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FROM: __________ County Social Services Agency

TO: [putative father]

SUBJECT: Placement of__[child]_____________.

	___[mother]_____________is applying for Aid for Families of Dependent
Children on behalf of her son/daughter___[child]_____________.  She says
that you are the father of this child. 

	Are you willing to acknowledge his/her paternity?

	Are you willing to accept the placement of this child?

	This office is responsible to dispose of this placement on the
following basis: 

		The best interests of the child.

		The equal right to placement with father or mother.

		The avoidance of prolonged litigation, which will keep the child
in emotional and legal limbo, uncertain of its relationship to the adult
who will care for it.  Such litigation serves to generate fees for
attorneys and to promote bureaucratic interferen ce between parent and
child, but commonly damages the child more than it helps it. 


	This office deems it of importance to settle this placement as
rapidly as possible consistent with _[child's]___________ best interests. 



	Please let us know promptly what your intentions are by phoning
either for an appointment or to let us know that you are not interested in
__[child]____________ being placed with you. 




                                   	___________________________
							[Title]		
			
					Department of Social Services
		
		



Each father placement will remove a mother and child from the welfare
rolls and from the humiliation of public charity.  The mother will be
enabled to stand on her own feet and compete in a man's world "without
sexual favor or excuse" (Ms. Friedan's words ).  What Ms. magazine says of
divorced women, that "they have the lowest household incomes of any group
of women surveyed," is true only of those burdened with child custody. 
Single women earn slightly more than single men.(1) The mother will be
more marriageable, since she will not be asking a second husband to take
on the rearing of another man's child.  The father will be more
marriageable, since he will be able to offer a potential wife his entire
paycheck.  The taxpayer will be relieved of the cost of welfare and the
cost of the mother's withdrawal of her services from the job market, where
if she is employed at all, she will earn less than a single woman. 

The father living with his child will have greater motivation and higher
income than a lone father. (2) The children would be the primary
beneficiaries.  Women, according to feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler,
are far more neurotic and unstable than m en, more dependent on
psychotherapy, more prone to depression, tantrums, nervous breakdowns,
paranoia, and attempted suicide.(3) The superior academic performance of
children from father headed homes is easily documented: "The high
father-present group w as very superior to the other three groups....The
early father-absent boys were consistently handicapped in their academic
performance.' Children in father-absent homes "are overrepresented in
terms of reported cases of physical abuse and other forms of child
maltreatment." (4) According to The Family in America, Dec. 1989, "of all
1,050 ongoing substantiated child abuse and neglect cases in Milwaukee
County in May, 1989, 83 percent involved households receiving AFDC" [read:
female-headed households]. 

The problem of father absence is obvious from the following fact: the
high-crime areas of every city in America are the areas with the largest
numbers of households headed by females. 

Amneus




 1Ms., May, 1978; George Gilder, Men and Marriage (Gretna, LA: 1986), p.62. 

 2See Sylvia Ann Hewlett, When the Bough Breaks (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p.141.

 3 Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. vi.   

 4Henry Biller and Richard Solomon, Child Maltreatment and Paternal Deprivation (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1986), pp. 154, 21.

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