As a lawyer, I feel my most important obligation to my clients is to be a peacemaker and problem solver rather than a warrior. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances, I find myself having to take a combative stance to defend my clients' rights all too frequently. This is particularly true when it comes to the right of a divorced father to parent his own child.

In my book, "Father's Rights," I note that years of experience and research have convinced me that to understand the gender bias condoned by many family courts we must recognize the interaction of all elements of the phenomenon. An inappropriate reverence for a long extinct ideal of motherhood certainly is a part of the puzzle. The mistaken belief that fathers can't handle the rigors of child care is another. This misconception is compounded by the conviction that children require a father's financial support more than they need his emotional support. And worse still, the final piece of this distorted view exhibited far too often by the courts - that fathers don't really want or value their parental rights and responsibilities.

Society's lack of respect for fatherhood and the inaccurate assumption that fathers are not truly interested in parenting combine to perpetuate a comfortable rationalization, a judicial delusion that goes something like this: Mothers and children need each other. Fathers and children don't, or at least not as much as mothers do. For some, accepting that dubious premise and gender bias, although illegal and unfair, doesn't seem all that harmful. After all, it's not like real bigotry - there's no violence or blatant oppression.

But the insensitivity and just plain wrongness of the notion that divorced or otherwise estranged fathers really don't want or need to be involved with their children immediately became clear to me within days of my decision to represent fathers in family court years ago. A client I'll call "Jim" sat in my tiny office weeping uncontrollably. He had only one request: an hour or two with his six-year-old son. "His mother has my kid believing that his dad hates him," Jim said. "I need to tell him that's not true."

Divorced novelist C.W. Smith's reflections on the loss of his children speak volumes for all men in his situation. Like many fathers pushed to the periphery of their children's lives, Smith didn't appreciate the inestimable value of what he had -- until it was gone.

" I read the kids 'Curious George' and the Dr. Seuss books," Smith wrote. "Once, when a heavy I snowfall closed the schools, we made an igloo in the yard. . . Giving them a hug, or an off-to-school scruff on the head. . . making cheese toast, cheering while running behind my cycling novice son with one hand clutching the waistband of his jeans -- these humble pleasures vanished the moment I decided to leave. To provide, to protect, and to guide. . . these had constituted the dogma of fathering I had learned as a son, and I didn't know that performing those ritual duties was such good spiritual nutrition." No doubt that most fathers, whatever their martial status, can identify with Smith and his feelings of love and loss. But the true tragedy here is that Smith's memories of the moments he shared with his children are equally treasured by them. They too, just as much as he, and indeed perhaps more, feel the loss of those momentary, casual, but nevertheless nourishing, interactions. So denying or at best limiting a father's access to his children isn't just a crime against him; it's an injustice to his children as well. My hope is that someday the courts and society in general will recognize this fact and act accordingly.

Jeffery Leving's column appears regularly. Mr. Leving is one of this country's leading family law attorneys. Send your questions and/or comments on this and other columns to Mr. Leving at mail@dadsrights.com or write to the North Lawndale Community News.