American Fathers 4Change with a mission of helping to bring awareness that by increasing the proportion of children growing up with involved, responsible, and committed fathers it will improve the well being of children.
"The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband." ~ Honore de Balzac
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DIVORCE – FACTS,
STATISTICS, AND RATES
If you spend enough time perusing the internet, you’ll find
no shortage of studies, statistics, and facts about divorce.
There seems to be a study looking into almost every possible
factor that might affect marriages and lead to divorce. These studies have yielded
some extremely interesting and – in some cases – downright shocking information
about divorce in both the United
States and the rest of the world.
Just in case you don’t have 20 hours to spare (it may or may
not have taken this long to compile this list), we have compiled a nearly
exhaustive list with every divorce statistic, study, and fact that we could
find. As we move through 2016 towards 2017, here is everything you need
to know – and quite possibly more- about divorce.
1. As of 2016, both marriage rates AND divorce rates in the US are
decreasing.
2. The marriage rate in the United States is currently 6.8 per
1,000 total populations.
3. The divorce rate in the U.S. is 3.2 per 1,000
population (as of 2014 the latest year of data from the CDC. (With 44 states
and D.C. reporting) This is known as the “crude divorce rate”. Although useful
for describing changes in divorce rates over time, the crude divorce rate does
not provide accurate information on the percentage of first marriages that end
in divorce.
4. Currently, the divorce rate per 1000 married women
is 16.9. Many experts feel that this is a much more accurate measure
of true divorce rate than the crude rate.
5. The divorce rate per 1000 married women is nearly
double that of 1960, but down from the all time high of 22.6 in the early
1980s.
6. Almost 50 percent of all marriages in the United States
will end in divorce or separation.
7. Researchers estimate that 41 percent of all first
marriages end in divorce.
8. 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce.
9. 73 percent of all third marriages end in divorce.
Steps To Take To Deal With Your Alienated Children
Dealing With Them When During Visitation/After Reunification.
First of all, let us discuss the more common of the two; the scenario of visitation.
Whether visitation is one day of the week or several, the behavior of an alienated child is most likely to be the same. Children are generally resistant and defiant, and will attempt to diffuse the alienated parent, and will make every attempt to diffuse the visitation. From ill behavior, violence, rudeness, underhanded tack ticks, you can expect anything.
Generally, anything and everything can happen and a parent has to be on their guard. This is no time for cupcakes and ice cream. Young children in the family have to be guarded as well if they are from a second marriage. If I am sounding harsh, I mean to be, I am realistic. I have seen this happen.
Of course, as with everything in life, there are acceptations to every rule.
You may have a perfectly adjusted child who has been alienated from you. If that is the case, ignore everything I have said above.
These children are emotionally behind by ten years by the time they are in their teens. Yes, they behave like 6-8 year olds. They may walk, talk and look like their peers, and are 4.0 students like my four children are, but emotionally, they are stunted.
Advocates for the rights of our children and their parents to have meaningful life-long relationships.
The BEST Parent is BOTH Parents!!
Fathers have become undervalued, family structure has become disposable, children suffer without both parents but so often father is left out, seen as nonessential. Let's correct this by bringing attention to it! We're happy to populate the Internet with information that is helpful, supportive, and conducive to fostering father-child relationships, reducing or eliminating Parental Alienation, for the betterment of our children's psychological and emotional health, and for the future health of our families and societies.
Fathers have become undervalued, family structure has become disposable, children suffer without both parents but so often father is left out, seen as nonessential. Let's correct this by bringing attention to it! We're happy to populate the Internet with information that is helpful, supportive, and conducive to fostering father-child relationships, reducing or eliminating Parental Alienation, for the betterment of our children's psychological and emotional health, and for the future health of our families and societies
Divorce Corp Director, Joseph Sorge, interviews renowned economist and lead author of a breakthrough study on the costs of raising a child, Professor William Comanor.
Watch this video to learn the shocking facts about how child support costs are currently calculated and why they need to be revised.
Then share this interview with your state legislators to support child support reforms.
Together we can end unnecessary fighting over one of the most contentious aspects of any divorce; child support.
The coauthors of the study are Mark Sarro, Principal of The Brattle Group and R. Mark Rogers, Founder and Principal of Rogers Economics, Inc. Lead author, William S. Comanor is Professor of Economics at UC Santa Barbara and Professor of Health Policy & Management at UCLA. The full paper "The Monetary Cost of Raising Children" published in the journal "Economic and Legal Issues in Competition, Intellectual Property, Bankruptcy, and the Cost of Raising Children" Volume 27, can be found here:
Imagine you are in a divorce. You’ve been a dedicated parent and you aren’t a convicted felon or being accused of a crime. Now imagine walking into a local court for a procedural hearing and in a single decree your children are banned from seeing you, speaking to you or communicating in any way based solely on hearsay and allegation. Nothing’s been proven, no due process has occurred to prove anything yet a capricious judge has made a snap decision that changes the rest of your life and your children’s. What would you do?
Unfortunately this scenario is the real life experience of thousands of families across the country. An overzealous or biased Judge makes a snap decision that takes away the most important things in our lives. Whether or not you were the one seeking divorce there’s very little that parents who find themselves in this situation can do. Even when children are banned ‘temporarily’ from their parents, months can drag on to years between court dates and there’s no pause button in life. Milestones go by, alienation grows, bitterness increases and worst of all children experience immense pain and loss. Surprisingly most states have no provisions to intervene when children are banned from their parents yet this is one of the cruelest punishments that a court can levy.
While the US Constitution gives the powers of marriage, divorce and adoption to state civil courts, state civil courts simply ignore their obligations to support the civil rights protections of parents as held in the US Constitution. Parents who can’t afford attorneys can lose their children fighting spouses with access to legal assistance. Children who are the ones ‘protected’ have no say in bizarre custody decisions. Evidence standards are non-existent in family courts in the USA so children can be taken from parents purely on accusation. However, since many courts receive federal aid and recent Supreme Court cases like Turner vs. Rogers have reinforced the concept of due process in divorce many parents are turning to federal courts to seek restoration of their parental rights based on civil rights arguments.
Usually, come Christmas morning — well, 4am to be precise — I’m woken by the squealing of over-excited children and the tell-tale rip of paper. I can hear every ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ as my 12, nine and five-year-olds open the sack of presents Father Christmas has left them.
Last year, the high point was when my five-year-old daughter unwrapped her Barbie pony. It was a toy I’d also had as a child, so seeing her at the side of my bed, clutching it with eyes like saucers, was one of those moments that make all the boring bits of motherhood — the cooking, the cleaning, the battles over homework — worthwhile.
This year it will be different. There will be no happy squeals, no little feet thundering up and down the hall. No huge, messy pile of wrapping paper. Instead, there will be just me and silence. Oh, and the dog.
That’s because for the first time ever, I will be waking up on Christmas Day without my children.
The problem is that Christmas makes the difference between the real and ideal so obvious. For example, when you have children, you build up a store of Christmas family traditions, such as playing a particular board game after Christmas dinner. For us, it’s eating chocolate for breakfast in our pyjamas.
When your children are away, you lose not only them but your little rituals and therefore the whole ‘shape’ of Christmas Day. I did once go away for Christmas without the boys before my daughter was born. I was with my then husband and his family in the West Midlands.
They were very kind but having a gaggle of children there who were not my own was awful. I managed till 3pm before almost bursting into tears over a ‘family’ game of Cluedo. The lack of my own family was simply too much to bear.
The most difficult thing about being a divorced parent on Christmas Day is the emotional loss and feeling of failure. As far as I’m concerned, being childless on December 25 feels like having one of those huge comedy hands pointing at you, saying: ‘Sad divorcee.’
Every lone parent will testify that there are many occasions when you feel the fact that you are not part of a conventional couple. School plays, parents’ evenings, birthday parties, holidays — all need to be negotiated with care.
But nothing brings it home as hard as Christmas. It’s the time of year when the imperfections in adult lives are exaggerated. John Lewis might like to consider re-uniting a snowman with his ex-snowwoman and their snowchildren as a poignant Christmas campaign next year.
I know some post-split parents get over the problem by reuniting for the big day. But what do you do with all the extended families — yours, his, plus potential new partners?
If I assembled my family, both my exes’ families plus my three siblings’ partners’ families, I’d need Wembley Stadium to fit them all in. And that’s if they’d agree to be in the same place at the same time.
Of course, compared to some I’m lucky. At least I’ll be seeing my children later in the day. But even having them dropped off halfway through has its challenges. There’ll be the hasty handover on the doorstep. The children will rush in, eager to get to a fresh pile of presents, tossing byes over their shoulders as they go. Their fathers will hover awkwardly as we say Merry Christmas.
At least once the children are home, I will value them more because I haven’t had them all day. So while their dads and stepmums may be flagging, I will be fresh and delighted to see them.
In the meantime, when I wake on Christmas morning I will try my best to enjoy the quiet — so rare as a mum-of-three. I will eat chocolate in my pyjamas on my own and have my lunch for one with the dog. It’s just a shame she hasn’t learned how to pull a cracker yet…
The evolution of fatherhood research offers interesting insights into academics’ assumptions about how fathers contribute to their children’s well-being. These assumptions influence research agendas and, while sometimes being helpful, can also lead to misunderstanding fathers and their contributions. For instance, the scholarly study of fathers began with the Second World War when researchers made the assumption that father absence would lead young boys to become effeminate (Bach, 1946; McCord, McCord, & Thurber, 1962) or homosexual (see Pleck, 2007), with much of this research drawing on Freudian theory (Burton & Whiting, 1961). During this time and through much of the 1970s, aside from examining their presence or absence, fathers were not included in “parenting” research, which was primarily the study of the mother’s influence.
Then, in the 1980s, feminist thought began to influence the research field, and the assumptions about the father’s role expanded to include multiple aspects of parenting (see Lamb, 2000). Scholars began to categorize general “types” of father involvement (e.g., engagement, responsibility, accessibility) and study how these types influenced children (Lamb, Pleck, Charnov, & Levine, 1985, 1987). From this research grew a wealth of information on how a father’s involvement contributed to his children’s development (Lamb, 2010). Bolstered by these findings, fatherhood researchers increasingly argued that when studying child development, it was critical to study the father’s role.
At the same time, social movements arose that began to call into question two assumptions often underlying fatherhood research: 1) that what fathers do as parents is different from what mothers do and 2) that father involvement is essential for child well-being. Regarding the first assumption, it is certainly true that there is much overlap in what fathers and mothers do. Both mothers and fathers care for their children, express love, monitor, discipline, play, teach, etc. In fact, it is difficult to name acategoryof parenting tasks that fathers and mothers cannot both do. Jay Fagan and colleagues (Fagan, Day, Lamb, & Cabrera, 2014) found little research justification that “mothering” and “fathering” were different. They therefore conclude that there is justification for collapsing the terms “mothering” and “fathering” into “parenting.”
Regarding the second assumption about “essentiality,” Louise Silverstein and Carl Auerbach (1999) rightly challenged the notion that every child requires a father in order to successfully develop. Indeed, there are numerous examples of people who succeeded without being raised by a father. Barack Obama became President of the United States and Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympic athletein history, and both were raised primarily without a father.
Parental alienation: "a disorder that arises primarily in the context of child-custody disputes. Custody can go on for years to the detriment of the children."
Some would argue that America is rapidly becoming a fatherless society, or perhaps more accurately, an absentee father society.The importance and influence of fathers in families has been in significant decline since theIndustrial Revolution and is now reaching critical proportions. The near-total absence of male role models has ripped a hole the size of half the population in many urban areas. For example, in Baltimore, only 38 percent of families have two parents, and in St. Louis the portion is 40 percent.
Across time and cultures, fathers have always been considered essential—and not just for their sperm. Indeed, no known society ever thought of fathers as potentially unnecessary.Marriage and the nuclear family—mother, father, and children—are the most universal social institutions in existence. In no society has the birth of children out of wedlock been the cultural norm. To the contrary, concern for the legitimacy of children is nearly universal.
As Alexander Mitscherlich argues in Society Without A Father(link is external), there has been a “progressive loss of the father’s authority and diminution of his power in the family and over the family.”
“If present trends continue, writes David Popenoe(link is external), a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, “the percentage ofAmericanchildren living apart from their biological fathers will reach 50% by the next century.” He argues “this massive erosion of fatherhood contributes mightily to many of the major social problems of our time…Fatherless children have a risk factor of two to three times that of fathered children for a wide range of negative outcomes, including dropping out of high school, giving birth as a teenager and becoming a juvenile delinquent.”
72% of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers. 60% of America’s rapists grew up the same way according to a study by D. Cornell (et al.), in Behavioral Sciences and the Law;
63% of 1500 CEOs and human resource directors said it was not reasonable for a father to take a leave after the birth of a child;
71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes according to the National Principals Association Report on the State of High Schools;
80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes according to a report in Criminal Justice & Behavior;
In single-mother families in the U.S. about 66% of young children live in poverty;
90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes;
Children from low-income, two-parent families outperform students from high-income, single-parent homes. Almost twice as many high achievers come from two-parent homes as one-parent homes according to a study by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.
85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes according to a study by the Center for Disease Control;
Of all violent crimes against women committed by intimates about 65% were committed by either boy-friends or ex-husbands, compared with 9 % by husbands;
Girls living with non-natal fathers (boyfriends and stepfathers) are at higher risk for sexual abuse than girls living with natal fathers;
Daughters of single mothers are 53% more likely to marry as teenagers, 111% more likely to have children as teenagers, 164% more likely to have a premarital birth and 92% more likely to dissolve their own marriages.
A large survey conducted in the late 1980s found that about 20% of divorced fathers had not seen his children in the past year, and that fewer than 50% saw their children more than a few times a year.
Juvenile crime, the majority of which is committed by males, has increased six-fold since 1992;
In a longitudinal study of 1,197 fourth-grade students, researchers observed “greater levels of aggression in boys from mother-only households than from boys in mother-father households,” according to a study published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology.
The Scholastic Aptitude Test scores have declined more than 70 points in the past two decades; children in single-parent families tend to score lower on standardized tests and to receive lower grades in school according to a Congressional Research Service Report.
Blankenhorn argues that America is facing not just the loss of fathers, but also the erosion of the ideal of fatherhood. Few people doubt the fundamental importance of mothers, Popenoe comments, but increasingly the question of whether fathers are really necessary is being raised and said by many to be a merely a social role that others-mothers, partners, stepfathers, uncles and aunts, and grandparents can play.
“The scale of marital breakdowns in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent that I know of,” says Lawrence Tone, a noted Princeton University family historian, “There has been nothing like it for the last 2,000 years, and probably longer.” Consider what has happened to children. Most estimates are that only about 50% of the children born during the 1970-84 “baby bust” period will still live with their natural parents by age 17-a staggering drop from nearly 80%.
Despite current interest in father involvement in families, an extremely large proportion of family research focuses on mothers and children. Health care agencies and other organizations exclude fathers, often unwittingly. Starting with pregnancy and labor and delivery most appointments are set up for mothers and held at times when fathers work.
The same is true for most pediatric visits. School records and files in family service organizations often have the child’s and mother’s name on the label, and not the father’s. In most family agency buildings, the walls are typically pastel colors, the pictures on the wall are of mothers, flowers and babies, the magazines in the waiting room are for women and the staff is predominantly female. In most welfare offices, fathers are not invited to case planning meetings, and when a home visitor is greeted at the door by a man, she often asks to speak with the mother. Given these scenarios, fathers are likely to get the message that they are invisible or irrelevant to their children’s welfare, unless it involves financial support.
Popenoe and others have examined the role of fathers in raising children and found there are significant differences than that for mothers. For example, an often-overlooked dimension of fathering is play. From their children’s birth through adolescence, fathers tend to emphasize play more than caretaking. The play is both physically stimulating and exciting. It frequently resembles an apprenticeship or teaching relationships, and emphasizes often teamwork and competitive testing of abilities. The way fathers play affects everything from the management of emotions to intelligence and academic achievement. It is particularly important in promoting the essential virtue of self-control.
A committee assembled by the Board of Children and Families of the National Research Council, concluded “children learn critical lessons about how to recognize and deal with highly charged emotions in the content of playing with their fathers. Fathers, in effect, give children practice in regulating their own emotions and recognizing others’ emotional clues.”
At play and in other realms, fathers tend to stresscompetition, challenge, initiative, risk taking and independence. Mothers, as caretakers, stress emotional security and personal safety. Father’s involvement seems to be linked to improved quantitative and verbal skills, improved problem-solving ability and higher academic achievement for children. Men also have a vital role to play in promoting cooperation and other “soft” virtues. Involved fathers, it turns out according to one 26 year longitudinal research study may be of special importance for the development of empathy in children.
Family life-marriage and child rearing-is a civilizing force for men. It encourages them to develop prudence, cooperativeness, honesty, trust, self-sacrifice and other habits that can lead to success as an economic provider by setting a good example.
Mark Finn and Karen Henwood, writing about the issue of masculinity and fatherhood, in the British Journal of Social Psychology, argue that the traditional view of masculinity, with its focus on power, aggression, economic security, and “maleness”, and the emerging new view of fatherhood, which incorporates many aspects of motherhood is a source of struggle for many men who become fathers.
In a study of fatherhood in popular TV sitcoms, Timothy Allen Pehlke and his colleagues concluded that fathers are generally shown to be relatively immature, unhelpful and incapable of taking care of themselves in comparison with other family members. In addition, the researchers found that fathers often served as the butt of family members’ jokes. All of these characterizations, while the intention may be humor, depicted fathers as being socially incompetent and objects of derision.
In a study of depictions of fathers in the best selling children’s picture books, researcher Suzanne M. Flannery Quinn concluded that of the 200 books analyzed, there were only 24 books where the father appears alone, and only 35 books where mother and father appear together. The author concludes, “because fathers are not present or prominent in a large number of these books, readers are given only a narrow set of images and ideas from which they can construct an understanding of the cultural expectations of fatherhood and what I means to be a father.”
It seems to me that the issue of the decline of fatherhood and the problem of the male identity crisis are inextricably intertwined.
In my Psychology Today article, “Our male identity crisis: What will happen to men?” I said, “In a post-modern world lacking clear-cut borders and distinctions, it has been difficult to know what it means to be a man and even harder to feel good about being one. The many boundaries of a gendered world built around the opposition of work and family-production versus reproduction, competition versus cooperation, hard vs. soft-have been blurred, and men are groping in the dark for their identity.”
Overwhelmingly, the portrayal of men and the male identity in contemporary western societies is mostly negative. Men today are extensively demonized, marginalized and objectified, in a way reminiscent of what happened to women. The issue of the male identity is of crucial importance because males are falling behind in school, committing more suicides and crimes, dying younger and being treated for conditions such as ADHD more than females.
There has also been a loss of fatherhood in society as artificial insemination by anonymous donors is on the rise. Further, medical experiments have shown that male sperm can now be grown artificially in a laboratory. There has been a rise in divorce rates where in most cases, child custody is granted to mothers. Continuous negative portrayal of men in the media, along with the feminization of men and loss of fatherhood in society, has caused confusion and frustration in younger generation males, as they do not have a specific role model and are less able to define their role in society.
From once being seen as successful breadwinners, heads of families and being respected leaders, men today are the butt of jokes in the popular media. A Canadian research group, Nathanson and Young, conducted research on the changing role of men and media and concluded that widely popular TV programs such as The Simpsons present the father character, Homer, as lazy, chauvinistic, irresponsible, and stupid and his son, Bart, as mischievous, rude and cruel to his sister. By comparison, the mother and daughter are presented as thoughtful, considerate and mild-natured. The majority of TV shows and advertisements present men as stupid buffoons, or aggressive evil tyrants or insensitive and shallow “studs” for women’s pleasure.
According to J.R. Macnamara, in the book, Media(link is external)and the Male Identity: The Making and Remaking of Men(link is external), less than 20% of media profiles reflected positive themes for men. Violent crimes, including murder, assault, and armed robberies accounted for over 55% of all media reporting of male activities. Macnamara says that over 30% of all discussion in the media of male sexuality was in relation to pedophilia, and males’ heterosexuality associated with masculinity is seen as violent, aggressive and dominating. Men are frequently shown in TV shows and movies as lacking in commitment in relationships and are shown as frequently cheating on women. And with increasing frequency, women are shown on TV shows and movies as being independent single mothers, not needing a man.
Guy Garcia, author of The Decline of Men: How The American Male is Tuning Out, Giving Up and Flipping Off His Future,(link is external) argues that many men bemoan a “fragmentation of male identity,” in which husbands are asked to take on unaccustomed familial roles such as child care and housework, while wives bring in the bigger paychecks. “Women really have become the dominant gender,” says Garcia, “what concerns me is that guys are rapidly falling behind. Women are becoming better educated than men, earning more than men, and, generally speaking, not needing men at all. Meanwhile, as a group, men are losing their way.”
“The crisis of fatherhood, then is ultimately a cultural crisis, a sharp decline in the traditional sense of communal responsibly, ” contends Popenoe; “It therefore follows that to rescue the rescue the endangered institution of fatherhood, we must regain our sense of community.”
Beyond that, fathers—men—bring an array of unique and irreplaceable qualities that women do not ordinarily bring. Some of these are familiar, if sometimes overlooked or taken for granted. The father as protector, for example, has by no means outlived his usefulness. And he is important as a role model. Teenage boys without fathers are notoriously prone to trouble. The pathway to adulthood for daughters is somewhat easier, but they still must learn from their fathers, as they cannot from their mothers, how to relate to men. They learn from their fathers about heterosexual trust, intimacy, and difference. They learn to appreciate their own femininity from the one male who is most special in their lives (assuming that they love and respect their fathers). Most important, through loving and being loved by their fathers, they learn that they are worthy of love.
Recent research has given us much deeper—and more surprising—insights into the father’s role in child rearing. It shows that in almost all of their interactions with children, fathers do things a little differently from mothers. What fathers do—their specialparentingstyle—is not only highly complementary to what mothers do but is by all indications important in its own right.
For example, an often-overlooked dimension of fathering is play. From their children’s birth through adolescence, fathers tend to emphasize play more than caretaking. This may be troubling to egalitarian feminists, and it would indeed be wise for most fathers to spend more time in caretaking. Yet the fathers’ style of play seems to have unusual significance. It is likely to be both physically stimulating and exciting. With older children it involves more physical games and teamwork that require the competitive testing of physical and mental skills. It frequently resembles an apprenticeship or teaching relationship: Come on, let me show you how.
The way fathers play affects everything from the management of emotions to intelligence and academic achievement. It is particularly important in promoting the essential virtue of self-control. According to one expert, “Children who roughhouse with their fathers . . . usually quickly learn that biting, kicking, and other forms of physical violence are not acceptable.” They learn when enough is enough.
Children, a committee assembled by the Board on Children and Families of the National Research Council concluded, “learn critical lessons about how to recognize and deal with highly charged emotions in the context of playing with their fathers. Fathers, in effect, give children practice in regulating their own emotions and recognizing others’ emotional clues.” A study of convicted murderers in Texas found that 90 percent of them either didn’t play as children or played abnormally.
So as we annually celebrate Father’s Day, and reflect on it’s importance to social stability, more men in our culture need to find their male identity and commit to the central importance of fatherhood.
Carey Casey, CEO of the National Center for Fathering, reveals startling statistics about the difference that a father in the home makes in a child's life.
"So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home." (Tecumseh).
American Fathers Liberation: ALL Men’s Rights are Human Rights. ’nuff said http://bit.ly/1JgMgEm
Do you support a presumption of equal parental fitness, regardless of gender, being enshrined in law in accordance with the 14th Amendment?
