What drives a deadbeat dad to forget his kids?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t feel I had a deadbeat dad per se - my father was in house, if emotionally absent due to being on drugs a good chunk of the time. This isn’t about me.

However, in my family, there are many men who have went from loving fathers who had literally nothing to do with their children after a separation or split.

My grandfather was apparently a loving father. He cared about what his daughters did for a living. He was upset when my aunt wanted to become a Nun because he felt she could do better with her life. He refused to allow my other aunt to join the military because women were mistreated in it. But when he and my grandmother separated, he went and lived his own life and he was rarely, if it all, seen for the next five years. My uncle was 4 when he left and they never really knew each other properly.

My sister’s father apparently loved my first sister very much. I’ve seen photos of him holding her, kissing her, being very affectionate. He wasn’t happy with the birth of my second sister as he felt they couldn’t handle two kids. They separated when my first sister was a year and a half and the second sister was 5 months old. Outside of an attempt to visit them the following Halloween with his new wife (my mother wasn’t home, my grandmother was watching them and she slammed the door on him and his wife) he never wrote, called or had anything to do with them again. The next time they saw him was when he died. My mother has told me he had a troubled relationship with his own father. He never thought he was good enough in his father’s eyes - so he had to understand what missing a father’s love was like.

My sister’s first husband, with whom she had 4 kids, was there until they split up when the eldest child was 5. He was pretty affectionate in the home videos I’ve seen. After they split, he then acted like they didn’t exist.

Or look at someone famous, like John Lennon. Wrote moving songs about the lack of his own father in his life, and proceeded to basically treat his first son after he broke up with the mother like he didn’t exist.

How can this sort of disconnect/level of detachment happen - where a guy can literally pretend his kids don’t exist? Psychologically?

2

I don’t know, and this thread is timely. My husband’s grandmother just died. Her first husband–my husband’s grandfather–cheated on her and she divorced him when my father-in-law was less than a year old. He never again, as far as we know, made any attempt to contact her or to find out things about or offer any support to his son.

She just died last week, and my husband–who has a lot of surly thoughts about the man–flew out to her funeral, and emailed me three snapshots of him, without commentary. He looks like a sweet, slightly goofy kid, but we know he was an alcoholic and ne’er-do-well. Sometimes I think the worst people are the ones who’re simply unable to cope with life, without malice, and end up hurting the ones who love them the most.

3

I don’t want to put down good fathers on the board, and I’m sure there are some good single fathers. I’ve even known some single men who adopt, and they are great, but it seems that men, much more so than women, attach to the children of the people they are with.

It’s just that men seem to become deadbeat dads-- or separate from their children-- even when nothing else in particular seems wrong with them. While other men become great stepdads when they care about the children’s mother. I know that’s a gross generalization-- there are plenty of abusive stepfathers, and plenty of stepmothers you would never guess aren’t the biological mothers of the children they are raising. In the latter case, that almost always happens when the mother is dead, or otherwise gone. I have known really very few women who were good, involved stepmothers when the original mother was still on the picture.

I have known some situations where the mother was terrible, and the father ended up with custody after a divorce, but in virtually every situation, drugs or a serious mental illness was involved.

Anyway, it just seems less important to women to think of a partner and his children as a package. I have even known a few women who actively sought to drive a wedge between the father and the children.

Again, I know I’m overgeneralizing, but I am speaking of trends, not of individual situations. Please don’t say “But I know of…” I know of lots of exceptions. I’m talking of trends and generalities.

So the answer to the original question is that when men lose affection for women, they may also lose affection for the children of the relationship. This seems to be a trend more with men than with women. I’m sure if you do Venn diagrams, you get lots of intersection, but it’s just more of a trend with men than with women.

4

Someone I know became a loving adoptive father to his step-children, which would be warm and fuzzy if it wasn’t for the fact that he pretty much cut ties with his children from his first marriage. And also that he left his first wife for his second. And that his second wife looks an awful lot like a younger version of his first. There’s very much a sense that this is his do-over family.

Other than that, to answer the OP, sometimes it just seems to be a form of compartmentalizing. Or, as Sattura said, an inability to cope.

5

There are people, luckily just a fraction of society, who will take the easiest path regardless of the consequences to others. They believe it doesn’t harm them nearly as much and by the time they realize they’re wrong - too late.
I’ve met a lot of men in my 47 years and w/ only one exception, those behind in their child support hated themselves for it and were diligent about seeing their kids as often as they could. My dataset is obviously different from the OP’s.

6

Reddy, it also could be that the affection he showed those kids in pictures and home movies was the only attention he ever paid to them.

For every man who abandons his kids, for whatever reason, there’s a woman who remarries and tells the kids some version of “You have a new daddy, so you don’t need the old one any more.” :mad:

I knew I’d started a thread about this kind of thing a while back, but didn’t realize it was that long ago.

7

Seems pretty obvious; if you’re irresponsible enough to have children and not be around for them, it’s not a stretch to imagine that you’re also irresponsible enough to not be up on the child support either.

8

Well, in the cases I spoke of: My grandfather paid child support. He just wasn’t involved after the split. But he paid support weekly in what would amount to around $1k a month roughly. He is also singular in that he returned - briefly - to walk my aunt down the aisle at her wedding, and after he had a stroke the next year, moved back home and watched my mother’s and aunt’s children. It is perhaps those latter two actions that keep his memory from having total scorn.

The other two never paid support of any kind.

On the other hand, my father - in a time when he was less addled - went out of his way to remain in my sister’s life after he and the mother separated. HE took the mother to court in 1983 after they had separated, and willingly paid child support, despite being told that paying support didn’t necessarily mean visitation rights. He made sure he remained in her life and fought hard for visitation rights. He paid the child support in full until her 21st birthday in 2001. He didn’t have to keep it going that long - he could have easily opted out when she turned 18. The only flaw he had was that he allowed their personal relationship to lapse both due to her pre-teen brattiness and his newfound relationship with my mother and my birth in 1990. But prior to their getting together in late 1989, there are boxes, and boxes full of photographs of the two of them together. For a man of meager income at the time, he has literally two and a half shoe boxes worth of photos that span only 1980-1989 just of the two of them. He has two videocassettes of her singing in a studio he paid for in 1986 and 1989 respectively.

9

Not all dads are driven to reproductive acts by a burning desire to form a parenthood bond.

10

Sometimes I guess it may be an age/responsibility thing.

It used to confuse the hell out of an ex of mine (it’s pretty confusing all round, to be honest). The ex’s Dad had been basically completely absent in ex’s, his older sister and brother’s life (to the point his brother had been brought up by grandparents with no contact at all with his Dad), but was a loving involved parent to ex’s little half sister, plus her older half sister and baby half brother, who both had different (completely uninvolved) fathers.

The ex had reconnected with his Dad in his teens, and had wound up living with him, plus his little half sister, plus both of her half siblings. It was like a switch had been turned on, and the guy suddenly became a proper Dad, not just to his own kids, but to kids he didn’t really have any connection to. The kid that was a baby when he got involved with her mother? Makes sense, and as she was very close to her sister, who was his own child, it was’t much more trouble to care for them together; but to then take on their mother’s new baby, born several years after the break up, who was definitely not his kid? The same guy who had totally ignored his own eldest child?

11

I’m the eldest child in a more-or-less similar situation. My father was a workaholic and, while physically present, entirely emotionally uninvolved in my childhood bar his being a constant, looming threat of an explosively angry outburst. Had I not moved out as soon as I finished high school, I suspect him and I would no longer be on speaking terms.

Somewhere in his late forties - presumably after some real soul-searching after fucking up his first marriage (to my mother), and almost estranging me entirely - he had a complete heel-face turn, and is now a devoted, involved father to not only my two young half-siblings, but also to his wife’s daughter from a previous marriage.

I think some men (and probably some women, too) make such an astonishing turnabout on the issue later in their lives because it feels like a way to atone for past sins. You can’t un-fuck the past, but you can do your best to not fuck up your second, third, etc, chances.

12

I don’t have actual much experience with people who do this. So this is very much guesswork.

I think a decent fraction of all men aren’t all that excited about having kids in the first place. They do it mostly to placate their wife. If all goes well with the marriage, such men become perfectly adequate fully present fathers. Little tykes have a way of worming themselves into one’s heart.

But if all does not go well with the marriage then things change. Once they separate from the wife, for reasons legit or illegit, it’s easy enough for them to decide the kids were 100% her idea, 100% her fault, and therefore 100% her problem.

Any effort by the ex-wife to turn the kids against the dad makes that all the easier for him to justify to himself. Expending effort to sell oneself to ones own children is an uphill struggle motivation-wise. This toxic phase of a former marriage is far more common than many people prefer to believe it is.

13

Deadbeat is normally a term used for those who don’t fulfil financial expectations of them. Those who fail to pay child support are generally unable to do so. One of the American states issues a most-wanted list some years ago of delinquent child support debtors, all of whom were listed as either unemployed or in seasonal and casual employment, and all of whom owed six figure sums, either of support payments or associated fines and interest.

I’m sure a lot of fathers also lose contact with their children because they’re unable to keep it. If you’re not living with them, have no real legal rights, have an enmity with the custodial parent, have to live and work elsewhere to support them and suchlike, it’s going to be very difficult to maintain contact.

14

Ohhh, boy, that is true! I have mentioned here that I sometimes work with a Trust which helps at need women and children. The children’s department often represents at risk children from broken homes (my job technically is to provide advice to the child advocate, not the child) and you would be amazed at how many children from ostensibly “good” families, often from well off backgrounds end up being the victims of this toxicity. Not just their parents, but the entire extended families seem determined to fuck everything up.

Back in about 2009-2010, I represented one kid, a boy whose parents had broken up acrimoniously 13-14 years earlier, and each had remarried and had kids from the new partner. They saw him as the enduring legacy of a big mistake and damn, the lad suffered for it. There were arguments over everything, every bill the child had needed to be minutely decided every time. With whom he could stay, and when and for how long and who would assume the travel costs to and from, and school, medical and expenses were argued over incessantly. And many times they failed to reach an agreement, which meant that he was left hanging, could not try out for the school cricket team because parents bickered over who would pay for the kit, could not go on a trip since they could not agree how they would split the costs.

Second worst thing was that they were excellent parents to their new broods. And it was starkly evident as to how they treated him differently. Rich people. If Mum and her family were going overseas for a fun vacation, he had to stay with Dad, since it was only fair, since she kept him when Dad took his kids on a holiday last month. :mad: And although the Court could and did order them to act in a certain way, they were rich enough that they could and did challenge every decision when possible.

The worst thing was that they did actually love him, they were fighting for the “principle” of the thing. I still vividly recall one day at a parenting conference, the lad’s step father took me and the child advocate aside and said that although he was there to support his wife, the boy was clearly suffering and maybe he could cover next few months costs under the table, un-bewest known to his Mrs and her ex. Amazing, the two hated each other so much that a literal step-dad could see what they could not.

Sorry, for rambling on, but of the cases I have done in my life, this is one that did shake me. The lottery of birth is probably the most important one in a person life and one which is appreciated the least.

15

It sounds to me like your father got treatment for a previously-undiagnosed mental health issue.

16

I know I’ve said this before on this board; I’ll do so again for the benefit of those who haven’t previously seen it.

When I was in college, I worked with two guys who said they planned to get married with the intention of treating their wives poorly after the kids arrived, so he would be a divorced dad (in other words, all the fun and none of the responsibility). One of them talked about planning to disappear from his kids’ lives and then make the Big Hero Dad Comeback when they were teenagers, most likely so he could party with them and maybe sleep with their friends. :mad: :eek:

One of them said that his family had to briefly live in a homeless shelter after his parents split up, and I asked him, “Why would you want to do that to your own children?” He replied, “Dad had a 17-year-old girlfriend.” :smack:

I don’t think they were kidding, either.

There is a situation in my extended family where the kids want nothing to do with their biological father OR his family (they don’t even hit him up for money) and nobody will tell me why, except that it’s for the best. :frowning: I know about some of the things SHE did in the wake of the divorce (among other things, she considered playing the sexual abuse card and the only reason she didn’t was because the kids refused to play along, because he didn’t do it) so I probably don’t want to know.

17

This is not the case. He was certainly depressed for a while after the divorce, but he doesn’t really show any stand-out signs of any mental illnesses. He was just brought up in a toxic environment that reinforced the worst aspects of his inherent disposition.

He did, however, have a near-death experience due to viral endocarditis, and met a woman (my wonderful, amazing step-mother) that was willing to stand up to him and challenge his atrocious behaviour in a way that my mother I weren’t, and that seems to have, if not fundamentally changed him, fundamentally changed the way he moderates his own behaviour.

18

Thank you for doing such valuable and ghastly work.

Ref the snippet above. When I was a union official I attended a negotiating school operated by a well-known name in the biz.

One of his practical tidbits was this: When somebody utters the words “it’s the principle of the thing”, that person has just lost all rationality on that topic. Now you know you can’t buy it off them for any price, but you *can *sell it to them for a fortune. Beat them to death with their own irrationality on the point.

It sounds like the parents you mention each took the “fortune” out of the kid’s hide & psyche to sell to the other. Hateful animals the lot.

19

Guy was watching waaay too much porn. Even if this was pre-internet.

Rotten apples rarely roll far from the rotten tree they fell from.

IOW, this seemed like “normal” to him.

Social dysfunction is almost as inheritable as is actually genetic stuff like hair & eye color. Not that dysfunction is in the genes, but rather that it’s almost entirely in the socialization which we all learn almost entirely by watching what our parents do, not listening to what they say. Plus/minus a few percent for natural variation.

20

My mother’s sister and her first husband divorced, after a marriage which would have been annulled if for some reason Aunt hadn’t refused the annullment (I think she thought it would make her children illegitimate). At the time, divorce procedures in Spain included a priest acting as “advocate for continuation of the marriage”; if he saw enough evidence of nullity, the same paperwork he’d generated for the civil court counted for the RCC.

I barely remember that uncle, but the details of the story could generate a long-running TV drama. Both parents chose to be emotionally absent; eventually one day my cousin ran into her father, greeted him and was told “I don’t have any children, who knows who else did that whore fuck”. One of the things he’d say when he and my aunt were yelling and throwing things at each other was that the kids weren’t his (both happen to look like his family a lot more than ours; my male cousin is a shorter and more barrel-chested version of the uncle; thankfully he also happens to be an actual human being unlike his parents). Aunt had married to escape her parents; eventually she met a man who didn’t want kids and moved with him to another town, leaving the children in the care of those same (grand)parents. But that whole side of the family, and that particular marriage in particular, were so dysfunctional the word would have had to be invented for them if it hadn’t existed.

I know other cases where the father could never find the time, others where he wants to be Santa Daddy (but often already did that when he was married, the wife was the main caretaker and the one who had to say no), others where he views himself as a failure and doesn’t want to “infect” his kids.