Posted by
Mike Geanoulis on Sunday, August 02, 2009 12:00:02 PM
SOCIAL POLICY AND FATHER ABSENCE
By Michael J Geanoulis, Sr. August, 2009
If I were a controlling imp of the kind our founding fathers warned against, and my boss the Devil convinced me to devise a plan that would make things better for families, but unwittingly sent 35% of America's children to bed in homes absent their natural fathers, I'd be hard put to come up with anything more effective than the present social moray which holds one parent more important than the other, and so would copy it all somewhat as follows.
Most parents and children value family ties. They might resist the road to hell being paved with fragile families and good intentions. So, to facilitate the plan, it will become necessary to eliminate fault as a cause for divorce, portray all men as abusive dolts who care more about their cars than their kids, and compensate for independent parenting with father substitute government programs.
Marriages or their neo equivalents are bound to weaken under this plan. The children, home, and a lion's share of the defendant's income will likely fall to the mother--by default and natural gravity for the singles, and by legal proceedings in which nobody was at fault for the marrieds. Anger management classes and restraining orders might issue for the multitude of defendants (most often fathers) angry over the loss of sacred relationships and material assets.
The plot thickens as it should for poorly conceived plans. Men avoid marriage and traditional fatherhood like the plague, preferring the casual affair thereby aggravating the fatherless problem. Independent women disavow marriage as a form of slavery. Both sexes forget the role of traditional families in advancing the species and revert to the mindless sexuality of the grasslands and our primate cousins, where nobody knew who their fathers were.
Many despondent dads are unable to cope with unfathomable orders that ruined their first families, and the expense of second households. Some hold judges responsible for removing the children from where they were decently provided for to begin with. And more than a few good dads are made to feel like criminals not charged with any crime. But it will only matter that the children get financial support. So Child Support Enforcement (CSE) offices will be established everywhere, complete with deadbeat posters, to make sure of it--so goes the theory.
It now becomes necessary to keep taxpayers ignorant of collections rates stuck around
65% of amounts ordered for all accounts ever since CSE began their war on fathers. Enforcement efficiencies, furthermore, must be publicly reported in misleading terms like child support dollars collected versus dollars spent to achieve those collections. Those embarrassing compliance reports reflecting the raw truth will be sent only to federal supervisors who will quietly pray for higher collections while saying nothing that might indict their self described "growth industry" as inept intrusions of rights reserved for the states and the people where they belong (
US Constitution, Tenth Amendment).
In an apparent effort to unravel bad raps heaped upon so-called uncaring fathers, Princeton and University of Arizona researchers report that unwed fathers are showing up in maternity wards in surprisingly high numbers. When caring dads are involved, compliance soars beyond 90% far exceeding any enforcement program this imp could contrive (Braver, 1998). But fathers' demonstrated desire to care about their babies won't matter. Those appearances will merely be used to extract social security numbers to enable forced collections going forward.
A Fatherhood Initiative report, "The 100 Billion Dollar Man: The Annual Public Costs of Father Absence," might present problems from those critical of family policy (
http://www.nh.gov/csm). Ditto for the growing body of research showing that children thrive best when raised by caring and involved mothers and fathers who first enter serious relationships by way of the altar. But the devil's plan might remain secure while books like "Raising Boys without Men" are published to serve the politically correct and the selfish (
Drexler, 2008).
As long as traditional families have questionable competition from the fatherless version, where poverty reigns and children suffer expensive
pathologies of every description, demand for independence and services will no doubt continue unabated. To be sure, some men are unworthy of a family connection. But policy should ordinarily default to healthy family formation excepting the clear and convincing to the contrary. Maybe father never really knew best as the fifties era taught. But it was a clever effort to hang that label on him if only to keep his wallet within easy reach. Too bad that label didn't stick.
(Mr. Geanoulis is a member of the New Hampshire Commission on the Status of Men, heads the father/child connection on that panel, and served on the first Governor's Commission on Child Support. He resides in New Castle, N. H. Blog at http://mensstatus.blogtownhall.com/)