Letter: A father's place
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: John Griffiths (letter, 24 March) is right to remind readers of the often suppressed fact of mothers excluding children from a relationship with their fathers. However, he omits to mention that this is true not just of single mothers, but of the divorced, separated and married.
There are millions of devoted fathers who, from their experience and that of their children, find it hard to believe that many mothers have any real love for their children. The CSA, and its advocates and apologists, speak not of the welfare of children, but of cash for women. They do nothing to advance the role of parents, but attack men for being unwillingly excluded from acting as parent to a child they have taken part in conceiving. Many of these fathers' children are merely their mothers' meal tickets, and vehicles of their mothers' malice.
I fought long and hard to maintain a truly paternal relationship with my eldest daughter, but my limited success is shared by a minority of my peers.
Women should consider why more women and children than men attended the protests that greeted the launch of the CSA. Not only do men not have the leisure and freedom of their wives or partners, but those women and children do not recognise their husbands and fathers in the demonised image they are presented with.
Neither do they recognise another woman's right to run around in a BMW and pay nothing towards her child's upkeep, at second families' expense.
Dr SIMON FORDHAM
Liverpool
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