Brigitte – the German women's magazine published an exciting article a few days ago that begins with the following words:
We're always quick to criticize men who don't take care of their children after a divorce. But to be honest, sometimes mothers don't cut a good figure when fighting over custody and children.
Maren laughs and chatters away. After so many weekends where the child wasn't allowed to come. She's finally here, spending eight hours with her dad. They go into town, eat ice cream, play in a raffle. Maren wins a make-up set and beams. Later, when she says goodbye, she says: "Mom will probably scold me if I bring that back from you." The handover takes place in a parking lot. The little girl gets out of her father's car and runs to her mother's car. Turns around, waves one last time. “I saw my mother throw the make-up set into the wastebasket at the next traffic light,” remembers Peter Witkowski. It was the last time he saw his daughter for half a day. He calculated that she was allowed to be with him for 21 hours in four years.
In 2007, over 187,000 marriages were divorced in Germany, the number of separations is estimated to be significantly higher, and around 50,000 children suffer because their parents argue about contact and visitation regulations . In the event of a divorce, custody usually distributed between both parents, but mothers still have the upper hand when it comes to the question of how often and when the father can see his child because in 80 percent of cases the children live in their household. Unmarried mothers can choose whether they want to share custody with the father of their child. Many don't want to, if only because they don't want to be tied to their ex beyond the relationship: around 54 percent of mothers in Germany therefore have sole custody of their children born out of wedlock.
Conversely, the situation is different: before a father gets sole custody, the child is more likely to end up in a home - statistically speaking. In Germany, custody and visitation rights are often and heatedly disputed in court. The real battle, however, takes place in the heart. The end of a relationship means hurt, sadness, anger and hurt. Even if you weren't abandoned, but abandoned. You need distance - and unfortunately sometimes you force it on your child out of supposed self-protection.
Some mothers move the front line into the children's room and defend their territory with all means possible: "Twice," says Harald Mauser (name changed) from Bremen, "she even had a medical certificate in her hand: the little one was emotionally torn, the contact the father had to be stopped first. " The mother had told the doctor tall tales.
Educators, teachers and doctors are often monstrous things by the alleged monster father , who beats his children, feeds them poorly or even abuses them. "Other people are massively lulled into being. It says: I have sole custody, under no circumstances give the child to the father," reports Würzburg qualified psychologist Christiane Pohl.
Children themselves are also often manipulated: Some women even deliberately tell their ex-husbands the wrong times when they should wait in front of school and pick up the child. Bad daddy was an hour late? The youngsters should understand that you can't rely on that.
What the child is guaranteed to understand: Mom doesn't want me to love Dad. A terrible dilemma from which children often only see one way out: they take their mother's side. At least as long as she's watching. “Sometimes my son cried bitterly when I held him in my arms during the handovers,” remembers Harald Mauser. "His mother then said: You see, he doesn't want to go to you at all. But as soon as he sat in the car with me, he was happy and asked full of expectation: Dad, what are we doing today?"
The mother only sees the tears and the resistance - and feels confirmed in her conviction that the father is just a disruptive factor. Some women manage to keep their children away from their fathers for weeks or even months despite established contact arrangements. Fathers can speak with the tongues of angels, complain to the youth welfare office, get the court involved, insist on the penalty payment that is definitely provided for in the law for boycotting contact - it is usually just a warning. “Many family judges are afraid that they will automatically punish the child along with the mother ,” believes Rainer Sonnenberger, federal board member of the “Fathers Awakening for Children” association. “When it comes to enforcing contact,” he complains, “you are stuck. With or without custody.
Time works against fathers: valuable weeks and months go by in which they cannot see their children, become distant from each other, alienated, weaned. Recently, Ralf G. Fuchs drove 320 kilometers to a sports competition in which his now 12-year-old daughter was taking part. "Hello," said the girl. They were the first words he had heard from her in four years. "It's terrible when you think about how much you would have liked to give to your own child, but you just weren't allowed to," says Fuchs.
When Tobias Knoch, 41, picked up his almost two-year-old son for a visiting day, the little one pointed to the mother-son photos on the wall in his children's room and then to his father. "Yes," replied Tobias, "I'll also bring you a photo of my dad." However, his ex absolutely did not allow a photo of the father in the son's room.
"I hate dad and want him dead ," said the nine-year-old daughter of Berlin filmmaker Douglas Wolfsperger at their last meeting. The child suddenly rejects the parent with whom he does not live and invents reasons for his hatred. The experts call it “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS) – the parental alienation syndrome. 90 percent of children whose parents fight over access or custody suffer from this. “Dad hit mom,” Peter Witkowski’s daughter suddenly claimed. And that he “ruined her school enrollment” because he wanted to capture her big day with the video camera.
“PAS children suffer all their lives,” warns the Hamburg sociologist Anneke Napp-Peters, who was the first scientist to examine children of divorce in Germany for PAS. "They usually have a negative self-assessment and are insecure. Consequences that often become apparent during puberty, an age in which many things start to unravel." Napp-Peters found that three-quarters of all children who lost contact with one of their parents after their parents' separation and suffered as a result have major problems getting their lives under control as adults
Unfortunately, one has to realize that in custody and access disputes, mothers give slaps in the face from their pedestal wherever they want to restrict her full-time right to her own child: " My child grew in my belly , only I know what's good for him," they say often in the justifications given to the youth welfare office and the judge when fathers want to enforce their access rights against the mother's will.
Those who argue in this way have often only experienced their own father in a secondary role: Many of these women have been given a negative image of men by their mothers and project their own image of a father onto their partner or ex-partner," noted the Würzburg psychologist Pohl. You can't rely on fathers, they are interchangeable. Peter Witkowski's former wife only started keeping her daughter away from her father when she met a new man. "She just wanted perfect family happiness, and then suddenly If there was another man there, as a father it was just a nuisance."
For decades, women have been demanding that men be more involved in parenting. Now there are more and more of these fathers who go to parents' evenings, organize children's birthday parties, and take vacation to look after the sick child at home. Almost ten percent of all fathers now take parental leave , after the proportion had hovered around five percent for years. It is all the sadder when there are mothers who do bad things to their children with their behavior.
The problem cannot be solved in court; the legal process takes too long . "There is often no contact between a parent and the child for one to two years, even though there are clear regulations. The courts don't know how to deal with the boycott of contact, they call in experts, and sometimes such proceedings take a long time to go through all the courts seven to eight years," family judge Jürgen Rudolph stated years ago.
For his Cochem area, he therefore agreed with his colleagues, lawyers and youth welfare office employees to force quarreling parents into mediation or counseling within two weeks, even before dirty laundry is washed. The parents are often escorted directly from the courtroom to the mediator - if necessary under the threat of immediately rejecting applications. Rudolph's model experiment has already caught on in Munich, Berlin and several other places.
He was also the inspiration for the change in the law, which will take effect nationwide from September : family courts will push harder for mediation and advice for couples wanting to divorce. The Bochum mediator Ingo Krampen: "What is important is how the child feels in the end. And that can best be communicated to the parents in mediation , where, unlike in court proceedings, there is no winner and loser in the end."
Douglas Wolfsperger has made a film about the fate of separated fathers - it's called "The Disposed Father" (in cinemas now). He has given up his own fight for his daughter. For her sake: "I noticed how terribly torn the child felt. I didn't want to do that to him any longer." He wrote the girl a farewell letter. He ends with the words: "I will always love you, you can always come to me. Your Papa Douglas."
At some point the children ask about their father , experience shows that. You urgently want to know: Why? The fathers know what they will say. Hopefully the mothers too.