Dads Divorce - Free custody and alimony advice for men and fathers.
Providing essential divorce, alimony, custody and support information and resources to men at any stage of divorce.
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I receive many e-mails about fathering, parenting, father's rights, divorce and so on. Usually, our visitors are sending me information that they think their colleagues would like to see on our site.
John M. from Dallas recently send me the following link to a real-life divorced couple's website: CoParenting 101. What a fantastic concept! A divorced couple who not only put a high priority on maintaining the best possible situation for their kids' upbringing, but who have gone on to create a website that shows the rest of the world that it can be done!
Robert Pedersen was devastated three years ago when a divorce judge said he could see his two children only a few days a month.
Pedersen's divorce agreement now includes long weekends, a Wednesday overnight visit and half of summers, holidays and spring breaks with his children. It's almost enough time to make him feel that he can provide an equal amount of parenting to his kids.
Michigan law recommends that custody decisions be based on which parent has been the primary caregiver unless it can be shown that another arrangement is more appropriate, but Pedersen and other noncustodial parents are fighting to modify the law so joint physical custody becomes the norm. They view equal parenting access as a civil rights issue, but opponents say equal time isn't always best for children.
"With the pain of a divorce, a lot of stupid decisions are made initially as far as the kids go," said Pedersen, who plans to ride his bike from Lansing to Washington, D.C., this summer to raise awareness of the issue. "There are different contributions that Mom and Dad make to a child, and kids need both of them."
Noncustodial fathers think gender bias plays a role in these decisions and reduces them to visitors who pay child support. Children need both parents equally, they say.
But many custodial parents, family law attorneys and domestic violence activists oppose making joint custody mandatory.
They say every family is different, and 50-50 custody doesn't work in every situation.
It becomes especially difficult when parents live in different school districts or one of them doesn't want joint custody. Another factor is that mandating joint custody can sometimes disrupt a child's stability.
"When a child's whole world is changing, we want to keep as much stable in their lives as we can," said Karen Sendelbach, chair of the Family Law Section of the State Bar of Michigan.
Other opponents say noncustodial parents sometimes want joint custody simply to even the score with their ex-partner or to reduce their child support obligation. A noncustodial parent's support payments can drop by as much as 40 percent if the child stays overnight 128 times or more each year.
"The 50-50 custody split is more about people not wanting to feel the other parent has won," said Kent Weichmann, chair of the Legislative Committee of the Family Law Section.
"It has nothing to do with the relationship with the child. It's more about who's winning. It also has to do with paying less child support."
More dads join movement
But supporters say this issue is not ever going to go away, especially as more fathers join the movement, including movie stars Alec Baldwin and Denzel Washington.
"It's a civil rights movement that is coming into its own," said David L. Levy, CEO of the Children's Rights Council, based outside Washington, D.C.
"It goes to the core of the right of a human being: the right to be a parent to your child, and of the children to be part of your life."
Next to child support, child custody is perhaps the most heated issue between parents when they split up and try to restructure their lives with their children.
Michigan hasn't kept reports on custody arrangements for several years, but the latest information, in 2003, shows that the Friend of the Court recommended physical custody of the children for mothers in 68 percent of the 14,470 cases that year, while fathers were recommended 12 percent of the time. Joint custody was recommended in 2,717 cases -- about 18 percent.
While noncustodial mothers are also part of the joint custody movement, it is spearheaded primarily by fathers and appears to be gaining momentum nationally.
More than 25 states have laws regarding joint custody that are much stronger than Michigan's, Levy said.
Since the 1990s, Michigan fathers have been trying to get the laws changed to force the courts to immediately presume equal joint custody.
A hearing was recently held on the fourth bill introduced in the Michigan Legislature, but it was not voted out of the House Judiciary Committee. It includes an exception for unfit parents.
In between the four pieces of legislation, the fathers launched a failed petition drive to put the ballot before voters and also were unsuccessful in a class action lawsuit in federal court.
Moms' groups eclipsed
Michigan dads say their effort is growing -- four new state organizations support the issue, and their ranks have grown from 5,000 to 20,000 people, said Lake Orion resident Jim Semerad, one of the leaders in Michigan's movement.
The growth appears to be eclipsing grass-roots groups headed by custodial mothers. The Association for the Enforcement of Child Support, a national group, was founded in Toledo in 1984 by activist Geraldine Jensen. She had a base in Ann Arbor for two years, before her 2004 retirement, which galvanized a number of Metro Detroit activists.
The organization is now headquartered in Cleveland, has become more virtual and is less visible in Michigan.
ACES executive director Debbie Klein is not concerned about Michigan fathers' activism.
They have always had more time and money to lobby lawmakers, while mothers tend to devote their time to raising the children, she said.
Joint custody simply cannot work for everyone, Klein said, because some couples are never going to be able to get along.
And it's the conflict between the parents in broken families that is most devastating to children, not the actual divorce.
"It puts the children in a horrible situation," Klein said. "That's what custody should always be about; it should always be about what's best for the children."
'It's the right thing to do'
Many fathers say it's best for children to be with both parents and that they will keep fighting until the law changes in Michigan.
"It's the right thing to do," Semerad said.
It's also why Pedersen, 36, is training every morning for his 758-mile bike trek in August with five other fathers to spread the word about what they think should be the law of the land.
"Kids do best with shared parenting, as long as it doesn't disrupt the school schedule and the parents are fit and willing," Pedersen said. http://www.detnews.com
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Divorce and unwed childbearing cost taxpayers at least $112 billion each year or more than $1 trillion over the last decade. This estimate from the Institute for American Values is, as the authors suggest, likely to be an underestimate.
This staggering but plausible tally of the economic costs of family dissolution follows what we have long known about the social costs. All our major social ills – poverty, violent crime, substance abuse, truancy and more – are more closely linked to family breakdown and single-parent homes than to any other factor. A poor black child from an intact home is more likely to succeed than a rich white one from a single-mother home.
It is hardly surprising that massive financial costs follow from this: Welfare, law enforcement, education, health care – all these budgets are justified by the pathologies generated by single-parent homes. Indeed, family dissolution not only creates costs; by destroying society's basic economic unit, it also prevents generating the wealth to meet those costs.
Yet, even this is only the beginning. More alarming still are the political costs. For contrary to the beliefs even of most conservatives, divorce and unwed childbearing are not the products merely of a decadent culture. They are driven by government – the same government that is extracting $112 billion annually from our pockets.
This is not to deny that we bear responsibility for all this through our sexually dissolute lifestyle, but the consequences of that lifestyle have already become institutionalized in coercive government policies. Diabolically, the very government programs advertised as addressing these social ills are the ones actually generating them. The result is a government perpetual-growth machine that will continue to expand until we have the courage stand up and unequivocally demand that it stop.
It began with welfare. Programs advertised as relieving families that had lost the father's wages due to war and economic hardship became a bureaucratic mechanism for driving more fathers from the home. The result was the vast welfare underclass we usually associate with low-income minority communities – the vast breeding grounds of crime, drug abuse, truancy, teen pregnancy, child abuse and other horrors that soak up taxpayer dollars.
But now it is becoming even more serious. Divorce has transformed welfare programs into mechanisms for creating fatherless homes in the middle class. And here the welfare bureaucracies go further: After driving out the fathers, they are seizing family wealth and even incarcerating the fathers.
This criminalization of parents is not isolated. Perhaps the earliest welfare state provision was the public school system, which jealously guards its prerogatives of using children as political pawns. The recent California appeals court decision allowing the criminalization of homeschoolers is only one indication of government's increasingly aggressive stance toward parents. The federal decision in Fields v. Palmdale, ruling that parents have no right to a voice in their children's public school education, is another.
But schooling is only one arena. The divorce machinery is even more authoritarian. The divorce apparatus has so many methods of seizing children and family assets and for incarcerating parents that it is a wonder any families remain.
For example, child support enforcement is advertised as a way to recover welfare costs by forcing "deadbeat dads" to support children they "abandon." In reality, it has become a massive subsidy on middle-class divorce, effectively bribing mothers to divorce with the promise of a tax-free windfall subsidized by taxpayers. It is also a means for incarcerating fathers without trial who cannot pay the extortionate sums. Far from saving money, child support enforcement loses money and – far more serious – subsidizes the divorces and unwed births that generate these additional costs.
Programs ostensibly for "child abuse" and "domestic violence" – problems also originating in single-parent welfare homes – have likewise become tools to create single-parent homes in the middle-class through divorce proceedings. Patently trumped-up accusations of child abuse or domestic violence, presented without any evidence, are used to separate fathers from their children and, likewise, to jail them not through criminal trials but through "civil" divorce proceedings and in new, openly feminist "domestic violence courts." Thus does family dissolution also undermine our most cherished due process protections.
Further, mothers are not only enticed into divorce with promises of lucrative support payments; they are also coerced into it through threats of losing their children themselves. Mothers are now ordered to divorce their husbands on pain of losing their children through spurious child abuse accusations. Intact middle-class families now live in fear of a visit from the dreaded "child protective services" with the possibility of losing their children.
This machinery cannot be brought under control by Marriage therapy programs, as the Institute for American Values advocates. While private church-based and community efforts like Marriage Savers should be encouraged, government psychotherapy merely puts more vested interests on the public payroll. We must demand that our tax dollars stop subsiding family breakup and ills that in turn require ever more tax dollars. By subsidizing the destruction of families, we are subsidizing the progressive impoverishing of our society. Indeed, by subsidizing the criminalization of both fatherless children and fathers, we are paying for the destruction of our freedom.
It is simply not possible to allow the family to unravel without having our civilization do the same. Yet that is precisely what we are doing. http://stephenbaskerville.net/
In this day and age, representing men and father’s facing divorce requires more than the legal knowledge and experience in domestic relations. It requires an attorney to think outside of the box. It requires an attorney, more than not, to act as or obtain the services of a “handler.” By this, I mean, someone who can take you, the client, and prepare or mold you in advance of any event, hearing or counseling/therapy session as may be ordered by the court. Often times an attorney will simply allow the “non-legal” process to take place without intervention or “handling”. The results of which can be disastrous.
Last month, attorneys from Illinois and Missouri gathered in St. Louis to review and learn updated information about how to most effectively practice family law. The 8th Annual Domestic Litigation Forum was hosted by St. Louis-based family law firm Cordell & Cordell, PC. “You can be sure that the work our attorneys put into these presentations reflects their dedication to achieving expertise in their field,” Cordell & Cordell PC Co-founder, Joseph Cordell, explained. “Our attorneys inhabit this realm of intricate family law every day. Assembling these presentations and leading these discussions among their peers both reflects and increases their expertise in this area. We know that by offering these free forums we are both expanding the knowledge base in the industry and increasing the knowledge base within our firm as we add to the understanding in the law community of the best ways to practice family law.”
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