Parental guidance

Oakland County program helps unwed parents

Oakland County's Forget Me Not Program is leading the nation with its innovative approach to unwed parenthood. This creative program, to be implemented by the Oakland County Circuit Court, will provide workshops for parents who never married each other to stress that every child deserves two parents. Focal points of the three-hour workshop will be the importance of having two parents in a child's life, how parents can resolve conflicts between themselves without traumatizing children, and how to boost a child's self-esteem. This alternative program will be a great help to a problem that persists throughout the country without much attention and redress.

The Oakland County Circuit Court presides over 800 to 1,200 people who file court petitions each year against their child's other parent. These petitions are usually filed by mothers seeking support and fathers seeking visitation or custody rights. With the creation of Forget Me Not, Oakland County judges will have a new weapon in their arsenal against quarreling unwed parents who put their children in the middle of their disagreements. The judicial branch will be free to urge and sometimes order these parents to attend the workshop offered by The Forget Me Not Program, if the court is to help on other related legal matters.

As children born to unwed parents have become a common part of modern life, more and more research has been done on the psychological effects of such an upbringing. While children certainly can receive a proper upbringing from a single parent, statistics imply that these children are more likely to participate in illegal activities. Children often benefit from a relationship with both of their parents. Forget Me Not helps children of unwed and divorced parents - which constitute a large cross section of American society - cope with the complexities of their parents' inability to get along. Too often children do become the victims of their parents' differences or mistakes. Forget Me Not, which may not address all of these problems, currently offers the best hope that unwed parents will learn how to resolve conflicts without traumatizing their children in the process.

Forget Me Not is a spin-off of Oakland County's nationally recognized Start Making It Livable For Everyone (SMILE) program for divorcing parents. Divorcing parents are ordered by the court to attend the SMILE workshops devoted to minimizing the shock most children feel when their parents divorce. Unlike the mandatory SMILE program, Forget Me Not will generally be voluntary at first - therefore, it may be more difficult to get parents to cooperate and work together for the sake of their children. Nuances of Forget Me Not will have to be ironed out as quickly as possible to make the program as effective as it can be. Oakland County, with its Forget Me Not and SMILE programs, should be recognized as a leader in the fight to improve the lives of America's youth. In this particular field, the rest of the country should examine Oakland County's creative social programs and find ways to address problems that are not confined to the borders of the county.

09-15-98