Really? we think that "that organisation" are representative of fathers in general? really?

[NormaStanleyFletcher]

"They are already telling us that F4J (and by association every dad in the land) are bullying and intimidating them in this latest campaign, a stance that completely ignores the decades of intimidation that has been suffered by fathers at the hands of women?s organistions and which attempts to control the space around the campaign..."

Do they think we are as mad and misguided as them?

Intimidation by women's organisations?

From http://karenwoodall.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/on-the-tyranny-of-the-weak-a-mothers-day-musing/

Who is this handmaden person?

See I think men who treat their kids like that, should not then be allowed to demand that they have more contact time when they split up with their girlfriends and are at a bit of a loose end.

It's incredible that they're allowed to behave like this. Incredible. And yet people just shrug and say, well at least he sees them sometimes and pays a bit of maintenance.

What we expect of men as parents, vs what we expect of women, is so paltry.

If he won't have them he can pay the cost of a week's nanny care I suppose and if his conduct means she can't work then he will have all the more support to pay for.

Nice idea. Except all this talk of extending father's rights is not being accompanied by anything to improve the number of fathers paying maintenance (let alone at a level that actually means anything). Indeed, maintenance is being eroded thanks to the new CSA charges.

xenia huge amounts of men pay £5 a week maintenance and don't see their kids at all. they're not going to be taking 50% care or coughing up a nanny's wage. the sad truth is that as a group men are taking very little responsibility for their children and giving them more and more rights has made no impact on that. so i agree we need to get to a point of talking about and enforcing responsibility and scrapping the whole bs rights rhetoric but i doubt we can jump from thousands of men paying nothing and doing nothing towards the upkeep of their children and 50/50 residency (or pay financially the equivalent of 50% of care).

we need some steps along the way.

and the reality is that currently we're just going backwards re: as sunshine points out the charges and changes to the csa that will mean even less women getting maintenance and the maintenance they do get being less than ever due to the stealth tax to be levied on it by the csa.

I would have said men as a group are taking responsibility for their children.

Most children live with their parents.

26% of households with dependent children are single parent families.

I think you're on about fathers that are separated I don't see how they can represent men as a group.

some of your coupled households will contain women who have remarried and have children from their previous marriage huan - worth considering as it changes the figures rather.

and it is a fact that even within coupled families women do disproportionately more of the childcare and more of the life adjustments required for children to be cared for even when both parents work full time - let alone in those where women are sahms or work part time to fit around childcare needs which are still commonly perceived as their responsibility.

oh and obviously some of that other 74% of households will be headed by lesbian couples.

That is not always so. Plenty of women don't tolerate sexist men and sexist sets up. If you earn 10x your man as I did then it's not that hard to ensure you don't become some kind of door mat at home. Most men are very good. Many many men are very loving and helpful with their children. Plenty do lots of childcare.

If you love a child and can imagine how it would be if it were not with you you can begin to imagine the devastation some men feel after divorce when deprived of being with their child. Thus if you love the child who benefits from being with its father then of course you want fair contact for both and indeed most couples reach agreement and don't go near courts thankfully.

the fact that some slave's white owners were nice to them didn't mean that slavery didn't exist or that all slaves conditions were fine. the fact that some, relatively few by the looks of all research, women manage to achieve a relationship of relative equality within the patriarchal institution of marriage likewise does not prove anything about conditions as a whole.

i never said anything about 'always' xenia. i said that 'as a group' men take less responsibility than women.

Xenia, are you attempting a subversive parody? Because only in your universe do many women earn 10x their partner's salary. You and women like you are the exceptions that prove the rule. Good on you I say, but your reality is not that of most women's.

Likewise, I challenge you to find one single study among the countless that have been done that show most men pull their weight at home. They just don't. Some - a minority - do, which is fabulous. But again, they are not representative of men as a whole.

With the exception of a small minority, I think most women are so terrified of depriving their child of a father that they bend over backwards to facilitate contact, even when this is sometimes plainly not in the child's best interests. Of those witholding it, there is often a good reason and whether reasonable or spiteful, they are far outnumbered by the number of men who so "devastated" at losing their child (as you put it) that they cannot be bothered either to turn up for contact or to pay anything toward that 'much-loved' child's upkeep.

Most men are good to their children. Most couplse share the children in some fashion or other afterwards. Some parents male and female deny contact and that can be very very wrong and I hope all mothers and feminists can put themselves in the shoes of the parent denying contact and shout from the roof tops that it is wrong.

not if they're denying contact for the safety of themselves and their child/ren. i totally support someone's right to protect themselves and their child however they need to given how often courts fail to do this.

''Most men are good to their children. Most couplse share the children in some fashion or other afterwards. Some parents male and female deny contact and that can be very very wrong and I hope all mothers and feminists can put themselves in the shoes of the parent denying contact and shout from the roof tops that it is wrong.''

Exactly, most couples do manage to sort out satisfactory contact/custody arrangements, so when I hear of somebody who has denied contact to their ex - I usually like to know the full story before I jump on the ''they're evil and vindictive and they doing to be spiteful'' bandwagon.

You know what, I don't need to shout from the rooftops that it's wrong, because everyone else in society is shouting it from the rooftops. I'd prefer to shout about the stuff that no-one else gives a shit about - the non-payment of maintenance by the majority of NRP's, the screwing aroun d with contact arrangements by many NRP's, the court refusals to protect children from violent men - I personally think those issues need more shouting about a) because they are more common and therefore a bigger probelm and b) because the media are not shouting about them like they are about contact blocking.

Some men are good parents, some men are shit parents. We somehow need a legal system that is flexible enough to cope with either scenario. If it relies on assumptions either way, it is automatically unfair in the other cases. It would be good if there was more reliable fact-finding built into the system, but it is always going to be hard to know the truth in a he said/she said scenario.

Thing is, the family court does try to decide things on an individual, case by case basis. It doesn't have blanket rules.

That's waht f4j want - a blanket assumption of 50 50, even where that it totally inappropriate and bad for a child.

A starting assumption of 50/50, with adjustments as appropriate, eg 100% to mum if he's never seen the child, 100% to dad if she's a pissed-up junkie. And anywhere in between.

A starting assumption of 50/50 works very well in lots of countries and it is only the sexist UK which assumes women serve and clean and do childcare rather than go out tyhere and earn a fortune perpetuates sexist patterns and decides a father seeing his child once a fortnight is right.

so basically that starting point would mean men who want to get 50% and men who don't want to still get to do fuck all.

not seeing that as progress personally.

yes - we have the choice between being a cleaner and serving OR going out and earning a fortune.

which world is this in?

many women go out and clean and serve too you know and earn a pittance for it - much like the people you rely on in order to go and earn your fortune.

beyond naive.

How would forcing an uninterested parent to have 50% benefit a child?

Back in the day when my ExH had the children to stay with him every other weekend, he often used to palm them off onto his mother.

Now he sees them once a month. So much more convenient for him, apparently.

I feel sad that his parents let him behave like this. He is in his forties; he's not a kid.

I think a starting point of continuing the status quo, which is what we currently have, is the only starting point that prioritises the interests of the child, rather than the parent.

But if we stick with the staus quo, how do we ever move on? Back in the mists of time when I was a baby, my father wouldn't have been seen dead pushing a pram (though he was good at playing with us and so on.) Now, my own son is completely hands-on with his son, and has been since birth. He did nappy changes, nightfeeds (ff), bathtime, bedtime, toilet-training and all the rest of it. Why should the start point still be the same?

50/50 puts the onus of childcare on both parents, instead of assuming that mummy knows best. It can only be a positive thing.

(And might encourage less responsible men to be a bit more careful about contraception in the first place.)