Paternal Custody of Children

Great Debates
1

In class today, a classmate presented the findings of his term paper on why fathers are rarely given custody of children.

He made several assertions, some which made sense and some which didn’t. Namely:
[ul]
[li]In 91% of court cases in the US, the mother gains custody of the child.[/li][li]In a comparison of single mother and single father families, it was found that the children in single mother families had a much higher probablility of committing a crime.[/li][li]Almost invariably, children over the age of 5 prefer to go with their father.[/li][li]In a family with no father, the children can suffer from “Absense of Father syndrome” (or something like that) which results in the boys becoming more feminine and the girls making bad relationship choices.[/ul][/li]
He didn’t have his bibliography with him, and as I don’t have class with him for another two weeks, I can’t get it until then. Nevertheless, I thought I would post this here as it could be an interesting discussion. I’ll try to come back later when I have some cites (for or against his assertions).

2

If true (and I’m skeptical) it may be the result of fathers rarely being given custody. Those few who are are more likely to be exceptional fathers than are the average mother they are being compared to.

This is absurd.

Possible. Though there are quite possibly other negative effects of growing up without a mother.

3

So, only 9% of the time the father gets or shares custody. Not buying it. I’ve never run into a case where Dad was the least bit interested (and not abusive or otherwise a really bad choice to make parenting decisions) where their wasn’t joint custody. Also, is this all cases, or only contested cases? I know a couple of Dad’s who were more than happy to let their ex wives have primary custody and get the kids every other weekend and one night a week. Raising kids is hard.

I really like the absent father syndrome. Of course being raised with no mother doesn’t cause any issues.:rolleyes

4

“custody”, at least in my state, has two components, physical custody and legal custody. I share legal custody w/my son’s dad, while I have physical custody.

The ‘legal’ custody has to do with decisions such as schools, religion, medical issues etc.

I suspect the figure of 91% custody refers to physical custody, and not legal custody (where there are those differences), but I would object to the concept that only through physical custody can a parent really ‘parent’ (it is easier naturally).

A friend of mine did not have physical custody of his youngest,but he remained a viable and important part of that child’s life (even tho they lived some 60 miles apart), by routinely calling and talking every single day, routinely sending letters, routinely attending every single concert, ballgame, teacher conference, routinely seeing him minimally at least once per week and more often usually.

The other major problem you need to factor is cause/effect issues. Just because two pieces of data coincide, does not mean one causes the other. In our household of 3, it always seems that as soon as one person heads to the bathroom, some one else is in dire need of the facility. One does not cause the other, and may in fact be totatlly unrelated, even tho’ it seems to happen every single day.

And in the rhelm of child rearing, it is especially difficult to determine and correctly measure influences, let alone attribute cause and effect (other than some really big generalities ‘kids who are fed regularly are generally healthier than those who are starving’ type of thing)

(and I’ll second Izzy’s request for the data to support the ‘facts’ submitted by the OP’s friend).

5

I did have a coworker once whose father died when he was two-he had one younger sister and two older sisters. He tended to feminine mannerisms-just sort of limp wristed and that fem voice that is mostly used for gay stereotypes. He wasn’t gay, or transgender or anything-it was just that he had grown up surrounded by females. So I guess THAT could be a factor, but it wasn’t something major. Not that being gay or transgender would be bad.

6

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by LaurAnge *

[li]In a comparison of single mother and single father families, it was found that the children in single mother families had a much higher probablility of committing a crime.[/li]
This seems like a fairly dumb assertion to me. Being that there are WAY more kids being raised by single mamas than by single dads, it seems obvious that the mama’s kids are going to come out on top in ANY comparison because of the simple fact that there are just more of them.

It’s like comparing enormously wealthy and enormously impoverished people and concluding that the enormously wealthy folks are more likely to be Republicans. Duh. Some things are obvious enough without statistics.

[li]In a family with no father, the children can suffer from “Absense of Father syndrome” (or something like that) which results in the boys becoming more feminine and the girls making bad relationship choices.[/list][/li]
Is this for real? I’m with you, Dangerosa. My eyes are rolling aplenty. Father’s have always had an easier time extricating themselves from the responsibility of parenting. Nature gave mamas the wombs. This is nothing new under the sun. The negative results of broken homes and the absence of either parent - and even sometimes the presence of either parent - are caused by the same old complex reasons as they ever were.

This “absence of father syndrome” sounds to me like another launching pad for pharmaceutical marketing at best. Just wait - soon we will have another fantastic blue pill which will ease our AOF syndrome blues. Take one a day and give thanx to Eli Lilly.

7

That was my point. I heard his presentation, he didn’t provide me with a bibliography (until two weeks from now) and so I wanted to present the problem here, hopefully getting people on both sides.

Seriously, I’m just as sceptical about his “facts” as you are.

I figured the “single mom crime rate” was because (or so he claimed) that fathers really only get custody in extenuating circumstances, when the child does go to the father, they are bound to be much better off. I think that (if the basis is true) if children were distributed equally to mother and father, such a disparity wouldn’t exist.

I did find one study done on the subject, I don’t think I can link it, though (it’s from a subsription database). It was done by Guttman and Lazar in 1998. They found that there were no significant differences in the social adjustment between children living in single mother households and children living in single father households.