A very detailed and thoughtful post with many great ideas including the need to focus more energy on the children with respect to their parents coping with a broken relationship as it effects the children.
Unfortunaltey the purpose of the post is simple and biased toward the primary care giver during the marriage. To say that legislated shared parenting as the DEFAULT custody upon the breakup of a-marriage is not in the best interests of the child and is an unfair policy toward woman is misguided.
The whole basis of a just system is innocent until proven guilty. Yet the writter woiuld have us say that one must PROVE they are a capable parent before they can obtain shared custody away from the primary care giver during the marriage. Keep in mind that what some would call the 'primary care giver' during a marriage is not the one soley rasing the children, but is doing so in a very close relationship with the other parent who is involved to a high degree with the raising of the children during the marriage. To suddenly assign sole custody to one of the parents is actually more disruptive to most families and enslaves the other parent to work for the benifit of the family but not have the benifits of actually raising their own kids. The marriage ends, things will change, including the roles of the parents, why must the change be more child involvement for the one who already had more, and less for the other. It does not make sense from a fairness point of view nor from the childrens point of view.
The whole point of defining shared custody as the default is to say for the most part anyone is capable and usually desires to be the parent to their own child which only shared custody supports. Any other situation must be agreed upon by the parents, or forced upon through legal means to seek what is best for the children, as only an independent party can determine this.
There are two quotes in the post that clearly show bias in favour of the primary care giver.
The statement says that it is hard to prove abuse so we had better give the kids to the primary care giver. This of course is ridiculous because what if the primary care giver is the abuser? A shared parenting system would level the effects of being with one bad parent. If there is abuse of the children, then like in any parenting situation, it must be PROVEN to be true for the parents rights to be taken away. To assume the non primary care giver is more likely to be an abuser is unjust in the extreme.
How on earth could the assumption that both parents are capable of being parents be unfair treatment of women????
In summary, the point is that we must assume, not based on gender, not on who stayed home more with the kids, not on anything, that both parents have a right to be a parent if they decide and to take away that right must be proven to a judge. Simple, fair, unbiased, gender neutral. Innocent until proven guilty combined with the right for a person to raise their own children.
