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There’s a certain feel-good amorality or or intellectual dishonesty in trying to make custody disputes amicable. If the stakes are high enough, you do what it takes – if someone tries to kill you on the street, you don’t observe Queensbury rules. Well then, what could be higher stakes than the well-being of your own children?

Here’s the thing – if you’re intellectually honest, and moral, then you wouldn’t enter into marriage without taking it seriously, and thus, if an honest and moral person finds themselves in divorce court, willingly or unwillingly, it follows that they would view the other party as harmfully unworthy to raise their children.

Granted, a lot of people see marriage as going steady where you need a court to break up, and they might fight over kids just for spite, but there are cases where one party’s sincerely held values would prefer handing their children over to cannibals rather than someone capable of what the other party did to precipitate the divorce.
Everybody making nice is not always the greatest good.

As a Pennsylvania family law attorney, I wholeheartedly agree that there is too much conflict in custody cases. The sole inquiry into any custody case should be the best interest of the child or children. However, all too often the courtroom becomes a battleground where the parents punish each other what what went wrong in their relationship. I’ve seen (and had cases) where a parent has accused the other of physical abuse (protective orders, while designed to protect a party against abuse all too often are a shortcut to gaining temporary custody); sexual abuse (resulting in the imposition of supervised visitation until child protective services completes its intrusive investigation); drug and alcohol addiction; mental illness; and child neglect. Parents seem to forget that at one point they thought enough of the other parent to have a child or children together and that this decision binds them together for at least eighteen years. They need to see their cases through the eyes of their child or children and understand the often devastating impact their behavior is making on their child or children.

Children need speedy resolution of custody disputes. However, as the article points out, high conflict custody cases clog up already overburdened family court dockets and delay resolution of ALL custody cases.

I applaud the use of conflict resolution and other like minded programs. Rather than a crutch, I see the utilization of these programs as a necessary tool to clear the dockets for cases that really need a court’s attention.

However, for those recalcitrant clients and, to some degree, their attorneys, the only solution is for judges to start imposing meaningful and painful sanctions to discourage frivolous and vexatious behavior.

Attorneys and judges bear some responsibility for these problems. Attorneys must do more than merely advocate their client’s position; they need to control their angry clients and assess whether constant litigation is necessary. Judges need to sanction parents and their attorneys for engaging in frivolous or vexatious clients and make those sanctions really hurt.

Duqlaw98 writes “The sole inquiry into any custody case should be the best interest of the child or children.”

Best interest by WHOSE definition? Major portions of the “culture war” revolve around conflicts between parental and dominant societal ideologies about what is best for a child to see, hear, do or believe. In a society that acknowledges parents’ right to uniquely impact their children’s lives for the better (as Bill Gates might for his kids) there is an obligation to acknowledge and protect, to some extent, the right to impact your children’s lives for the worse. If the state is to impose its definition of what’s good for kids on the offspring of divorcing parents, why not take all children from those who never married, or parents in poverty?

Researchers publish study after study showing that even under idealized circumstances, divorce is bad for kids, yet, in the name of what’s good for kids, we keep trying to make divorce more painless, and thus, whether we intend it or not, more common.

As a person involved in one of the aforementioned high conflict custody cases (as the new husband of a wife who is the actual party who must deal with this situation), I would point out to dweeb that there is a HUGE difference between having justifiable anger with a person who was involved in what was supposed to be a lifelong commitment with them, and the kind of ridiculous behavior that goes on sometimes. In our case, our neighbor’s 12 yr. old daughter has been accused of French kissing a 4 year old and had to deal with a DSS investigation. My 9 year old son has been accused of sexually abusing the same child (who is now 5). My wife has been accused of neglect and attempting to drown her daughter. None of these claims is true, and they have been found so by the department of social services and the courts in every case.

Unfortunately, my wife’s ex-husband has involved the children in these lies and has tried to convince them that if they say these things that they won’t be taken away from him. These sorts of behaviors are absolutely deplorable, dispicable and inexcusable, yet the courts do very little about them when they happen. They look at it as part of the process.
That is very exceptionally wrong. People who USE their kids in this way are hurting them by exposing them to concepts and ideas that they do not need to be exposed to.

This is the thing that really needs to change somehow.