Unmarried or divorced father stats

Fathers who have never made the commitment of marriage or even of sticking around.

 

There was a time when fatherlessness was high on account of death. But: "A surprising suggestion emerging from recent social-science research," Popenoe points out, "is that it is decidedly worse to a child to lose a father in the modern, voluntary way than through death. The children of divorced and never-married mothers are less successful by almost every measure than the children of widowed mothers ... . And there is reason to believe that having an unmarried father is even worse for a child than having a divorced father."

And the statistical analyses of the US data are showing that children from a fatherless home are:

20 times more likely to end up in prison;

32 times more likely to run away.

20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders.

14 times more likely to commit rape;

Nine times more likely to drop out of high school;

10 times more likely to abuse drugs;

Five times more likely to commit suicide;

Nine times more likely to end up in a state-operated institution;

Two times more likely to have children during their teenage years;

The litany of disaster continues in the US statistics:

85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes;

90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes;

71% of all high-school dropouts come from fatherless homes;

71% of teenage pregnancies are to children of single parents, so the cycle continues;

75% of all adolescent patients in chemical-abuse centers come from fatherless homes;

63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes;

80% of rapists come from fatherless homes;

70% of juveniles in state facilities come from fatherless homes;

85% of all incarcerated youths grew up in a fatherless home.

Researchers have found that for children, the results of their mothers abandoning the marriage bed are nothing short of disastrous, along a number of dimensions

We ignore the problem of father absence to our peril. Of perhaps greatest concern is the lack of response from our lawmakers and policymakers, who pay lip service to the paramount importance of the "best interests of the child," yet turn a blind eye to father absence, ignoring the vast body of research on the dire consequences to children's well-being.

How appropriate that Justice Alito brought up cellphones in the recent Supreme Court hearings on the marriage cases. Because these days it seems like it is easier to get out of a marriage than it is to get out of a cellphone contract.

It is no secret that marriage is in a state of severe crisis in America. And while academics, statisticians, and pundits may quarrel about the exact divorce rate or its causes, no one would deny that the widespread legalization of no-fault divorce beginning in the early 1970s saw an explosion of divorce in this country.

Yet as social conservatives, and even many liberals, wring their hands about marital and familial breakdown, few seem to question whether our experiment with treating marriage like a restaurant experience-order what you like and send it back if you change your mind-is worth reconsidering.

Instead, no-fault divorce has become an assumed feature of the landscape of unbridled American freedom. Whereas once freedom in this country meant the right to live a good life, the ability to be a moral agent in the human enterprise, the chance to chase happiness, it now increasingly appears to mean the right to do whatever you want whenever you feel like it, regardless of whom you destroy in the process.

No-fault divorce is destroying women, children, and men. More precisely, divorce destroys marriage, and the destruction of marriage harms every party involved. The legality of no-fault divorce just makes it infinitely easier to hurt people. There are no two ways about it. No one comes out of a divorce a happier and more whole person.

Particularly offensive no-fault divorces are those where one spouse is protesting. In these cases, one spouse is literally abandoning the other (and frequently the children as well), despite having made public vows and having signed a contract before civil and religious officials stating their lifelong commitment to his or her spouse.

In this country you can come home from work and tell your spouse the marriage is over and he or she can do nothing but cry, and fight for the best financial payout possible. Try doing that with Verizon. Or while under contract to buy a home. Or with your gym membership. You'll get laughed at.

Eighty percent of divorces are unilateral. The legal sanctioning of human abandonment must end.

The family court system needs to do a much better job of keeping families together and combating the Evils of Parental Alienation. 

Help in Yakima family court

I felt it very important, to not only post the comment below Lani-Kai Swanhart, an unfit Commissioner but to add it to the blog pages. It seems there is help in Yakima and if you are in family court there, I would encourage you to contact the number below. You will need to do your investigation and use your best judgment when contacting the number below. I cannot recommend anyone that I personally don’t know. Still, I think it would be worth your time visit with the person below;

I am a GAL in the Yakima court system but I also work with a parent who is representing him/herself to gain custody or increased visitation. I provide advocacy and case management.

I have and M.S.S.W. from Columbia University and years of experience working with children and families in the family court system.

Since only 28% of the father's in Yakima County have 50 percent custody of their children, advocacy and case management are critical to increasing the father's involvement with the child. Counties on the western side of the state have upwards of 65% of the fathers who have 50% custody of their child.

I am easily able to challenge court custody investigators or GALs who often lack the experience I hold.

Parental alienation is an extremely important issue and judges must be reminded how damaging it is for the kids. 509-312-9850

What is Parental Alienation?

Parental alienation occurs any time that a parent, relative or friend speaks badly about another parent so that a child can hear what is being said. Alienating behavior may be mild, moderate or severe. All parents are likely to "lose it" and be inappropriate with their words around children. However, when there is a predominance of negative messages being communicated to a child, these messages can seriously erode the child’s psychological well-being. In severe cases of parental alienation, children are manipulated and brainwashed (programmed) into such states of confusion that their perception of events and people around them are severely distorted.

Parental alienation in its most severe form is a heinous form of child abuse and neglect. It is a dangerous manipulation of children’s minds to alter their perception of reality about another parent. The purpose of marginalizing this parent is so that he or she has no means to be an effective parent or to entirely cut that parent out of their child’s life.

The Tragic Result

Severe cases of parental alienation have the characteristics of being complicated in two ways. Combative parents duel with conflicting stories of "he said / she said" and make it very difficult to determine who is telling the truth. Brainwashed children often support the side of the offending parent with dramatic stories of how they have been abused by the target parent. As target parents argue their position, they often seem defensive even when they are telling the truth. Programmed children lose their own sense of reason and their ability to express their own choice in the matter. If the alienator is not contained, these manipulations of the child’s mind become the incubator of their own future psychological problems. These children have an altered perception of reality that is not in their best interest or in the best interest of society.

Unfortunately, in many cases, fully capable parents and their extended family and friends who love the child and would provide a nurturing and healthy family life are eliminated. Once the cutting out of a parent has occurred the child is left under the full care of the most disturbed and dysfunctional parent. These tragedies are played out in our family law courts daily.

Target parents find that normal methods of handling parental conflict such as mediation and therapy do not work. They are forced to appeal to a judge to make a decision that will enable them to continue to see their children. This is often an expensive and perilous path that rarely results in a satisfying outcome as few people, including judges, attorneys, and therapists, understand the nature of the problem.

Major Family Services

Major Family Services was founded by Dr. Jayne Major, Ph.D. and offers classes, consulting, books and educational materials that address a broad range of unique parental training situations that can benefit all types of parents. For over 30 years, Dr. Major has been educating parents on the art of raising children and maintaining healthy family relationships. Dr. Major established Major Family Services, Inc. to expand the availability of her parental training classes and consulting services through a trained network of professional instructors certified in teaching her techniques. Dr. Major’s curriculum provides parents with advanced and proven child-rearing methods designed to encourage and promote psychologically sound ways to parent children. Major Family Services will continue to expand and offer classes in an ever-growing number of communities.   
    

Jayne Major, Ph.D.
President    

Jayne A. Major, Ph.D. is the founder of Major Family Services and the author of the acclaimed book Breakthrough Parenting: Moving Your Family from Struggle to Cooperation. She is nationally recognized as an expert in family education, a dynamic and inspiring speaker, author and consultant on optimal family relationships. She holds a doctorate in Philosophy of Education from UCLA.

 

A Personal Message from Jayne:

I became aware of how difficult it is to be a parent when my husband and I adopted two foster boys who were 7 and 9 at the time and had been severely abused and neglected. I rapidly ran out of everything that I knew to do. I had to face the fact that I needed to learn much more to be an effective parent.

I started reading how to books for parents and quickly discovered that even the experts disagree. What was so simple was turning out to not be simple at all. I decided to use parent education as the focus of my doctoral dissertation at UCLA. My purpose was to write a curriculum for parents that would be a psychologically solid and skill based way of raising children according to the best of what we know today.

My doctorate is in Philosophy of Education and what I philosophized about was psychology. When I graduated from UCLA I began speaking and teaching classes to many different groups of people. I also started writing books for parents. These books eventually became Breakthrough Parenting: Moving Your Family from Struggle to Cooperation.

I believe that when people know better they do better. Parent education is my passion. There is no more important job than that of being a parent. I enjoy consulting, teaching classes, and speaking about how we can improve the way that children are raised by their parents. I frequently consult with parents about discipline situations that have developed in their families and have become knowledgeable about divorce and child custody disputes. I show parents how to improve their strategy on how to handle difficult problems in families.

What I’ve found is that children want to get along with us and the main reason that we have struggles with children is due to the parent’s lack of skill and knowledge. Education is the key to successful parenting.

www.MajorFamilyServices.com

...

What is child abuse today?

Many of the things that made us the greatest generation ever...would now be called child abuse and our parents would have been thrown into jail. We the kids would have been stolen by the court for our own protection and placed in homes where we could grow up fat and lazy with the attitude that everyone owes us something. Kind of like the entitlement mentality that kids and to many young adults have today!

~~~~~~~~~

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE

1930s, '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s!!

 First, we survived being born to mothers who may have smoked and/or drank

while they were pregnant.

 They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

 Then, after that trauma, we were

put to sleep on our tummies

in baby cribs covered

with bright colored lead-based paints.

 We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets,

and, when we rode our bikes,

we had baseball caps,

not helmets, on our heads.

 As infants and children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes..

 Riding in the back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

 We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

 We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.

 We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter, and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And we weren't overweight.

WHY?

 Because we were always outside playing...that's why!

 We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day.

--And, we were OKAY.

 We would spend hours building

our go-carts out of scraps

and then ride them down the hill,

only to find out we forgot the brakes.. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem..

 We did not have Play Stations, Nintendos and X-boxes. There were

no video games, no 150 channels on cable,

no video movies or DVDs,

no surround-sound or CDs,

no cell phones,

no personal computers,

no Internet and no chat rooms.

 WE HAD FRIENDS

and we went outside and found  them!

 We fell out of trees, got cut,

broke bones and teeth,

and there were no lawsuits

from those accidents. 

We would get spankings with wooden spoons, switches, ping-pong paddles, or just a bare hand, and no one would call child services to report abuse.

   We ate worms, and mud pies

made from dirt, and

the worms did not live in us forever.

   We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and 

-although we were told it would happen- we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

  Little League had tryouts

and not everyone made the team.

Those who didn't had to learn

to deal with disappointment.

 Imagine that!! 

 The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

 These generations have produced some of the best  risk-takers,

problem solvers, and inventors ever.

 The past 50 to 85 years have seen an explosion of innovation and new ideas..

 We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

 If YOU are one of those born

between 1925-1970, CONGRATULATIONS! 

 You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives  for our own good.

  While you are at it, forward it to your kids, so they will know how brave and lucky their parents were.

No matter what our kids and the new generation think about us,

 WE ARE AWESOME !!!

OUR Lives are LIVING PROOF !!!

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it ?

~~~~~~~

The quote of the month

by

Jay Leno:

   "With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?"

For those that prefer to think that God is not watching over us...go ahead and ignore this. 

For the rest of us.....pass this on.

 Pulling boys on a sled at Christmas time with a horse and what an attorney called an abusive father

 Kaleb, Colton and Dakota riding horses on the beach with a loving step mother who was responsible for and coordinated lots of fun family times.

 Josh, Kaleb, Colton and Dakota with Jan having fun. Thank you Jan for buying the snow-machines for us. We all had great times!

 The 4 boys being pulled around the driveway behind a crazy man on a tractor.