Why don't women with kids force the dads to have them 50% of time?

[DontCheetoTheCheetah]

Disclaimer: I dont have kids and dont want them so prepared to accept my POV might be odd but...

...Just read a thread where a woman was talking about disputing maintenance costs with her ex and mentioned he never has his kids overnight, adding that its his choice.

Why wouldn't you just force them to have their kids? Im think if I were a mum I'd quite like to have half my time to just chill and have some downtime without my children? Or is it that when you have kids you cant bear to be wthout them?

Well this turned into a pile on very quickly!

Op - when I first became a single parent, I was really young, exhausted by parenting, and angry at the injustice of my ex just swanning off, so I tried what you suggested - I tried to force him to parent. I'm ashamed now of that time. My children were the ones who suffered. Luckily I quickly saw the reality of me "forcing" him to be a parent and have them more (wasn't even close to 50:50 but that would have been my ideal).

The lowest point was when I came back from work at 11pm to find they had been walking through the estate we lived on for an hour because he was convinced I was there somewhere, shagging someone, rather than at work as I had told him.

I never asked him to have them again.

My dd is now nearly 14 and ds 21
Both contact their birth father regularly ( dd daily after school)
He sometimes answers and mostly doesn't
They have asked him at every opportunity if he will see them / go for coffee / a walk anything
He has been too busy for 10 years
He lives 30 mins away
He has retired
It breaks their hearts
I don't think he's "allowed" for some reason . We were married 25 years and I've remarried so no idea why a partner would support this behaviour but it not my business
So OP
My Dc and me would love love love 1% contact but even that is unrealistic .

Because we like our kids generally? And we want them to have a stable home life rather than being shunted from pillar to post? Most people don't have kids just to find ways to get rid of them?!? 😂

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

Pretty sure my ex tells each new gf this too. Truth is he can barely manage to interact with them EOW, and just takes them on endless days trips to shopping centres, and wouldn't even consider having them live with him 50/50, certainly not full time. But, he tells people his kids are his life, blah blah blah, but it's actually bullshit.

Surely OP must have realised by now how unrealistic this is (if it wasn't obvious already).

50/50 parenting can work very well

Has he been to court to request this?

Because practically you can’t force someone to do that. This is why it’s unfortunate that so many shit fathers have equal rights to the mother but refuse to take equal responsibility. It would be impossible to make a law on this, as the courts and the government focus on what is in the best interests of children, and rightly so. Legally forcing someone to have a child 50% of the time who doesn’t want to isn’t likely to be beneficial to the emotional needs of the child. It’s shit, but it is what it is. Unfortunately men get to cop out of parenting if they choose to. Society doesn’t judge them harshly either. If a mother ever does the same she’s considered some kind of monster to be able to go against her natural maternal instincts. Apparently men in the same situation don’t share those same instincts. I do think if 50/50 court ordered custody was more the norm, like it is in countries like Spain, there may be a slight shift in attitude to seeing parenting as something that should be done equally between two parents, rather than defaulting the lions share to the mother while dad’s get to have the fun time at weekends.

As I've said many times on this thread, yes he has.

Why was it refused?

Same. My ex even had a gf who thought she'd be the angel who would "fix" the situation, and contacted me on social media with an offer to sort something out, as a big surprise to my ex, to mend his broken fatherly heart. To her credit, she did seem to have a very kind soul, so I think it was genuine. She also was very young, only a few weeks into the relationship, and a bit naive.

She was absolutely shocked to learn the reality of the situation, I did not overshare but I did give her the facts she could have verified independently. They broke up very soon after, I suspect it played a big role. I have very mixed feelings ranging from bad to good about my participation in that.

You're ever so simplistic, what's life like on your planet 😆

‘The life burden of them’ wow you’re a piece of work!!

I certainly don’t see my DD as a burden of any sort!

and yes of course we’d all like ‘downtime’…. However no I don’t think men should be ‘forced’ to see their children… I don’t want my ex to spend time with his DD just because he fears a fine or prison sentence….

My ex moved 100’s of miles away when we split and he’s only seen our DD once in 2 years!!….. His loss!

I think she has issues because her own father ‘just vanished’…. She obviously feels either that he should have been forced to have a relationship with her, or she would have got some sort of fascination from knowing he was in jail for neglecting to see her! Very odd that she’d have wanted her ‘deadbeat’ dad to be forced to spend time with her or that she sees herself as a life burden on her own mother!

In my situation I am pushing for 50% (would love to have them 100% of the time but children need both parents) and rightly so, the block from the other (female) side is due to ££ (impacts how much she gets into her pocket monthly - she calls child maintenance "her money" not money for the children and even though I pay substantially more than CMS requirements she keeps threatening to go that route to somehow make me have to pay an extra 25% - talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face) and this warped sense of self-entitlement that men are a necessary evil and that in some way the children are her possessions. (Absolute mirror image of her mother) Not all men are as described, generally, on here.