To not believe no dad is better

Simple! If he had simply kept in contact with the child regularly when the relationship ended then there's nothing to fight or request. I'm not sure how you think a mother is stopping a man seeing their kids because he's gone AWOL and wants to show up our of the blue without any arrangement in place he actually has to stick to.

Ok, this is clearly a troll thread 🤦‍♀️

Sure, my ex-husband didn't care enough to fight me in court, but some men will take you to court out of spite or to avoid paying child maintenance or simply take the child and not return it, in which case you will be forced to go to court.

And the vast majority of mother’s don’t just let a dad who has fucked off and abandoned his kids walk back in and out of a child’s life when it suits him, hope that helps!

It's very unclear that you're separated parents tbh, I would consider separated parents to be those who have parented the child together and the relationship has broken down and court mediation is a very very common service even those parents use. You seem to be keen not to clarify how long you (or this man..) actually lived with and raised these kids prior to "separating" and what the contact / financial maintenance situation has been.

Some mum’s want to protect their children from being hurt by someone who doesn’t have their best interests at heart… clearly you just can’t understand that though.

And FYI, if all he wants is to pop in once every few months, he doesn’t want a relationship with them.

Well he either has parental responsibility for them or he doesn't in which case he wouldn't need your permission to see them / have them overnight. If he had a CMS arrangement in place this would be affected by how much much he's already seeing them. Applying to the court to mediate a regular access arrangement to your kids is a very common procedure by people who genuinely want to come back into their kids lives.

I'm more and more convinced OP is a dad or a mate of one who hasn't been seeing them, hasn't been paying maintenance and doesn't want any sort of formal arrangement in place that he would be held to.

Interesting that you only answer the parts of replies you want to OP😂

Your kids fit the fatherless household outcomes regardless of him visiting every few months, he doesn’t care about his own kids, so why do you care?

How is it sad to want to have official parental responsibility for his child...does he already have this then?

Exactly, if you only focus on the outcome you completely miss that it's the circumstances of the absence that are going to have a greater effect. If your father is absent because he's in jail then you're also likely to be poor and have other social issues going on which are all going to play into a bad outcome.

It would really help OP for people to give more nuanced advise if you would give any info about how long this man has been absent and how old your children are. Has he been paying maintenance for them in his absence? Does he has parental responsibility? Is there a reason why of he's so keen to be back in their lives he isn't formally approaching the family court to work something official out?

You're really oversimplifying that data to match what you wanna do though. They have worse outcomes for a variety of reasons not because having occasional contact with their biological dad would have some magic effect. The stats also show that having a grandmother in a child's life greatly improves outcomes but it doesn't mean keeping an abusive troublesome grandma in their life would work. You seem to want to completely overlooked the evidence that inconsistent, unreliable fathers cause just as much damage.

Depends how much money you've got.

The main variable for good outcomes is income.

The reason children of single parents have statistically worse outcomes, is because they are poorer on average, than the children of parents who live together.

When you weight the figures for income, the results are pretty much the same - it's not being single that's the issue, it's the fact that you only have a single income and it's often low because it's more difficult to do high-fallutin', high earning jobs because of your childcare commitments. If you earn the same as a couple or have a degree, the differences in outcomes flatten.

So all down to money basically.

Of course not, but a coparenting father isn't an absent one.

Your kids dad has fucked off and only now decided to “come back”- he’s the one who thinks his relationship with his own kids isn’t important.

Be honest, what does this actually boil down to? Are you just desperate for a break from your kids? Because I genuinely can’t believe any mother could believe the stuff you’re saying here.

Just had a look at those stats you were talking about and actually the kids with poorer outcomes statistically were from families not just with no father present but with

1. Low contact with father- father does not live with kids and has little contact e.g. rarely see’s them
2. Low responsibility from father- father rarely involved in supervision, childcare, financial or caregiving responsibilities
3. Low engagement with father- father does not spend much time physically with or interacting with the child

As well as

4. Father absent from the household

So respectfully OP, if you’re going to rely on those statistics to prove your point, you should probably realise that regardless of whether you let him rock up every few months or not your children are still in that statistic of “fatherless homes”. A few hours every few months doesn’t make them exempt.

If your kids only see their sperm donor every few months then they are still included in that statistic OP. A visit once every few months is FAR from being a child with both parents in their lives.