex or his parents around her sons anymore.
So yeah, there really are some evil single mothers out there that purposely use their kids to hurt their ex.
There are some women out there who view their children as entirely theirs and don’t feel the father has a claim.
In which case they should do the men of the world a favor and just visit a sperm bank instead of yanking men around and manipulating them to get offspring.
It’s very sad when a good parent wants to be part of a kid’s life and is kept from doing so. We all know these sorts of things occur, even as we can give counter examples.
I’ve been going through this for the last couple of years. I don’t think she’s pissed off at me, but she definitely would love it if I wasn’t around. She also tries to make things hard on me like not telling me when things are happening at school as I’m supposed to find that information out myself. Kind of hard when it comes home in a backpack. When I ask for a bit more time with my kids she tells me no, it’s not good for them. Yet when it’s my time she will ask me to bring them back early.
I can see why a lot of guys would just say fuck it after awhile. No one needs that kind of extra stress, and it’s hard to deal with someone who does that kind of bullshit. I’ve almost done it myself, takes me a few days sometimes to get over it too.
I would say that when you hear about normal guys who cut and run, it’s not the kids they want away from, it’s the other person. It’s like taking a beating over and over and over again, and at times one just wants to get the hell away from the pain.
They don’t even have to be evil. My Ex has stopped visitation for months at a time. Once after a couple of murder-suicides had been in the news, I was suddenly cut off. She had decided I seemed suicidal and declared I was a danger to the children. It was only after I filed in court for total custody that she relented. And she regularly makes it far more difficult. It isn’t always about me or about the kids. In fact it usually isn’t. Usually she simply forgets. Or my visitation is such a low priority, she chooses other things over it.
I knew someone that had a similar situation to this. The dad had two kids with his first wife, and he made EVERY effort to be in their lives as much as the ex-wife would let him.
She pretty much just wanted her paycheck. (Child support payment)
They hammered out a deal where he was supposed to have them every other weekend. Ex wife signed them up for enough weekend classes (Art, dance, softball, girl scouts, gynmastics, ballet, karate, you name it) to choke a large animal, and insisted that since SHE was the one paying for these lessons that she would drive them and supervise them, and that Dad would need to work his visitation schedule around them. Which amounted to Dad getting 30 minutes with his exhausted, grouchy kids, getting them dinner at McDonalds or somewhere with his ex-wife tapping her foot waiting for them.
He still put up with it for YEARS. Paid his support, paid for extra stuff, kept a corporate job that he wasn’t fond of (so the kids could be on his health insurance), and the ex-wife still was not happy with this - she turned the kids against him by the time they were teenagers. They started begging off from seeing dad, had better things to do, etc. Pretty much only talked to Dad when they needed some money for something. When he got a big promotion at work, he called the kids to tell them, thinking they’d be happy for him. Instead, he got a court summons or some such very quickly, asking for an upward adjustment in his child support payments.
I think the kids were 13 and 14 when Dad decided he was done forcing visits down their throats, and told the children that he would come see them any time they asked. They never did. Ever.
I think the situations you describe are pretty rare. Most single Moms would kill for a chance to read, or sleep in, or catch up on the housework. It’s nearly impossible to prevent a Dad from seeing his child unless you can prove conclusively that he is dangerous. And even then they get “supervised” visitation.
I’ve mentioned on here before a case in VA where a man was sent to prison for molesting his children, and the Mom was forced to waste her limited energy and resources to bus her four children to the prison for a monthly visit.
I’m not saying it can’t happen, but she’d hve to be a very sick woman, and he’d ave to be too lazy or scaredto go to court about it.
Oh it happens. Or what I see most often is Mom wants dad to give money and pick up on all of the duties but not have fun times with the kid. And when the kid comes home having had a great time with dad, they get jealous.
My SO has women in his office who talk all the time about having a child, deliberately out of wedlock, and then ditching the dad because “they don’t need no dad to raise a kid”. One of them has already done this, and she has a little following of impressionable young women.
Or they just put visitation at a low priority, like Bartman. Not good for the kids.
A couple of years ago I posted about a woman in my office who was thinking of doing this. She wanted her son to have a full brother so she was going to ask her ex for some sperm. In a cup. Because she didn’t want to “sleep with his sorry ass.”
I would say it’s actually pretty common. In cases that I am personally familiar with I would guess more than 50% of custodial parents, aka mothers, actively discourage visitation and contact with fathers to one extent or another. (Certainly it seems to be the case that most women in divorce situations fight to keep visititation rights as minimal as possible.)
While, as some have noted, many women would prefer a break, and other women would prefer that their children have a father figure, it’s also true that (as others have noted) many ex-wives tend to have highly negative views of their ex-husbands, and tend to think any contact with those rat-bastards would not be in their child’s best interest. And especially in cases where these women have moved on to other relationships or marriages, they would generally prefer for the father figure in their child’s life to be their current SO rather than the loser that they ditched.
Plus, a lot of divorced women resent that they get the “drudgery” of day-to-day child care, while their ex-husbands get to entertain the kids on weekends.
Regardless, it seems that the facts on the ground are as described.
I think the situations you describe are pretty rare.
Not at all, but just keep in mind that no Dad is going to say “My children’s Mother keeps them away from me because I’ve given her good reason to be terrified of me.”
There has to be a really good reason in order to sucessfully keep a child away from their Dad, and the standards to which one is held are not much lower than the criminal courts would require. Basically, if you can’t put him in jail, you can’t keep him away. And even then, when he gets out they’ll declare that he’s been rehabilitated and give him ten more chances before they will allow you to keep your child safe again.
I hear “My ex keeps my kids away” with the same part of my brain that processes “I’m a former Navy SEAL.”
You’re addressing a scenario (i.e. legal termination of visitation rights) which is not what’s being discussed in this thread, and then declaring it unlikely. OK. But people are discussing something else. Read the posts.
I think you’re confusing keeps them away as makes it damn difficult to come get. My ex used to live 5 minutes from me, now she lives 30. I have to do all of the driving, she has refused to even meet half way.
She got remarried this past summer, when it was my weekend she came home from her honeymoon, she asked me 4 or 5 times for me to bring them home early because she missed them.
FTR I used to do a lot of the child care after work, I picked up my oldest daughter after school and brought her home, made dinner, cleaned the dishes and helped put one of them to bed.
Maybe you haven’t seen it, but I have, it’s little by little the other parent starts taking away time. They make it harder to see them, asks for them back while it’s supposed to be their time with me. Or when I have them during the week, it’s “why didn’t you feed them?” or “why did you take them to McDonalds? You know the other kids will get upset.”
You are probably right that a lot of guys don’t care, but there are a lot that do but it’s made very difficult to actually see their own children.