About Us

Parental divorce or separation should not mean that children lose the love and care of one of their parents.

Families Need Fathers seeks to obtain, for the children, the best possible blend of both parents in the lives of children. The amount of time the children spend with each parent will need to vary. However, the role of both should be enough for the children to realise that both parents are fully involved in their lives, that there is no important area of the children's lives from which either parent is excluded. It should not be so disproportionate that one parent can dominate the lives of the children or to be able to control the children's relationship with the other parent. The parents should be of equal status in law. Responsibilities and obligations, caring and financial, should be fairly shared between the parents and depart from equality only for child-centred reasons.

Families Need Fathers is firstly a social care organisation, concerned with a particular area of child welfare. Via information, advice and personal support we help parents to retain, develop and make best use of the children's relationship with them. We provide books and leaflets, a website, support workshops, a telephone helpline and internet forums in which members offer and seek comments and support. We publish a quarterly journal. We have a network of telephone contacts and local meetings. Some legal information and support is available. While a lot of our work is helping parents whose children's relationship with them is under threat, a developing area is information, advice and support for contact parents on how to do the best for their children with the rights and parenting time that they have. We are the only organisation that provides these services on a national basis.

Our support services win widespread praise, for instance from Dame Elisabeth Butler-Sloss, former President of the Family Division of the High Court, who had to review them in a legal case, and Deidre Sanders, trustee of the National Family and Parenting Institute and Britain's most respected Agony Aunt. We also pleased and proud to have The Rt Hon David Blunkett, Dr Hamish Cameron and Nigel Planer as our patrons.

Families Need Fathers also lobbies, in the way charities traditionally do, for changed legal and social attitudes. We have regular contact with politicians, the judiciary and the media. We wish to see a total recast of social attitudes towards parenting and the role of both parents. Our immediate priorities are getting courts orders for shared residence, improvements in the time children are allowed to spend with their 'second parent', more effective action taken when one parent defies a court order requiring them to allow their children a relationship with the other parent, and replacing adversarial court hearings over children matters with child-centred discussion. We want to see children's views taken into account more. Research shows that they (and their contact parent) want to spend more time with the parent they see less of.

We are highly effective in our lobbying having initiated, for example, the change of the law in 2003 extending Parental Responsibility to unmarried fathers who signed the birth certificate. We have driven the debate about Joint Birth Registration and what action to take when a residential parent refuses to comply with a contact order.

Our principal objection to the current situation is not the priority normally given in family matters to mothers, but to the 'winner takes all' result of most family divisions. Many of our supporters, volunteers and those we help are women - mothers who have lost 'residence' and who suffer the same as fathers, grandparents and others excluded from the lives of the children at the same time as one parent, sisters and new partners of excluded parents. We work closely with our sister organisation, Mothers Apart from Their Children (MATCH).

FNF depends on subscriptions and donations for a substantial amount of its work. Membership costs less than the price of one letter from a solicitor - a modest price for access to our additional services and support for our work. Volunteers are also needed especially, if you accept selection, training and abide by the necessary rules, for work on our national telephone helpline.

Click here to download and/or print one of our general information leaflets - ideal if you'd like to help someone without internet access learn about our work