Dads get a bad rap. The fathers who are fighting back

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Mike Smith played basketball at university, went to nationals a few times, and today is a successful executive in Halifax. But his charmed life was upended when his marriage collapsed and his access to his three children evaporated.

Seven years ago, he and his wife of nearly two decades had an intense verbal fight. His wife left the house, called the police and reported Smith had a mental health disorder. According to his telling, when they arrived he was given an hour to vacate the premises or face arrest. When he initially challenged the demand, one of the officers told him, “She wants to come home with the children.”

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“I said, ‘I’m here, I’m the dad. She can drop the children off here. Her mother lives up the street. She can go stay with her mother.’”

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The cops didn’t budge. Smith left his house that day, fearful of being arrested, and faced a very different life the next.

It is a nightmare he has yet to wake up from.

National Post has removed his real name and identifying details from this story for legal and privacy reasons.

A tense custody battle has left Smith with a fraction of time in the lives of his children while paying to support them. Last year, he made appointments with doctors to explore his eligibility for medical assistance in dying (MAID), a last-ditch attempt to ease the pain and grief he feels from the alienation of his kids.

“My story is one of thousands,” said Smith, who has since backed off his pursuit of MAID. “What I’ve been able to do is try to build awareness and move things forward using that pain, that suffering, as motivation to keep working.”

Dads have gotten a bad rap. They are caricatured on sitcoms as boys role-playing as men — Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin — or bumbling idiots in commercials who don’t know how to cook, do laundry or dress the kids.

Such views of fatherhood are entrenched in our loftiest institutions. The Supreme Court of Canada has enshrined a mother’s “constitutional right to the custody of their children,” researcher Grant Brown wrote in the National Post over a decade ago. “Fathers have no rights at all — only obligations.” The Ontario government publishes mugshots of men who allegedly skirt child support payments. No women are listed.

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The “best interest of the child” remains the guiding principle of Canadian family law. Modern research clearly shows dads play a crucial role in the development of healthy children. Keeping fathers — and mothers — in the lives of their kids should be the optimal outcome in custody proceedings, but dads are still too frequently being cut out of their children’s lives.

Divorced dads can face protracted and costly legal battles to win back access, alongside the devastation of family dissolution and alienation from their children. But a new generation of men are building a grassroots fatherhood movement challenging antiquated stereotypes of masculinity and what they say is an unfair system for fathers.

“It was just assumed that divorced fathers were uninterested, kind of happy to be footloose and fancy free from responsibility after separation,” said Edward Kruk, a professor of social work at the University of British Columbia, describing his work in the 1980s with single mothers in Toronto.

His assumptions changed following a cross-national study he conducted on the impact of divorce on non-custodial fathers.

“To my absolute surprise, these fathers didn’t at all fit the stereotype,” he said of his 1989 PhD thesis studying dads in the U.K. and Canada. “I actually found that a lot of fathers were experiencing a grief reaction containing all the major elements of bereavement. The outcomes for fathers were really quite devastating in some cases.”

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Kruk’s academic career coincided with a rise in men taking a more active role in family life. In 1976, stay-at-home fathers accounted for approximately one in 70 of all Canadian families with a stay-at-home parent. By 2015, according to Statistics Canada, the proportion had risen to about one in 10. A 2022 Pew Research Centre study of American dads found they overwhelmingly viewed being a parent as an important aspect of their personal identity.

Canadian family institutions, however, have not caught up with the rapidly changing social landscape.
In 2008, Kruk published a review of Canadian family law, exploring the gendered outcomes of contested custody cases. He found mothers were awarded sole custody 77 per cent of the time, while fathers received such an arrangement in just 8.6 per cent of cases.

I still am grieving their loss. I don’t know when I’m going to see them again.

Mike Smith, father of three

A 2018-19 Justice Canada survey of custody decisions by Superior Courts in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Yukon found sole custody was awarded to mothers in 27 per cent of cases compared with three per cent for fathers. In one indicator of equitable progress, joint custody was awarded in six in 10 (61 per cent) court orders.

Of the 275,000 active family law cases in 10 provinces and territories in 2019/2020, custody/access issues represented 19 per cent of the cases, according to the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics. However, these cases represented just under one-third (31 per cent) of the total family events recorded by the courts, because custody/access cases tend to involve more court activity and remain in court longer than other family case types, such as divorce or support disputes. Quebec, Manitoba and Newfoundland were not included in the data.

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Custody refers to the living arrangements of a child or children and which parent will have decision-making authority. Access allows the parent with whom the child does not primarily reside to apply for parenting time.

“I believe equal shared parenting is the ideal and what we should be striving toward,” Kruk said in an email to National Post.

‘I wasn’t in a good place’

Mike Smith is one of the fathers caught on the losing end of a long custody battle.

An emergency protection order filed by his ex, and put in place in the aftermath of the police incident, showed “on a balance of probabilities,” his wife was in “immediate danger” and a box was checked affirming there “has been a history of domestic violence.” The specific nature of abuse was not indicated, but the order included his wife’s allegation that he was “on meds for bipolar,” reads the document, shared with National Post.

The order prohibited Smith from seeing his wife for 30 days. Because the kids were in her care, he was effectively barred from seeing his children until he successfully challenged the order. He eventually found a new place to live, a short drive away.

In a second incident later that same year, his wife called child protection services, alleging the children in Smith’s care were scared, that he “was screaming at them,” and they didn’t want to be with him.

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“That’s kind of when things started to get pretty screwed up,” he said.

Divorce proceedings were initiated, and the couple reached an agreement on interim parenting arrangements. His ex was granted primary care, with Smith agreeing to specified parenting time, including two visits per week, a weekend overnight stay and vacation time.

The agreement didn’t resolve the parenting issues; Smith wanted their time to be split 50/50. Other calls were made to police and child protective authorities in the bitter leadup to the divorce hearings.

A detailed parental capacity assessment was performed by a psychologist. Both parents and the children were interviewed, along with medical and other professionals close to the family. The report, reviewed by the Post, makes no mention of domestic abuse, but it does detail Smith’s anger issues, something also expressed by his children. It noted that Smith did not meet the diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder, but he did have an anxiety disorder, for which he had been receiving treatment. Among the conclusions, the assessment noted that both parents loved the children, but they were being affected by the conflict between the parents.

“I was told repeatedly, for years, that she would leave and I would never see my kids again,” Smith explained when asked about his anger issues. “I wasn’t in a good place, and I did yell. I’m sure it scared my kids, but it was also me who cuddled our kids together every night, who (they) would come running to if they needed help or were hurt.”

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At the conclusion of the divorce hearings, Smith’s ex was granted primary custody and the court ordered therapy for the family. Smith battled with the Superior Court of Nova Scotia throughout the next two years to challenge the ruling but failed. His attempts for equal parenting never materialized.

In a final attempt to fight the court orders, the judge concluded that Smith had not successfully completed his court-ordered therapy, and that his time with the children would be “at the sole discretion” of his wife, according to court documents reviewed by the Post. He was not allowed to take his children outside Halifax’s city limits or have sleepovers. The order required Smith to always be in public spaces with his children.

The judge cited Smith’s behaviour post-divorce, such as his repeated challenges to court orders, as a factor in her decision. She also noted his deteriorating relationship with his children, and said the decision was in their best interests.

The arrangement left him with minimal facetime while paying the “full amount of child support,” he said, translating to a couple of thousand dollars monthly. Most outings with his children are now confined to local restaurants or coffee shops. Occasionally, he takes them skiing and snowboarding.

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Later that year, Smith was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), which develops from chronically reliving trauma.

“I still am grieving their loss,” he said. “I don’t know when I’m going to see them again.”

In May 2024, he undertook his first MAID assessment, which was rejected. A second, performed by a prominent Dalhousie University bioethicist later that year, approved the procedure, citing the pain of familial loss.

He’s no longer considering MAID.

“That was a dark time. I couldn’t see a way to stop the suffering. I don’t want to go back there,” Smith said.

He said he has turned his experience running the gauntlet of government agencies into a central clearing house for other parents across the country.

Survey of the custody landscape

The custody landscape didn’t always look this way, Kruk wrote in his 2008 study looking at child custody outcomes in Canada. Throughout the 19th century, there was a “paternal presumption” of child rearing. However, the Custody of Infants Act of 1839, a British law used in pre-Confederation Canada, challenged that view by permitting mothers to petition courts for access to their children. That paved the way for the “tender years doctrine,” which held that young children should reside with their mothers, Kruk wrote.

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“This presumption appears to have been in place in Canada since at least the beginning of the 20th century and remained in place until the formal introduction of the ‘best interest of the child’ standard through Canada’s second Divorce Act” of 1986, he wrote.

The well-intentioned legislation failed to produce more equitable outcomes. Nipissing University criminal justice academic Paul Millar reviewed the Central Divorce Registry, a Department of Justice database, between June 1986 and September 2002, covering the post-reform period of the Divorce Act. In the more than one million judgments Millar examined, mothers were granted sole custody in two-thirds of cases, while fathers received it in just 11 per cent. The remainder were granted shared custody or were situations where neither parent was awarded custody.

It’s a worldwide phenomenon. Fathers want to be more involved with their kids.

William Fabricius, psychologist, Arizona State University

Custody researcher Grant Brown reviewed the landscape of Canadian family law in his 2013 book, Ideology and Dysfunction in Family Law: How Courts are Disenfranchising Fathers, and summarized Millar’s findings in stark terms: “Mothers were more than 27 times as likely as fathers to obtain sole custody of the children.”

Kruk’s 2008 study catalogued a list of negative outcomes associated with fatherlessness, including that 85 per cent of youths in prison and 71 per cent of high school dropouts are the products of fatherless homes. Children raised in dad-absent environments are also more likely to be obese and use drugs and alcohol, according to the U.S.-based National Fatherhood Initiative.

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That corresponds with University of Virginia sociology professor Brad Wilcox’s work in this space.

“Children are much more likely to flourish when they have an active and engaged dad in their lives,” he wrote in an email to the Post. “They get better grades, are less likely to get into trouble at school, and are more likely to avoid ending up depressed.”

‘No faith in the legal system’

In the early days of their marriage, Al Clarke said his wife grounded his life in sprawling Toronto. Then one day, a decade into the marriage, his wife began acting erratically, speaking uncharacteristically rapidly.

“It’s as if somebody went up to her and cranked it to max,” Clarke recalled. “I knew right away something was wrong.”

Clarke’s real name and identifying details have been removed from this story for legal and privacy reasons.

Clarke took his wife to their family doctor in Toronto, who signed a FORM-1, requiring her to undergo a psychiatric assessment at a local hospital.

Clarke’s wife eventually rebounded from the episode in the following months with his care and support. “Life simply carried on,” he told the Post.

Two years later, the couple conceived, but the welcome news didn’t solve their underlying tensions. Shortly after the birth of their son, their marriage fell apart. She left, taking their two-month-old son, who Clarke didn’t see for several weeks until a court order restored weekly access.

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The delicate arrangement held for a few years. At first, Clarke saw his son several times a week for a few hours and a full day on the weekend. That was whittled down throughout a custody battle and his access shrank to one weekday and every other weekend in a subsequent court order. He now alternates between two to four hours of supervised access with his son each month.

The collapse of his family propelled Clarke to rock bottom. He lost 30 pounds and went for a psych evaluation. The doctor described a man who was preoccupied with the loss of his family and “having a hard time moving on and enjoying positive activities” a medical document shared with the Post reads.

He struggled to hold down his job and went on short-term disability, then long-term disability. He began seeing a therapist the following year. The practitioner’s notes also chart Clarke’s struggles to cope with the deprivation of his son and the ongoing custody battle.

“Al has no faith in the legal system, police services and Children’s Aid Society. He feels his identity as a male puts him at an immediate disadvantage in all of these respects,” read the therapist notes.

When Clarke returns his son to the police station, the agreed-upon meeting spot for custody exchanges, the therapist noted, “Al feels like a piece of him (is) dying every time this happens.”

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Throughout the first years of his son’s life, Clarke said his wife repeatedly called the police to conduct wellness checks while their son was in his custody. A police report shared with the Post showed his ex-wife was threatened with public mischief charges if she didn’t stop.

“She has unnecessarily called police many times, and more than 200 hours of officers time has been wasted,” the report noted. It also noted there were no concerns with the father, “he has been very cooperative with the police.”

But Clarke still found himself on the losing side of the legal battle with his ex. A trial before the Superior Court of Ontario severely curtailed access to his son. He eventually collapsed from the stress of it all and was rushed to the hospital. The following year, he was diagnosed with PTSD.

When his ex’s lawyer raised his new medical condition during another divorce hearing, the judge ordered him to undergo another mental health evaluation and cut off contact with his son. The same month, Clarke was notified of an investigation by child services following a tip citing concerns for his mental health. The agency conducted interviews with both parents and the child and said it did not identify any additional protection concerns, documents shared with the Post show.

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Limited, supervised access was eventually returned to Clarke two years ago.

“When I finally got to see my son, he was crying and, of course, I was crying more than he was. The first thing he said to me, he says, ‘Daddy, what did I do that I couldn’t see you?’ That really broke my heart.”

City of Fatherly Love

Philadelphia is known as the City of Brotherly Love but was actually named by founder William Penn by combining the Greek words for love (phileo) and brother (adelphos). Penn wanted his town to live up to its name. In recent years, the “City of Fatherly Love” is more apt as the American city becomes a hub for a growing fatherhood movement championing men taking a more active role in family life and child rearing.

Throughout the pregnancy of his first son, Joel Austin felt like an impostor. He wanted to be more involved, but felt unprepared, as though he lacked the basics. Shortly after the birth of his second son in 1992, his eldest was invited to a big-brother class at his local Philadelphia hospital. Surrounded by a sea of children, Austin had a realization.

“I’m the only one in my household who has not been taught how to care for an infant. They were learning things, which no one took the time out to show me,” he told the Post from his office in downtown Philadelphia. Austin is athletic, well-dressed, with broad shoulders and long locks speckled grey that also shades his beard.

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He said doctors and other professionals dealt with him as an afterthought. He felt the home was not his domain, that his identity was simply being the breadwinner.

“How do you come from such togetherness to such division? It was her and the world,” he said of life being a new father. “I was pissed that you didn’t take me seriously. I was pissed that for nine months I felt invisible.”

His awakening wasn’t warmly received at home, at first. “Honestly, there was conflict. I felt as though I was stepping on her feminine toes. That was her job,” Austin confided.

The tensions Austin encountered at home manifested out in the world. When he’d take his children to the pediatrician, he would be asked where his wife was. He also began to question his career goals, which led to friction with work. One day, he was running late and trying to get his kids ready for school. They were playing, and he got upset with them. He explained that if he ran late, he could get fired.

“They both looked at me and said, ‘Well, does that mean you’ll have more time to play?’ That’s when I realized money was not going to be my legacy,” he recalled. “I’ve realized that I could become a millionaire, but my son will regret me because I didn’t show up at the game.”

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Austin rebuilt his life by laying the foundations for a healthy home. He carved out time for vacations, made a point of nightly family dinners and visited his kids at school during lunchtime with fresh cupcakes, “sitting at these very tiny tables just kicking it for 30 minutes.”

His eldest recently confided that if it weren’t for his father’s “constant push,” he likely wouldn’t have graduated high school.

Austin founded Daddy University in 2004, which he describes as the longest-running male parenting education organization in the United States. The support group sees dads gathering around food and drinks to talk about the challenges of fatherhood. “Some venting, some peer pressure, support, safety, and it has grown into what it is now,” he says.

Austin’s proud of the events they run, like “Daddy Daughter Dance,” which gets fathers outside their comfort zone and builds lasting memories.

“I find it one of the most equalizing, non-racist, non-biased things in the world,” Austin says with a laugh as he explains the fatherhood learning curve. “All of them will complain, ‘I don’t understand her!’ No level of education, none of that — it doesn’t save you. Many of us are on-the-job training.”

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Daddy University is just one example of a flourishing fatherhood ecosystem in Philadelphia. Rufus Sylvester Lynch, who runs the Strong Families Commission, said his Philadelphia non-profit is “not a fatherhood organization,” but a “child well-being organization through the lens of fathers.”

“When I talk about the Strong Families Commission, we’re talking about child well-being, because one of the things I’ve learned in messaging in America about fatherhood is try not to talk about it. Talk about something else. And that something else are the children.”

While it is true that more mothers than fathers have exclusive parenting time with their children, this is largely due to fewer fathers seeking parenting time.

Suzanne Zaccour, National Association of Women and the Law

Lynch found that fathers’ perspectives were rarely considered by the children and family agencies in Philadelphia. Strong Families aims to nudge government bodies and public officials to remove barriers for fathers in child involvement. Lynch helped pioneer the father-friendly flagship accreditation, which a dozen city agencies signed up for by 2018.

The model, Lynch told the Post, lost its relevance in 2020 when national and state attention was redirected toward global health concerns, but he plans to “reactivate” the program in 2026. “My goal is to have Pennsylvania become America’s most father-friendly state in the union.”

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There are others across Pennsylvania shouldering Lynch’s broader mission. In 2022, Lynch worked alongside Jeff Steiner, executive director of Dads’ Resource Center, to lobby and pass a state general assembly act that created the Pennsylvania Advisory Commission on Greater Father Involvement.

Steiner explained his Dads’ group caters to “single fathers fighting to be in the lives of their children.” Steiner grew up not knowing his father, a perspective he believes heightens his passion for fatherhood. “I couldn’t tell you who my father is, so that’s defined my life in a way where I kind of have, like, this hole in my soul.”

Steiner’s work involves dealing with state family courts and child protective services. “I wear a lot of hats,” he said, speaking about his mentorship of other fathers. Attitudes about fatherhood are rapidly changing, he said, but when asked whether child custody rulings still disadvantage men, he didn’t skip a beat.

“Everyone knows this is an issue. The judges, the lawyers, the social workers — everyone knows this is an issue. But there’s an inertia within the family courts,” Steiner said.

Joel Austin agreed. “Fathers still fall into second-class citizenship when it comes to children. It is an asinine system and it is also very biased.”

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Push for equal parenting

There has been a growing push to make shared parenting the default in legal custody decisions. Studies have shown that children of divorce wish they had better access to both parents, and kids in joint parental custody often do better than those in sole custody arrangements. More equitable custody has also been found to reduce parental conflict because children are taken off the chessboard — they are no longer pawns in the inevitable power struggle of a messy divorce.

William Fabricius, a psychologist and head of a research laboratory on fatherhood and divorce at Arizona State University (ASU), told the Post that numerous studies examining the benefits of equal parenting show a similar conclusion: “We can’t disprove that equal time is best for kids,” he said.

Fabricius stumbled into the field in the ’90s when he discovered that psychology colleagues at ASU were prominent divorce academics. He found most of the research at the time failed to take the perspective of fathers and children into account.

The disconnect got him interested in the concept of equal parenting — the idea that child custody should be roughly equal between guardians so long as there is no credible evidence of abuse or violence. Fabricius was instrumental in passing two bills in Arizona over a decade ago that made the state the first in the nation to “embrace equal parenting time.” Other states, including West Virginia, Florida and Kentucky, have followed.

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“It’s a worldwide phenomenon. Fathers want to be more involved with their kids,” Fabricius said, citing recent consultations he has done with legislators in Japan and Norway.

Canada’s National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL) argues that shared parenting endangers women trapped in abusive relationships, forcing them to share custody and their location with their abusers. Suzanne Zaccour, director of legal affairs for NAWL, disputed the view that family law is biased against fathers.

Zaccour pointed to articles she’d published that argue Canadian courts discounted domestic violence against women and prioritized father-child contact over child safety. “While it is true that more mothers than fathers have exclusive parenting time with their children, this is largely due to fewer fathers seeking parenting time,” she wrote the Post in an email.

Shared parenting arrangements are “not appropriate in all cases,” Zaccour continued. “Mandatory shared custody laws lead to negative outcomes for children by pushing judges to grant 50-50 shared parenting, even against the wishes or best interests of the child, including in cases of child abuse.”

Fabricius called such arguments “a bit of a straw man,” noting that courts are charged with determining “things like abuse and neglect and parental substance abuse or mental health problems.”

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Edward Kruk, the UBC professor, is an advocate for reforming Canadian family law and serves as the president of the International Council on Shared Parenting. He’s heartened to see supportive statements from several European countries pushing for equal shared parenting but is frustrated that Canada is slow to embrace the change.

When it comes to legally contested custody cases, Kruk believes the percentage of equal shared parenting outcomes is “very, very low.”

“The closer to 50/50 division, the better the outcomes for children and parents,” Kruk said.

A majority of Canadians feel the same. Polling conducted by Nanos in 2022 found more than three-quarters (77 per cent) surveyed strongly or somewhat supported new legislation emphasizing “a presumption of equal parenting in child custody cases.” That’s up from 70 per cent in 2017. Two-thirds of respondents said such a reform is a “right” youth deserve and represents a “child’s best interest.”

“The public opinion polling for 25 years has been strongly in favour of equal parenting right across the board,” said Brian Ludmer, a lawyer and divorce specialist. Ludmer helped draft Bill C-560, sponsored by a Conservative MP in 2014, which sought to enshrine within the Divorce Act a “principle of equal parenting.” It failed to pass.

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The Conservative Party of Canada has long advocated for shared parenting in its policy declaration guidelines, but Ludmer understands why other political parties don’t pursue the issue, given its limited electoral appeal. “We’re doing a disservice to our children by allowing this to continue this way. This is long overdue.”

Father’s Day joy and sorrow

Father’s Day is usually a time for BBQs and family gatherings. Austin’s tradition in Philadelphia is to invite the community of fathers he mentors to his place “to sit, drink and be merry.” He sees it as a “simple 24 hours of respect and appreciation,” with the children bringing “gifts, hugs or whatever they have.”

Austin’s Father’s Day joy is something not shared by Mike Smith and Al Clarke. The absence of their children in their lives makes the occasion particularly painful for the Canadian dads.

According to Clarke’s calculations, in 2024, he saw his son a total of 36 hours. As of the end of May, he’s had 14 hours of supervised scheduled time with him this year. Clarke struggles to maintain his optimism. He says he can’t remember the last time he got to celebrate Father’s Day with his son.

Smith deals with “conflicting emotions” come Father’s Day. “I hold onto the hope that, even briefly, my children are able to feel the simple and unconditional truth — they are deeply loved by their dad, not for what they do, but for who they are.”

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