THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, June 6, 1995 TAG: 9506060029
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 191 lines
JUST LET US be fathers, they plead. Just let us be real fathers.
One of those pleading is Daniel R. Tartt. He has to wait until his annual vacation to see his 5-year-old son. That's once a year.
Tartt hasn't been accused of wrongdoing. No one's said he's a bad parent. He pays his child support in full and on time. It's just that his son lives with his mother - Tartt's ex-wife - in Alabama. The authorities in that state won't allow the boy to travel outside the state to see his father.
``My job - I don't get too many three-day weekends,'' says Tartt, an assistant manager at a Chesapeake wholesale-club department store. ``And there are financial limitations. I can't afford to fly down to Alabama every month.''
Distance is one thing. But Tartt also has had to write nasty letters, hire lawyers and file federal lawsuits to check out his son's day care or meet his teachers. The facility's management at first shunned him because his ex-wife, and not he, had custody of his son.
``I'm a loving parent,'' Tartt says. ``I love my son. . . . It's a shame I have to fight to be a part of his life.''
A shame but a reality, say many other divorced, separated or never-married fathers who don't have custody of their children.
They, too, scrap and badger and sue for greater involvement in their children's lives than just sending a monthly check. They do this while ``deadbeat dads'' and child-support crackdowns dominate the headlines, and their neighbors don't take their parenting interests seriously.
They're fathers like David Shurbutt of Virginia Beach.
His pregnant girlfriend left him, and he wasn't allowed to see his son until the boy was 6 months old. For another six months, the father-son relationship was restricted to one hour a week in a Department of Social Services office.
``I felt like I was in prison,'' says Shurbutt, who works at the Virginia Marine Science Museum. ``The first time I saw him, I wasn't even allowed to hold him.''
Shurbutt's still going to court, trying to add to the one evening a week and two weekends a month he now sees his boy, who's 3 1/2. Shurbutt's also trying to get his name listed as the father on the boy's birth certificate.
``I'm not allowed to parent my child,'' Shurbutt says. ``It's a very traumatic and shattering experience. You never really hear about that. You hear about fathers who don't pay child support.''
The children, he adds, ``don't want Dad's money - they want Dad.''
Dad is mad these days. And he's fighting back.
He's pressing his custody and child-support claims in court. He's lobbying, petitioning and testifying at hearings on domestic laws. He, like Tartt and Shurbutt, is joining support and lobbying groups such as the 150-member Children's Rights Council of Tidewater Virginia. He's also burning up computer chat lines, his on-line discussions seething with bitterness.
Many divorced and separated fathers feel that they don't get an even shake in custody decisions, even though the laws officially are gender-neutral. Their lawyers often advise them not to bother seeking custody - mothers are presumed to be fit as parents, while fathers have to prove themselves, they say.
``That isn't fair,'' Shurbutt says. ``When I went into court, I had to make myself out to be a saint.''
These fathers feel that child support is deemed their most important - sometimes their only - contribution to their children. ``You just feel like a wallet,'' says Michael R. Ewing, president of the local Children's Rights Council, who shares custody of his 10-year-old daughter.
He and others feel that the term ``visitation,'' when it refers to the times when they are allowed to see their kids, is an obscenity.
``That's all we are - we're `visitors,' '' complains Michael C. Jarrett, a 49-year-old Virginia Beach broadcasting executive who is suing his ex-wife and others for $6.35 million concerning his access to their two daughters. ``I visit the zoo. I visit Nauticus. I visit Waterside. I visit my children.''
Visitation, agrees Shurbutt, is ``not being a parent. It's like being an uncle or something.''
The issue of how we, as a society, handle split parenting is becoming increasingly significant. Experts long have noted how the surge in broken families can harm children. Now, more attention is being focused on the absence of fathers and how children fare better socially and academically when there's someone in that role.
The Census Bureau reports that almost four of 10 American children don't live with their biological fathers, and more than a quarter of them live in homes without any father figure. The National Center for Fathering says that half the children of divorce have never visited their father's new home. In a typical year, 40 percent of them don't see their father. Twenty percent haven't seen their father in five years.
The center also reports that a 1992 poll showed that 70 percent of Americans agreed that ``the most-significant problem facing U.S. families is the physical absence of fathers from the home.''
On top of all this, welfare-reform efforts going into place across the country - including Virginia - lean heavily on tougher child-support enforcement, such as taking away driver's or professional licenses from delinquent parents, most often fathers.
Divorced and separated dads agree with policy-makers and most of their neighbors that two parents generally are better than one and that child support should be paid to help keep kids off welfare rolls. However, where many differ is in the approach.
As Tartt says, ``Treat them like a parent. Not a criminal.''
The fathers groups argue that courts should presume there will be joint custody - ``joint parenting,'' they prefer to call it - unless one or both parents are deemed unfit. That gives both parents legal rights concerning their children, such as access to school and medical records. Ewing and others point to studies that show mothers get sole custody 90 percent of the time.
Similarly, mediation should be the standard method of determining who does and pays what, because it's less adversarial than a court battle and because mediated agreements are more likely to be followed, they say. If needed, courts could arrange for child-rearing classes for the less-experienced parent.
Child-support awards should increase or decrease automatically as the paying parent's income goes up or down, just as the family income would rise or fall if the parents were still together, the fathers say. And child-support guidelines should reflect the increased cost of maintaining two separate households - and should not assume that only one parent is paying.
When Tartt was transferred from Philadelphia to Virginia Beach, he took a cost-of-living cut in pay, but he couldn't get the court to reduce his child-support obligation by an equivalent amount.
Michael A. Pelletier, a Virginia Beach carpenter, says that when he once was laid off for about six weeks and fell behind in child support for his son, his ex-wife took him right to court.
``She wanted everything paid up before she'd let me see my son,'' he says. ``I just couldn't do it. I said I'd double up on my payments.''
A judge mediated a settlement, and Pelletier's employer now pulls $80 out of his paycheck each week.
``All I've asked is to be allowed to establish a stable, loving relationship with my son . . . and I've got no trouble paying what I'm ordered to pay,'' Pelletier says. ``There should be more of a mediation focus to the situation. Everything doesn't have to be dragged through the courts. Little problems become big problems.''
The fathers point to studies showing that the more access both parents have to their children, the better that child support gets paid. To help children and to reform welfare, public policy should work toward keeping both parents involved in their children's rearing, they say.
``Fathers feel they're literally pushed out of their children's lives,'' Ewing says. ``A judge's telling a father he can see his child only on every other weekend is, in my opinion, nothing short of child abuse.''
Losing regular, meaningful contact with their children can create deadbeat dads, the fathers say.
``I've seen it so many times,'' Ewing says. ``They say, `If I can't see my kids, then screw it.' ''
Ewing also says he's heard stories of divorced fathers losing their homes and living out of cars so they can pay child support - and then having their visitation rights reduced because they had no ``suitable home'' for their children.
Ewing's new wife, Cynthia L. Ewing, has testified before Congress on child-custody and child-support issues, and she is on the Virginia Child Support Advisory Committee, which is reviewing the state's payment guidelines this year. She sees a ``hysteria'' in this country about deadbeat dads that hurts all divorced and separated fathers.
``We've got to admit, our system is broke,'' she says. ``But we can't look at it in a vacuum. . . . First of all, we need to treat parents as parents, and treat them with dignity - not throw them away and treat them as a wallet.''
For dissatisfied dads, there are a few good signs.
Joint custody or parenting - not necessarily a 50-50 split in duties or time but arrangements involving both parents - is becoming more common around the country. In Virginia, activist fathers last year helped push through a change in the law making it a misdemeanor, punishable by fines or time in jail, to violate custody or visitation orders. The fathers long had complained that they got punished when they fell behind in child support but that the parent with custody could cut off visitation without serious consequences.
The expected start-up of Family Courts in Virginia in the next few years, with their greater emphasis on mediation and whole-family counseling than the current Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Courts, should result in increased efforts to keep fathers active in their families, says one of the courts' architects, Judge E. Preston Grissom.
However, Grissom, who is now on the Chesapeake Circuit Court bench, says that despite judges' best intentions and efforts, they aren't going to please everyone.
``Sometimes the sheer nature of the beast, sometimes the fact that you have to come down hard on one spouse makes that spouse angry,'' he says.
Although he agrees that fathers are just as important to children as mothers, the judge says that custody decisions require weighing a host of factors, such as the parents' living environments, associations and activities. ``It is so complicated, you can't make a simple statement and come up with anything that makes a solution,'' he says.
Complicated or not, Tartt and others think things need to change. Tartt emphasizes that he has no problems with his ex-wife as a mother, just with a system that he feels keeps him from being more of a father.
``The system claims to be in the best interest of the child,'' he says, ``but I have to question that sometimes.
``Don't all these children deserve access to both parents? Don't they all deserve a mother and a father?'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Tamara Voninski, Staff
Daniel R. Tartt...
Color photo
Tartt is only able to visit his son, A.J., once a year
KEYWORDS: FAMILY FATHER VISITATION CHILD CUSTODY PARENTING by CNB