The 51% Minority by Lis Wiehl

Author:Lis Wiehl [Wiehl, Lis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48106-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

The Children

Custody battles are often the longest and most drawn-out of any divorce proceeding. It has been shown that judges seem to favor women for custody because usually they have been chief caretaker during the marriage and the courts like to maintain as much continuity as possible in reference to children. For this reason, women also often end up with the house because the judge doesn't want to force the children to move.

Of course, this is a double-edged sword: as much as most women want to be the caretakers of their children, being a single mother is extraordinarily hard. Not only are you chief chauffeur, nurse, and referee, you are also responsible for ensuring that the bills are paid. This includes making sure that the child support payments that are due to you are received. An astonishing number of women have to fight tooth and nail to get the fathers of their children to pay their fair share of the costs of raising kids.

The trend in law has been to replace the terms custody and visitation with parenting times. It is degrading to give one parent “custody” and the other parent “visitation,” regardless of who spends the most amount of time caring for the child. The blurring of the line between custody and visitation has also led to a modern phenomenon called “shared physical custody.” This means that the children will spend equal time during the week with each parent. The theory in support of shared physical custody is that fathers have as much rights to their children as do mothers, the children have rights to a full relationship with both parents, and the children are better off when they spend equal amounts of time with each parent. The results are that the child is shipped back and forth between two households, usually several times during the week.

“In some cases this arrangement works,” says Connecticut family lawyer Cindy Hartwell, “but for the most part, it injures the stay-at-home mother, whose primary job has always been to rear the children and run the household. Orders for shared physical custody can be a real blow to the woman's self-esteem. She has lost her ‘job’ and she is left with the additional feeling that she has lost her children. She still has the same full-time concerns as a parent, but she is only given a part-time schedule with less money and resources to fulfill her parenting goals.”

Unfortunately, some women withhold access to the children as a “punishment” for their husband's wrongdoings. It is important to understand that your children are not yours alone, and using them in this way is destructive to their well-being. (On the other hand, it is important that you pay attention to any signs of abuse or financial irresponsibility on the part of their father.)

For the last twelve years Maria's ex-husband had been dictating to her what he would and wouldn't pay, constantly micromanaging her financial decisions about redecorating, medical care, sports, and even where she should have telephones in her house.

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