TOOL OF THE DAY: Equal Parenting Reduces Incentives to Fight Over Children, reduces alienation, and does not cause children to be placed with abusers.

CATEGORY: Family Law Resources

It is insanely cruel for the Family Law System to allow a child to testify against a parent, simply because that system can’t come to terms with Fundamental Liberties. Divorce courts are using children to perpetuate their prejudice and discrimination against divorced parents. When parents know the court will use the child, many times they feel they have no choice but to use them in the battle as well.” (p.155 of “NOT in the Child’s Best Interest“)

the removal of a child from the parents is a penalty as great as , if not greater, than a criminal penalty… — Santosky v. Kramer, (1982)”

Remove this incentive for the courts and you remove a lot of the financial corruption, as there will be no incentive to force parents to pay for child custody studies or psych evals.

Remove this incentive for the parents and you remove the incentive to alienate and the incentive to fight in court over the children.

Equal parenting however does not resolve a difficult parent. It will not change a parent if they are a narcissist and it will not make a parent co-parent better. Those are problems that have to be resolved in other ways. This does not mean that the courts don’t have to have the presumption and default that parents have equal custody until it is proven that a parent no longer is qualified through proper due process of the law that they can be deprived.

Some parents are worried that equal parenting is going to force them to give the children to an abuser and that they won’t be able to protect the child. A parent doesn’t get to keep a child from the other parent if that parent is not abusing the child. Just because parents are not getting along or the parents are violent towards each other does not mean that they hurt their child.

It is time to differentiate between the two. Many times once parents are away from each other and there is no threat of either one losing their child more than half the time, the parents do not inflame each other anymore.

This post is about reducing divorce incentives so that children are not put in the middle by the courts (and yes it is the courts that are causing this because they provide parents with incentive to use the child). This post is not about child abuse. Child abuse is a crime and should be treated like a crime.

Many times equal parenting bills are opposed because there are parents who feel that they will be forced to hand the child over to a child abuser. Equal parenting can never override the safety of a child…never, ever. The State always retains their authority and power to protect a child immediately.

Many times I hear the excuse from parents opposed to equal parenting that the child abuse system is broken. If the system that prosecutes child abuse is broken, then that system should be fixed as well. The answer is not reducing the standards in family courts and causing children to be kept from fit and loving parents, or placing extra burdens on them, when the other parent makes allegations that never are proven.