[MUSIC PLAYING] Good morning, and welcome to Frankly Speaking. Today we'll be discussing a new phenomenon of the divorce court, women without custody. I'm Helen Ackerman for George Mason University. Divorce is probably one of the most common crises faced by adult Americans today. One out of three American marriages end in divorce. When children are involved, they usually end up living with the mother, a decision made either by the couple involved or after a usually bitter court battle. But there are changes appearing in this common pattern. A small but growing percentage of mothers are choosing not to have custody of their children. With me today to discuss this subject is Dr. Karen Rosenblum, Assistant Professor of Sociology at George Mason University. Karen, what makes a mother choose not to keep her children? Well, obviously there are all a variety of factors. And it probably wouldn't be fair for me to prioritize them. But in general, the thing that's most important to me is that it must be structurally possible for a woman to do that. That is, the mother has to be the one making the decision at that point about divorce and about custody. Obviously, if a husband has already left, the decision is not there to be made. So to put it, say, in sociology is when you have to have an available structure that says it's even possible to decide to leave the children with your spouse. Wives also tend to look at the quality of fathering on the part of their husbands and whether or not they believe that he's going to be a good father. What is it, though, that's in the woman's mind when she decides not to keep her children? Is it because she feels she's not going to be able to give them as good a life as she feels they should have? Or is she feeling, I never really wanted to be a mother, and now I've discovered that I don't want to be a mother, and so I have this choice available to me at this time, and I am just going to leave my children with their husband? Well, actually, it's both of those. It has the potential to be both of those. Now, we have to be careful because all of the research is very tentative, and we're in a really early stage of research. But the work that I've done shows mothers kind of equally distributed between those two or three factors. In general, there is a group of mothers who believe that they can't do as well by their children as their husbands can. In particular, that usually breaks down to finances. And there's a lot of very reasonable evidence supporting those mothers' beliefs. So I saw recently a little piece of research that argued that single fathers earn twice what single mothers earn. So in terms of economics, kids are probably going to be better off with fathers. Yes, it's somewhat ironic that the courts have always decided in favor of the mothers, and yet women are consistently lower wage earners than men. Yeah. Yeah, well, right. Also, we find mothers who are deciding against custody are often at a point in their lives when they want to expand their participation in the labor force. Sometimes that means going to school. Sometimes that means moving from a part-time to a full-time. Sometimes that means changing jobs. Sometimes that means moving geographically. So when there's an intense commitment to the labor force that a mother perceives as potentially harmful to her children, she might then be likely to say, OK, I want my husband to have custody. Provided the husband is a good father. There are a couple of other major groupings. One is mothers who do not perceive themselves as having a particularly good relationship to a child. Now, mothers may measure that in terms of not feeling like they feel the right kind of emotions towards their kid, feeling that there should be something stronger, that they should have more empathy for their child than they do. That can range all the way to feeling like an abusive parent. So that other grouping tends to be mothers who have a relationship that they don't perceive as a quote "successful one." There's a third grouping, which is kind of an offshoot of that. And that is mothers who believe that they really aren't cut out for mothering, period. And that differs from the group I just mentioned in that. The second group might be mothers who took one child and left another one with their husband. Or after a decision was made after a divorce, say, many years after. One child goes back. Whereas the latter group tend to be mothers who left all children with their husband and are unlikely to consider themselves candidates for children in the future, who simply decided that having children was not what they were good at or what they wanted to do, raising children, not having them. Is this a recent phenomenon? It's interesting. There are some classic historical cases which have some notoriety because of the persons who did them, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a socialist feminist at the turn of the century who left her child. Doris Lessing left her child with her husband. I understand, in South Africa. But that was totally rare, totally rare. Currently, we are seeing an increase. The White House Conference on the Families indicated that the number of single parent father families has probably doubled since 1970. But nonetheless, we're talking about a very small proportion of the population. My estimates are that there are probably about 200,000 women in the country now who have decided to relinquish custody of their children voluntarily. I mean, this is not in the face of a serious court battle that one fears will hurt one's children. That's not the kind of thing I'm talking about. But instead, a positive decision that non-custody is what one wants. I gather from what you're saying then that it's members of a particular group, when you're talking about having the proper structure there for them to be able to make this decision, it's more likely to be middle class women than perhaps working class women. It is more likely to be middle class women for a variety of structural reasons. One might say, well, in terms of education and occupational opportunities, certainly middle class women have a better chance and therefore are comparing a household situation that they may not be wild about with a more interesting professional or working situation. But that's, to my mind, not really the critical factor. What is important in getting one into or keeping one in the middle class is mobility. Mobility means moving away from kin so that for a middle class woman, there is not often the option of leaving her children with her family because they would be nowhere in geographic presence. And we don't hardly find in the middle class grandparents raising children. That's really not a common phenomenon. So a structure that might be present to, say, some kind of a middle ground structure between father custody and mother custody, like an extended kin temporary custody in formal adoption kind of situation, that's really not available to middle class women to the degree that it is available to working class women. So for that reason, you're more likely to find middle class women giving up custody altogether, which there's something I want to qualify on that, if it's OK with you. I don't want to-- it's quite reasonable to my mind that the relinquishing of custody is certainly a good alternative in a variety of cases. So that to say, well, the absence of extended kin doesn't mean that. It would be better if mothers didn't give up custody. I don't want to imply that at all. How does this affect the children involved? It's always been accepted that children should be with their mothers. And here we are having mothers choosing not to take their children. How do the kids feel about this? Well, there's not a lot of research on that. And the research on that gets confounded with the consequences of divorce in general. And the consequences of divorce on children vary in terms of the age of the child, obviously, but also in terms of the sex of the child, and also in terms of the quality of the relationship between former spouses. So for example, kids suffer more when parents separate unamicably. So all those things would have to be factored in along with the fact that this would be an anomalous custody situation. So one in this case is also dealing with children who have fathers as heads of single parents, when very few other people do. My guess is that there is probably some short-term trauma that is perhaps slightly greater than that experienced by children who come from a divorce that's not very amicable. One of the things that has to be weighed against always is what was life like for that child in an intact but unhappy family. So you always have to look at it in terms of what existed beforehand. That's always the classic statement as far as divorce is concerned and children are concerned. Well, what about the mothers? Do they suffer terrible guilt trips from making this kind of decision? Yeah, they do. There are some interesting things in that mothers worry, as best I can discern, a lot about children misperceiving the causes of their decision. Mothers worry about how children are doing. On the other hand of that, many mothers are convinced that their husbands, their former spouses, will remarry much more quickly than they will and would be likely to pick somebody who's a good mother. And in fact, that happens. That is, men remarry much more quickly than women do. Most of the mothers that I have spoken to go to great lengths to maintain contact with their children. Even after-- just as when we have mothers with custody, there's going to be geographical distance eventually, as the middle class moves, essentially. Mothers are usually, if there's that distance, are taking children over the summer. They're doing a lot of correspondence, a lot of telephone calls. So there's a lot of guilt, and there's a lot of effort to assuage it through contact. And there's also, it seems to me, a big effort to talk to kids about why this decision was made and to be as straightforward as possible with children about not just why a divorce was made, but why an anomalous custody situation developed. I think that the problem-- there is an area that has the potential for being most troublesome, and that is when mothers remarry. If they remarry men with custody, or if they remarry and then have another child, then there's a whole new set of things that one must discuss with one's child by previous marriage, and that children will insist on discussing. So it's possible that one of the things that happens to mothers who have relinquished custody is they wind up going through years and years of explanation, perhaps in duration much longer than the amount of time that they had to make the decision, because children have to be dealt with when they're eight as well as when they're 38, right, about why mom decided what she did. And does that mean that she didn't like me? Karen, you're currently doing research on this subject. What aspect are you looking at? In particular, I'm looking at how mothers decided-- the question that you started off with, essentially. What were the factors that they weighed? How did they tell people? What did they tell people? Who did they talk to? So I'm looking at how mothers make sense of their decision for non-custody. And I understand you're looking for people to talk to on this subject. Is that correct? Yeah, I'm presently conducting interviews with in-depth interviews, which last about an hour, with women who have made the decision or who are in the midst of weighing such a decision and would be delighted to talk to anybody in the area. What should people do who are interested in talking to you? They should simply call at the sociology department at George Mason and leave their name and a message for me. OK. Well, I'm afraid we're out of time. This has been a fascinating topic. And thank you very much for coming and talking about it with us. You've been listening to Frankly Speaking, a public service program produced by George Mason University. For information about our guest or this program, please call area code 703-323-2138. That's 703-323-2138. I'm Helen Ackerman for the State University in Northern Virginia. Thank you for listening. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]