The Equal/Shared Parenting After Divorce Scam: Follow The Money

We, as a culture, don’t like to be accountable for our actions. In fact we avoid it as much as possible, at all costs. It’s painful and we don’t want to experience pain. If we’re being completely honest, almost no one is exempt from avoiding accountability at some point in life for some reasons or another. 

And this has never been more true of how we look at marriage and parenting. 

I know it may sound extreme, but accountability is a thing of the past as far as how seriously we take our commitments to marriage vows and parenting children. Marriage and family have been embedded aspects of the throw-away-culture.

And while the progressive women’s movement supporters might be initially identified as promoting the breakdown of the family through promoting feminism, no-fault divorce and abortion, they aren’t entirely to blame. It doesn’t matter which political philosophy you embrace. Progressives and Conservatives are equally to blame for the advancement of family foundational decay. Both have bought into the “women can have it all/do it all” philosophy born out of the women’s movement which diminished the traditional roles of both sexes in the family foundation.

What may be the biggest dirty little secret of the escalating attacks on the family foundation is just how your state legislatures and family courts are working diligently to seal that deal, and if they have their way, will forever change family in America on every level. 

Last week I heard an interview on a local St. Louis radio station, 97.1 fm talk, about a effort to advance “equal and shared parenting” in divorce. On the surface that sounds like a fabulous idea. Unless you follow the money trail, you won’t understand the underlying ulterior motives behind the movement.

Mark Ludwig works with a national group called Americans for Equal Shared Parenting. AFESP is an organization, of men, who are seeking more time with their children after divorce. 

In this interview Ludwig laments the obvious. Most people don’t understand the fallout of divorce unless they have truly been through it themselves. His realization as a divorced parent is that divorced parents live in separate houses and the child(ren) usually reside with one parent more than the other. Under this system the one parent, usually the father, pays child support to the other. 

And that, my friends, is what equal and shared parenting is all about. It’s about money. It’s not about shared custody, or maintaining a relationship with their children. It’s a movement to eliminate the non custodial parent’s responsibly to pay child support, plain and simple.

Ludwig has teamed up with  AFESP to lobby the Missouri Legislature and other states around the country for a 50/50 rebuttable presumption, which means it would mandate family court judges to award custody to parents on a 50/50 time shared basis. That in turn would presumably reduce the amount child support award to the primary custodial parent. They use a number of emotionally based arguments that presumes the well-bing of children of fathers who do not have physical custody 50 percent of the time will not flourish.

It’s important to not that AFESP is a men’s group, primarily, and doesn’t seem to advocate from the same position of 50/50 custody for women. 

Ludwig does make some salient points about the corrupt family law system.

There is a federal funding mechanism through Social Security Act that funds enforcement of child support and alimony. That’s what AFESP’s lobbying efforts are trying to dismantle. 

Women have been the biggest financial victims of divorce through the decades. 

Forbes outlined in 2013 the disadvantages most women find themselves after divorce as it relates to alimony: “After several decades, he is at the peak of his earning potential (thanks in part to her) and she is relatively unemployable (except for some low paying clerical or minimum wage job).

“Even though they may be dividing assets 50-50, he, because of his earning power will replace some or all of those assets over time while she, because of her lack of earning power, will be liquidating assets from day one and will ultimately go broke. The purpose of alimony is to somewhat equalize this disparity.”

And for decades family court judges have been eliminating women’s ability to receive alimony. Now the latest assault on the support for foundational family principles is to eliminate child support, and groups like AFESP are becoming all too popular in their agenda to push that along.

Ludwig does get it right when he says the family court process is adversarial and attorneys and judges benefit wildly from ginning up that process as much as possible.

The system is corrupt, no question. But alleging that a father’s relationship with a child is jeopardized by the number of days he spends with a child is intellectually dishonest at best. Fathers, or mothers for that matter, have a sole obligation for developing and maintaining relationships with their children. Blaming divorce or separation for decline in those relationships is an abandonment of their responsibility.

These so called equal parenting organizations do more to divide and destroy the foundational family culture in America than to protect it or the children they claim to serve. 

 

The long and the short of it is that family courts don’t need more legislation, they will likely ignore anyway, to mandate a starting point for deliberation for custody. If they can’t take into account the facts of each case, individually, to determine the best interests of children then maybe they should be impeached. 

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