Defiant Dads: Fathers' Rights Activists in America

6. The Custody Wars

6 The Custody Wars The local fathers’ rights group, Papas for Participation, tries to create a warm, inviting atmosphere when it meets every month. A small Golden Retriever puppy dashes among the ten round tables that are set up in the expansive room donated by the Lutheran Church in a suburban northeastern town. As his owner tries to gain control over the puppy, other members gradually trickle into the room. Including the male leader and his female vice president, twenty-one people are in attendance on this breezy day. All attendees are white, and there are a total of six women, two of whom appear to be grandmothers. One man boasts his commitment to the cause by wearing a “World’s Greatest Dad” tee shirt. Five minutes behind schedule, the meeting begins with Lawrence, the president, and Cathleen, the vice president, introducing themselves to the group. They each provide the names and ages of their children and ask the members to do the same. After pausing a moment, most of the members reach in their wallets and pocketbooks. They begin circulating pictures of their children to all of the other members. With each member taking his or her turn, they describe their family situations to the rest of the group. Some members state that they do not need to be coming anymore as their children are grown, but they are committed 146 Defiant Dads to the cause of forcing their state to pass new, father-friendly laws. One father cries out that he does not believe he will ever see his children again due to false allegations of abuse. Once the introductions are over, Lawrence first reviews the activities planned for the summer. Papas for Participation is aiming to attend a baseball game as a group social event, rent a booth at the state fair to publicize its issues, and sponsor a candlelight vigil at a local park in support of shared parenting. Then two female members speak. One recently completed training in family mediation, and she describes to the group the importance of this option for settling disputes as opposed to the adversarial court process. The second woman describes her efforts to establish a neutral site for both the transfer of children between parents and, when needed, supervised visitation. After these initial presentations, Lawrence gets the group’s attention by asking them all to fight for their most important goal: encouraging the state to pursue joint custody legislation. Lawrence: I hope that all of you are voting, because we must get joint custody legislation passed through this legislature. I want to read to you a list of several individuals who are running for office in the state. Some of them are divorced with kids. We must invite them to our meetings, because more and more of our representatives are in the same boat as us. I have an important rule of politics to share with you. Help candidates out with the election and they will help us with our issue of joint custody! Beyond overhauling the child support system, fathers’ rights activists consider child custody reform to be the most important issue facing legislators and judges at all levels of government today. Unlike material assets accumulated during the course of a relationship or a marriage , the law has had much more difficulty “dividing” up children once a relationship has broken down. When considering the dilemma as to where children should spend their time after a family dissolves, one potential starting point would be to answer the question: Who handled the majority of child care when the family was together? Scholars have approached the study of how much effort each parent expends in caring for his or her children in a variety of different The Custody Wars 147 ways. Up through the 1980s, these analyses explored how much time each parent allocated to general household labor, which included child care. This early research accounted for time each parent spent in broad categories of work, like preparing meals, washing clothes, and cleaning the house. However, because these studies did not specifically focus on child care per se, they were in constant danger of either over or underestimating attention paid to child-centered activities (Ishii-Kuntz and Coltrane 1992). More recent research has relied on time diaries, which ask participants to recall, sum up, and report the total amount of time that they engage in a...