Growing, Growing, Growing…
By Harald Breiding-Buss
F&C Trust, once a mere playgroup for Housedads’ kids, has gone from growing in hops and skips to burgeoning in leaps and bounds.
Another three months have flown by and the Trust continues to develop at breathtaking speed. It seems that what we are doing is so common sense. Why has no-one thought of it before.
Men supporting men as fathers – what an extraordinary idea!
The Trust has become an information hub for projects all around the country. Whether it is a new fathers group to be formed in Auckland, an individual who wants input into creating a weekly newsletter for fathers, a parent education project in Dunedin -everyone wants to talk to us.
This, of course, is way beyond the scope of the Christchurch Father&Child Trust, and this is why we have been pushing to get a national organisation started.
The main reason for parents contacting the Trust remains the problems separated fathers experience with access to their children. Often it is not the fathers themselves who contact us, but female family members.
Sometimes they are concerned for their brother’s, son’s or partners emotional wellbeing – they talk about depression, and even the sometimes suicidal tendencies of these fathers.
Men do not take it lightly if they cannot see their children. This is the other side of the problem of fatherlessness – fathers and children who are kept apart by a system that believes dads do not care about their children and if they apply for more access they do so to get back at the mother.
This is unacceptable and we urgently need to reevaluate as a society what value we place on the father-child relationship. Men are not disposable parents.
Secondly, fathers in primary caregiver situations are coming in, most often single and custodial dads.
A common complaint is lack of male companionship and generally isolation. Single dads feel especially alienated from parenting agencies. Some complain that these agencies give them the feeling that they are incapable of doing the job and try to elbow in as replacement mothers.
There has also been a fair number of calls by stepfathers recently.
These fathers find themselves in a very new situation: unlike biological fathers who can normally slowly adjust to the challenge of being a parent while the baby is small and needs only basic needs met, these fathers are suddenly required to be parents to older, sometimes initially not accepting children.
At the moment the Trust has no stepfathers on its Board of Trustees, but we would like to have one to look after these issues.
