Q. I am the father of nine- and 11-year-old daughters. Years ago, I made some very bad decisions, including leaving my wife and my children, and losing custody. I have grown up, straightened out and have established myself. I want to reconnect with my daughters, but don’t know how to go about it.

The panelists strongly urged the father not to try and contact his daughters on his own, while also discouraging him from going to the girls’ school.

“It’s a legal matter now,” said panelist Mike Daniels. “He has lost custody, and the mother has a perfect right to keep him from seeing the children.”

“The contact and conversation must start with the mother,” panelist Chad Stefanyak said. “Everything depends on her.”

“What the father says to the mother will be different depending on what she says and how she feels about the whole situation,” Stefanyak said. “The father needs to be prepared to let his ex-wife express whatever resentment or other feelings she may have. That’s the first step.“

As part of the conversation, the father also needs to be able to say, “I deserve whatever feelings you have about me,” said Stefanyak.

“The father has to be cautious, and not resentful,” Daniels said. “He must accept what he has caused.”

One way the panelists suggested the conversation could go would be for the father to start by saying that at some point it will be good for the girls to have their birth father in their lives.

Panelist Pam Wallace cautioned against appearing to try buy his daughters’ love, or thinking it is going to be easy to walk back into their lives. “He’s not going to make up for 10 years in one weekend. To reconnect he is going to have to win back the trust of a lot of people,” said Wallace.

The question was asked if the daughters have connected with someone else as a stepfather or father figure. “He’s got to be OK with that,” Daniels said.

As for the daughters themselves, Stefanyak noted that children are very forgiving of parents. “From my experience, kids are eternally optimistic. They will give parents chance after chance. The first thing to do is just say, ‘Hi.’ The daughters will believe the father’s sincerity when they experience it,” said Stefanyak.

This week’s team of parenting experts are: Pam Wallace, Program Coordinator, Project Child, a program of Valley Youth House; Denise Continenza, Extension Educator, Food, Families and Health, Penn State Extension; Mike Daniels, LCSW, Psychotherapist, CTS, and Chad Stefanyak, School Counselor.

Have a question? Email: projectchild@projectchildlv.org. The Family Project is a collaboration of the Lehigh Valley Press Focus section and Valley Youth House’s Project Child.