Sure, that seems like sensible advice for the median case. All I'm saying is that these risk baskets are qualitatively different, and therefore the correct allocation between custody strategies might be very different across different people and use cases.
> I was bummed to see that most studies don't actually try to ascertain who usually wins when both parents want custody and there are no extenuating circumstances
The problem is that if there is a custody dispute, then probably at least one, and usually both, sides will be pleading circumstances which pull one way or the other. And any court is likely to issue fact findings that lean the same direction as the custody order. So, if you are going to find what bias exists in the court system you can't look at just custody orders and legally determined facts, you've got to separately readjudicate the fact disputes with an unbiased process. Which is...problematic.
> The research was conducted over a four month period by talking to legal professionals in every state to find out what the most commonly awarded schedule is for their state.
So, they didn't study actual custody awards, but lawyers opinions about what was “most common”.
So, it's not really a study of what the reality of custody time is, but a study of expert opinion is of what that actual study of the ground truth would find if someone bothered to do it.
Plus self custody, where if you make a mistake like forgetting your password you lose everything permanently, is a bad idea that is incompatible with how human beings actually work.
Right, it seems like we’re mostly on the same page.
I definitely don’t mean to imply my wife would get sole custody. I think both parents should be given equal opportunity to do their best, and anything else will inevitably harm the kids in some shape or form.
What I meant is that if my wife didn’t have adequate housing, it would be bad for her bad the kids on her time with them. If we separate, I could readily use my income and credit to find adequate housing in a way that she couldn’t. As such, finding some arrangement in which she keeps the house would be best for her financial situation and for the kids’ experience as well.
I definitely don’t think moms are entitled to more time or more wealth. I’d expect equal custody of our kids. The housing part is just a result of our particular situation; it would work fine for us. This might not work well at all for others, and if that’s the case, they should do something else. Hopefully that makes sense.
So Dept. of Health and Human Services has probably the best data you're gonna get here, and I do additionally have hard data on contested custody vs. contested child support, but it's no worries. Agree to disagree.
I'm not. I am blaming you for presenting a statistic in a misleading way. You are suggesting that courts are fair because fathers get custody when they seek it. But you are leaving out the part where they only seek it in cases of abuse. Fair would be default joint custody, which feminist organizations like NOW actively campaign against.
On what basis would you argue it's defensible, when child custody isn't premised on marriage (or the lack thereof) to begin with?
I don't see what would change such that it would introduce any new complexity on that side of things.
The exact same complexity already exists today: step-parents. It's mostly a non-issue and is well defined. Step parents acquire no custody rights over the child inherently. If my wife remarries, and we had a child together, the parental rights are retained in myself and her. The same would be the case in a three-way break away on that ten person marriage; there would be (in this scenario) a two person custody of the child, eg the biological parents.
All of your points are already covered in the linked article.
Except it says that mediation is better than legal fees, regardless of who pays. The article's claim is that this shift away from the adversarial process is probably the biggest factor, though others also contribute.
And 50/50 custody is already the norm in many places, according to the article.
"Laws in Australia, Sweden and some American states require judges to consider splitting custody time more or less down the middle."
Except that the default presumption is, by law in every state, joint custody, and every state has court rulings to back that up.
The proponent of exclusive custodial control must prove the other parent's unfitness for custody. This is easy, if say, the other parent is a convict or a drug dealer. It's not so easy for suburbanites or rich folk. While the bar is lower than criminal guilt, it's not much lower -- proof must be by "clear and convincing evidence", which is significantly higher than the usual civil burden of "more likely than not".
Indeed, in over 90% of the cases I worked on, the exclusive custody proponent lost. The myth about mothers always getting the children isn't just a myth, it's blatantly untrue. Where exclusive custody is awarded, the father is just as likely to get custody of the children (usually b/c the mother does not have a job and is unable or unwilling to find one).
Kid, I worked in Cleveland. If there's any city where mothers should be "stealing" the kids from their fathers, its going to be a city where more than a 1/3rd of the male population doesn't have a job.
Everyone is talking about self-custody, but there’s a lot more nuance to the discussion that needs to be had. Also, not everyone knows how to self-custody well.
> The fact that the father has divorced and is out of the picture puts them at a higher risk of poor outcomes.
Hundred percent agree on this point. My concession was that it's not always beneficial that the parents stay joined nor is it deterministic that a single father or mother is strictly worse off than an intact family with an abusive/negligent/not present parent. Ideally none would divorce, but we can't factor for that.
It may then be better to say you are untrusting of the family court industrial complex, that is set up to contain the social contagion of the former family unit and to extract as many resources as possible from the carcass as it splits into two taxable households.
It’s very common that a man end up with little time with the kids as the family court system is stuck on 1950s assumption around the woman being a housewife, and because a woman usually marry up also a huge bill every month. I’ve seen people driven near bankruptcy from it.
This is a great podcast for those unaware of how dangerous it is when your family enters the family court system
At this point we'd both need to go do extensive research at the levels of a full time job to really prove one way or the other.
Suffice it to say we disagree and you seem to have much more trust in institutions than I.
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