When my parents divorced, my father was the rock in my life. Although I loved my mother for her many good qualities, she was an alcoholic. My father was the parent I could most easily go to for emotional support and help. Consequently, when I filed for divorce, although I had physical custody of the children due to my son needing homeschooling for autism, I felt my ex-husband should play a major role in our children’s lives. I had the children call Dad every night for years. I also made sure they saw Dad per the parenting schedule. Despite some small problems between us, Dad and I had a decent co-parenting relationship. We often attended school events together and shared birthday and holiday celebrations. The serious problems in our relationship developed after he became involved with the abusive woman who became his second wife. The point is I felt and still feel that children need lots of quality and quantity time with both parents if at all possible. BUT sometimes these important relationships don’t work the way they should. Some parents physically and sexually abuse children. Others psychologically and emotionally abuse children, including parents who disrupt their children’s relationships with a previously loved and loving co-parent. This is now called coercive control.
After my ex-husband took our daughter away from me, and my contact with her dwindled to almost nothing, I briefly ran a support group for parents coping with losses of contact with their children like mine. Only one mother and one father came to the group with any regularity although I talked with a few other parents on the phone. I don’t know as much about the lives of fathers coping with lost contact with children lost to a controlling parent as I know about the domestic violence survivors I worked with, but their stories are familiar.
The wife of the man who came to my support group accused him of domestic violence and child abuse when she filed for divorce. He told me that he was innocent. The end result of these accusations was he was not allowed to see his children outside of supervised visitation. The problem was that his ex-wife rarely brought the children in for those visits. During some visits his daughters spurned him. In others, though, they were affectionate and told him they knew he was not to blame for the fact that they did not see him. The therapist supervising those visits was of the opinion that he was not the problem and supported him going to court to find his ex-wife in contempt for not complying with visitation orders as they were. He decided not to try this as both he and the therapist were uncertain of what position child protective services would take in the case. The end result was his ex-wife continued to rarely bring their daughters to supervised visitation. She suffered no consequences for her failure to comply with court orders. It should have been the therapist and not the ex-wife who decided that the father should not see the children. When his daughters turned 16—the age at which children are generally allowed to decide what custody and visitation arrangements they want—he gave up trying to see them.
The moral of the story is rejected parents often make serious mistakes, but custodial parents who disrupt the attachment between their children and their co-parent are misbehaving too.
At the same time, children truly need loving relationships with both their mothers and fathers. Society needs to support both parents being actively involved in their children’s lives.
Names, locations and other identifying details have been changed in these otherwise true stories although I what I know depends on my memories of what the survivors told me rather than on an exhaustive investigation of cases.
@ Virginia Pickles Jones 2018. Please do no reprint without permission.
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