Fathers of the Future

 

If you're like many fathers of the future I encounter, you are most likely discouraged that the systems that you would hope could help you guide your family with love and logic really say and do very different things.

I am talking about all the systems that run on clock-time brought to America by the colonists — the legal system and the medical system that run on clock time. The science of colonization uses a mechanistic model to divide and conquer nature into its component parts. 

We are coming to the end of an era. The family court and the mindset of therapists the court depends on to help families is changing. 

You may be discouraged because you are having a hard time finding a professional who is trained in a methodology to resolve the dynamic that erases fathers from families, and perpetuates a doctrine of separation for your family but I am here with a special news flash….

You have to be the one to lead the way.

You can get stuck believing that an attorney will help you protect the best interests of your child, or a judge will see what is going on, but they are not going to be able to help you protect your child or see what is going on through the lens of the old therapeutic and judicial paradigm.

While volumes have already been written about the devastating effects of father absence, there still exists enormous confusion about what the problem is, and this proves true time and again. 

The old paradigm passed down from the days of colonization is not going to help you recover your family, and if you think that’s not true, that can be preventing you from taking action.  What the family court system and all the surrounding professionals want you to believe that you have to do things a certain way if you want to be heard, and get help for your family - but that is not entirely true. 

You will not be heard and your family will not be helped if you simply do what you are told. You will have to prove your case. If this is something that you already knew intuitively but never thought was possible, now you know you are not alone. It is possible.

I hope that makes sense. You are not going to get help. You have to help yourself.

All the experts may say that there is nothing you can do, but I am here to tell you that if you have a problem, there is a solution. Start taking action. Right now there is a gap. Start building the bridge.

That is what dads do. We make stuff happen. When there is a problem, we will go to the end of the world to figure out what to do, and that is how we make the way for our family in the future. We may not know what to do, but we start with one thing and take it from there.

You have to have proof, and we’re going to talk about that. It’s time for fathers to focus up. . . Dads are a joke in the court of public opinion, and they need to set the story straight. Images of dads in the media portray them as out of touch and incompetent. Research on the role that fathers actually play depicts a different reality.  

As of 2019, a quarter of the 121 million men living in the US are biological fathers to at least one kid who’s under the age of 18. 1 out of 3 children under 18 live apart from their father. 

Father absence has devastating effects for children’s educational attainment, relationship formation and stability, mental health outcomes, and labor force success.

According to the Center for Disease Control children from fatherless homes account for 90% of all homeless runaway kids. 71% of high school dropouts and 63% of Youth suicides.

Something has shifted for me in the past weeks. I came across some ideas from Alexis De Tocqueville, who visited America for about nine months in the 1800s and wrote a book called Democracy in America, where he stated: 

The judicial organization of the United States is the institution which a stranger has the greatest difficulty in understanding. He hears the authority of a judge invoked in the political occurrences of every day, and he naturally concludes that in the United States the judges are important political functionaries; nevertheless, when he examines the nature of the tribunals, they offer nothing which is contrary to the usual habits and privileges of those bodies, and the magistrates seem to him to interfere in public affairs of chance, but by a chance which recurs every day.

The first characteristic of judicial power in all nations is the duty of arbitration. But rights must be contested in order to warrant the interference of a tribunal; and an action must be brought to obtain the decision of a judge. As long, therefore, as the law is uncontested, the judicial authority is not called upon to discuss it, and it may exist without being perceived. When a judge in a given case attacks a law relating to that case, he extends the circle of his customary duties, without however stepping beyond it; since he is in some measure obliged to decide upon the law in order to decide the case. But if he pronounces upon a law without resting upon a case, he clearly steps beyond his sphere, and invades that of the legislative authority.

So this is another way of saying that we have to bring up the law for the judges to be able to say anything about it. Now finding a lawyer who will raise the issue of fundamental rights of children and families rather than quibbling over relatively trivial matters is proving to be more difficult than you might expect, and the reason is that no one expects it. The lawyers and the judges have a set script. They see so many families, they are trying to categorize things in a way that makes the system run as efficiently as possible.

You know, they wake up in the morning and have a cup of coffee and then they go to the office which for them is the court. At the office, they see their co-workers - the judges and the lawyers who they see everyday. The people and the families who the lawyers represent are really interchangeable parts to be manipulated and handled. The lawyers and judges have little incentive to serve the people in the court system. The people are not the ones that they have the most influential, consistent relationships with to maintain, enduring relationships that motivate the lawyers in their day-to-day lives. They need to maintain their relationships with the judge and with each other, so they may not stick their neck out to bring up new information or start talking about fundamental rights. It would make more work for everyone.

What they try to do is find out how your story fits in with business as usual. They ask questions so they can see where you fit into the existing narrative that makes it the easiest for them to handle the case. The problem is that every case in family court is between individuals, and while  it is certainly true that there may be more similarities than differences between men and women, or between dads, each one of us has a special and unique relationship with our child. That is the essence of what it means to be a family, and to be a father - the right to pass on values and beliefs that are specific to your family circumstances. Values that arise out of the strengths of your ancestors that can be observed and recognized  in your children, and the challenges that they must overcome. So we can't have a one-size-fits-all solution.

It looks like there may be opportunities for due process that we have not fully explored, or even begun to explore because we're busy focusing on the things that the lawyers want to focus on. They ask the questions, and when you ask the questions you guide the conversation. So if the question is about what percentage of time you have with your children this is quite literally dividing the value of parenting into clock time, a percentage.

If you begin with these types of questions then the game of the court is to maintain the status quo unless you can prove some extraordinary or concerning reason why things should be any different. The more important questions are not bound by a clock and cannot be divided into property. These are spiritual questions, which involve fundamental rights of our children guaranteed by the constitution. I have recently come across some interesting examples of case law that could change the whole focus of what families are doing in family courts n the future:

The rights of parents to the care, custody and nurture of their children is of such character that it cannot be denied without violating those fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions, and such right is a fundamental right protected by this amendment (First) and Amendments 5, 9, and 14.  Doe v. Irwin, 441 F Supp 1247; U.S. D.C. of Michigan, (1985).

Loss of First Amendment Freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury. Though First Amendment rights are not absolute, they may be curtailed only by interests of vital importance, the burden of proving which rests on their government. Elrod v. Burns, 96 S Ct 2673; 427 US 347, (1976)

The state has no greater power to restrain individual freedoms protected by the First Amendment than does the Congress of the United States. Wallace v. Jaffree, 105 S Ct 2479; 472 US 38, (1985).

Until recently, I had an intuition about these things but no real examples of how we might apply the principles of the supreme law of the land in our family law courts. Now I am really curious. This is something that no one really talks about because it’s one of those things. It just isn;t done. It hasn’t been done. We have yet to hold our state courts accountable for upholding the fundamental rights of children and families under the constitution. The best interests of the child are a moving target with no functional definition. We must begin to define the best interests of the child in terms of their fundamental rights. It is in the best interests of every child to give and receive love from both parents without obstruction. 

There has to be a way. If love and logic are not against the law, then we can certainly wrap the law around them. Fathers of the future will be glad that we started finding a way sooner rather than later. The heavy lifting is only heavy now because no one is doing it. It won’t be easy, but thanks to the founding fathers it should not be that complex. The law is already on our side. We just have to apply the law with facts and courage enough to counteract the contagion of emotional gamesmanship that currently passes for currency and basis for jurisprudence in courts of family law. 

Just because a father is not a criminal doesn’t mean that his rights and the rights of his children should not have the same rights as a criminal in a court of law. Judges do have to follow the law. I've heard a lot of things, and I hear that the judges don't have to follow the law and so far I have been shrugging my shoulders along with everyone else and saying I guess that is the way it is so what else is there to do? What there is to do is what we haven’t done yet, only because there is incredible resistance to doing things differently that they have done before in all human affairs - even when the conditions have already been prepared. It takes someone to make the connection. To help the fathers of the future, we have to be the fathers of the future. 

We have to find the limits of what is possible. We have to be willing to go to the end of the world and stand our ground to do what we can to protect the interests of our children and our way of life. Our connection with our children is foundational to the life of our people as a family. To be part of their life, to ask questions, demonstrate interest, and encourage our children on an individual level is to exercise the most freedom of speech and freedom of religion imaginable. If you think of religion as a daily practice, certainly father time is central to that. We’re not here just to collect child support from. We’re here to support our children.

* GODSPEED stands for “Gather Only Data in Sync with the Purpose of Every Excellent Deed.