Fathers Groups Support Divorced Dads

    Most father’s rights groups in the United States say they only want one thing: equal parenting time. But across the country, these organizations, made up of non-custodial parents — mostly fathers — are vilified as only wanting to shirk their child support obligations and create a losing situation for their children.   

“I consider it a marketing accomplishment along the lines of bottled water,” says Dr. Ned Holstein, the executive director of Fathers and Families, a Massachusetts-based family court reform organization. The idea, of course, is that somehow bottled water — called “glorified tap water” by some consumer groups--is selling at a cost that exceeds the price of gasoline. 

And yet people are as likely to buy overpriced tap water as they are to believe that groups who support father’s rights just want to escape child support. “We do fully believe that children need to be supported, both emotionally and financially,” says Dr. Holstein who started Fathers and Families a decade ago after it became clear to him following his own divorce that fathers were not being treated fairly by the United States family courts. “My curiosity was piqued because I am a divorced father.”  

According to their Web site, the organization’s “primary goal is to change society's institutions that create so many casualties in the first place. We are an advocacy organization, an organization that fights to change an unjust system. We also minister to the needs of individual fathers and grandparents to the extent possible, but this is a secondary activity.”  

After his own divorce, Dr. Holstein quickly realized just how lucky he had been when he met other fathers who had the standard visitation model: every other weekend and a few hours on a weekday. “I was one of the rare fathers who got joint legal and physical custody,” says Holstein whose relationship with his two children, now grown, was able to thrive and prosper because of joint custody. Many of the fathers Holstein met were not as fortunate. 

They felt distant from their children and their children felt distant without them, Holstein says. Fathers and Families sprang out a need for social action, Holstein says. Ten years later, the organization is going strong with more than 4,000 members and a full staff. Fathers and Families is dedicated to “promotion of social change,” Dr. Holstein says.    

In Illinois, a similar organization, the Children’s Rights Council of Illinois , also promotes shared parenting as a means to greater success for children. “The real issue is about the right of children to enjoy a meaningful parent-child relationship with both their parents and to not have either relationship diminished, unless one of the parents is either proven in court to be unfit or is simply disinterested in their parenting role,” says Mike Doherty, chair of CRC-IL.   

Many of these organizations shy away from the term, “father’s rights organizations” because of the stigma attached. Instead, CRC-IL describes themselves as an organization dedicated to children’s rights. For some, this idea is hard to swallow. In 1997, Gloria Woods, the former President of the Michigan chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW) denounced the agenda of many father’s rights groups in an article entitled “Fathers Rights Groups: Beware Their Real Agenda.”