Federal Government's Website on Fatherhood a Surreal Experience
 

http://mensnewsdaily.com/glennsacks/...al-experience/

Federal Government's Website on Fatherhood a Surreal Experience
By Robert Franklin, Esq. | Jun 28, 2009
On June 20th, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a
press release describing a new "public service campaign...promoting
fatherhood." The press release directs readers to the website
www.fatherhood.gov, and breathlessly promises a public service announcement
by none other than President Obama himself. Needless to say, that was an
offer I couldn't refuse.

When I went to the site, I discovered it was the home of something called
the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse. And, much as I would
expect from a site with that name, I found pablum - the shallowest, most
out-of-touch-with-reality ideas of fatherhood and the barriers to father
involvement imaginable. Obama's 30-second PSA is skin-deep, essentially an
exhortation to fathers to take their children to the zoo and help them with
homework. Michelle Obama's message is no better.

The message is simple; fathers are good for children, therefore, responsible
fathers will spend time with them and everyone will be better off.
Surrounding this message on every side is the subtext of "responsibility,"
i.e. if a father isn't actively involved in his kid's life, he's at fault.
He's just irresponsible and, if he cared about his child, he'd man up and do
the right thing. In short, it's the standard narrative of male perfidy that
omits all mention of family laws and court practices that doggedly separate
fathers from children. And there's no mention of maternal gatekeeping that
marginalizes fathers, sometimes from the first hours of a child's life.

But...

Look further on the site. Go to the library of publications and a whole new
world opens before you. The publications the site links to aren't many and
they're not up to date, but they paint an entirely different picture of
fatherhood and the many barriers fathers face in trying to establish and
maintain relationships with their children. There are scholarly
publications on maternal gatekeeping, programs to enhance non-custodial
parents' access to children, an article by Kathryn Edin about young, poor
fathers and others.

In short, once a visitor to the site gets past the bumper-sticker phrases
about responsible fatherhood, there's a lot of real information by (dare i
say it?) responsible social scientists to be had.

And the juxtaposition of the two is mind-bending. It's the same thing we
see every day. We know the truth; we read the massive amounts of social
science that shows us the incontovertible fact that fathers strongly desire
close relationships with their children, but are thwarted by a bewildering
array of laws, policies and practices that seem to be based on a complete
ignorance of well-established facts.

To listen to the president of the United States intone the mantra of
responsible fatherhood, cheek-by-jowl with the real information about
everything we do to prevent that very thing verges on the surreal. The site
neatly, if inadvertently, catches the deeply contradictory nature of our
public discourse and our public policies on fatherhood.