• DOI:10.1093/SW/39.1.15
• Corpus ID: 146586355

The Disengaged Noncustodial Father: Implications for Social Work Practice with the Divorced Family

@article{Kruk1994TheDN,
  title={The Disengaged Noncustodial Father: Implications for Social Work Practice with the Divorced Family},
  author={Edward Kruk},
  journal={Social Work},
  year={1994},
  volume={39},
  pages={15-25}
}

• Edward Kruk
• Published 1994
• Psychology
• Social Work

The dramatic increase in divorce rates during the past 25 years has shifted social work research and clinical practice to a newly emerged population considered to be at risk: parents and children affected by marital divorce. The rapidly expanding divorce literature, an array of social services organizations, and legal and policymaking bodies have clearly identified divorce as a major social phenomenon and family transition during divorce as an important mental health issue. At the same time men's issues, and particularly the father-child relationship, have become a source of considerable public discussion and have received high priority for methodological inquiry. An emergent trend of fatherhood has been identified and androgynous fathering promoted, generating much speculation and controversy in the literature. Despite varying levels of child care involvement among fathers, who are far from a homogeneous group in this regard, fathers' emotional investment in their children prevails over other aspects of their lives, and fathers' attachment bonds with their children can no longer be regarded as secondary. Thus, in social work, the importance of engaging fathers in the therapeutic endeavor is a priority. Although divorce and fatherhood research is now flourishing, divorced fathers remain a largely neglected population in the professional literature. Similarly, despite the emergence of therapeutic practice models based on the involvement of all family system members in the therapeutic endeavor, social work practice with divorced families largely continues to exclude fathers. The contribution that social workers can make to families in transition and to the adjustment of family members to the consequences of divorce is considerable. Family mediation and divorce counseling are emerging as important fields of practice for the profession. With the paucity of empirically grounded and systematic information about this one member of the postdivorce family system, particularly in light of data stressing the importance of ongoing meaningful relationships between both parents and their children for the postdivorce adjustment of all family members (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1985; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980), social work practitioners remain limited in regard to engaging fathers in their work with divorced family systems. This article reports the results of a research study of the impact of divorce on noncustodial fathers and the phenomenon of noncustodial fathers' disengagement from their children's lives, discusses the implications of the study for social work practice with families in transition, and begins to develop an alternative conceptualization to prevailing stereotypes of divorced fatherhood. The goal of the research was to identify and integrate the missing elements in the divorce literature and to contribute to an empirically based understanding of divorced fatherhood. It is hoped that this in turn will lead to more informed practice with divorced and divorcing populations. The study gathered data directly from fathers, with a primary emphasis on their perception of changes in their relationships with their children before, during, and after divorce. The point of final parental separation was considered to be the salient event in the divorce process. As Wallerstein and Kelly (1980) found, although the legal divorce ratifies child custody and access arrangements, the transition period from the point of separation to about six months to one year afterward is most critical in establishing and consolidating postdivorce patterns and relationships among family members. Thus, "divorce" here refers to the final parental separation, not the legal divorce decree, and the transition period six months to one year after. The term "divorced father" also requires clarification. In light of the heterogeneity of patterns of fatherhood existing within two-parent families, divorced fathers should not be assumed to constitute a homogeneous group. …