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Father Research Papers

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Throughout the United States, more than one-third of children don't live with their biological fathers, and about 17 million of those children don't live with any father at all. Of those, roughly 40 percent haven't seen their fathers in the last year. The over 500 Father's Rights organizations are trying in a variety of ways to change these statistics because they believe that fathers are necessary to the intellectual, psychological and emotional well- being of all children. "Family values" groups encourage long lasting stable, marriages and tough divorce laws to increase the number of two- parent households. Some organizations focus on reasonable child support and visitation, as well as creative joint custody arrangements to …show more content…

The 1980's saw the emergence of a new and powerful father hood movement, focused on discrimination in divorce laws and unfair child support orders. 1986, The National Convention for Men, an umbrella group for 36 organizations representing roughly 6,000 men, centered their attention of the issues of child support and custody rights. The men were outraged by the gender bias men suffer in courts, with 87 to 90 percent of divorce cases giving sole custody to the mother with our without visitation for the father . They emphasized that the feminist movement had changed parenting roles and equalized parental involvement, and demanded that custody laws be changed to reflect this. The president of the NCM, Peter Cyr, urged the men to fight against isolation and alienation from their children. In 51 percent of sole- custody arrangements, the children saw their father less than once a year, according to the Commission on Child and Family Welfare. The NCM supported joint custody, which was a key issue of fledgling Father's Rights movement and is still central plank of the father's rights platform today.
In the late 1980's and early 1990's, criticism of single mothers began to mount. The number of two parent families dropped over 11 percent from 1970 to 1980 and continued to drop into the 90's. Between 1969 and 1992, the percent of AFDC cases involving children born to unwed mothers grew by over 20 percentage points,

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