Parental Rights and Support

     Even for the hundreds of thousands of divorced fathers across the country who desperately want to be involved with their children, the uphill battle they must fight through the United States family court system often makes running seem alluring, says Greg McClain, a father of one from Tulsa, Ok., who has spent the last several years chasing the mother of his 3-year-old son across the country.            

No one could ever accuse McClain of not being involved with his son. When the mother of his son told him she was moving to Texas, McClain took a job in Dallas. But she never moved. 

Instead, just one month later, she decided to move to Tulsa. McClain decided to go with them. “I moved to Tulsa and got a lower paying job just to see my son more. Everything was going all right, until two months ago when she decided to move to Oklahoma City. Now I have to take her back to court to try and get custody,” McClain says.

Still, his expectations are low. “By Oklahoma law, she is suppose to petition the court before she moves with him, however, when she moved to Tulsa she failed to file anything, a point we brought up during our last ordeal in court, but the judge simply offered a warning and no consequences for moving.” McClain’s story is different than the one painted by so many child enforcement agencies: the father who has no interest in seeing his child, who flees to avoid paying what he owes and lives a life of leisure somewhere tropical. 

In fact, McClain’s desire to be a part of his child’s life has driven almost every adult decision he has made. Despite his devotion, things have not changed. “The mother of my son has literally done everything within her ability to keep me from getting "equal" time with him and the courts refuse to do anything about it,” says McClain. “I am a visitor in my own son's life.”             

Although McClain says he would never consider leaving, the reality is, sometimes he can understand why a non-custodial parents would just give up. “I have been tempted to just leave this whole situation simply because at times its just so frustrating and I know the impact it will inevitably have on my son,” he says. “When he is older he will want to know where I was, and I will have to explain to him that a guy he never met, when he was very young, argued by two people who had no interest in his life, decided how much I could see him. The police department can’t help, my lawyer gets tired of my phone calls and, in the end, I'm out $6,000 and still can't see him anymore than 4 days a month.” 

“There does seem to be incentive for dads who don’t want to be visitors in their child’s life to just give up. Then society calls them deadbeats,” says McClain.

The experts agree. “There are many inequalities built into the family legal system that revolve around two dimensions of fatherhood. The first is that women have implied legal rights to decisions to keep (developing) children (while in utero) even if the man wants the child, or, alternatively, may make the decision to keep the child even if the man does not want to raise a child,” says Dr. Scott Haltzman, a psychiatrist and assistant professor at Brown University who specializes in relationships and men’s issues. 

“Ultimately, after the fertilization of an egg, the woman, and the woman alone, has the right to make the decision about what to do next. The man must sit on the corner and accept the consequence, even if the woman has misrepresented whether or not she was fertile at the time of sex,” Haltzman says.            

As of now, fathers — or non-custodial parents -- are expected to accept their full share of financial responsibility for children even if they have little to no say about the care of the children. “In most cases, the mother of the child has the right to decide how the money should be used to secure the child’s needs,” says Haltzman.            

For McClain, whose first experience with family court was during his parent’s divorce in 1986, the fact that nothing has changed in more than 20 years was quite a shock. “I would have thought that the father’s role has changed at least a little bit since 1986,” says McClain who was given the exact same visiting schedule—four days a month and every other holiday—as his father was back then. 

According to Ned Holstein, executive director of Fathers and Families, a Massachusetts-based family court reform organization, that is the reality across the country. “The only place where it is still the 1950’s is in family court,” says Holstein.