Several months ago, I was contacted by Don Hubin from National Parents Organization to participate in a documentary about shared parenting. He connected me with Anthony Brassil who is the chair of the executive committee of National Parents Organization of Texas. Anthony drove across the United States last summer interviewing parents for a short documentary to support a push for custody reform in Texas. The resulting film discusses shared parenting efforts, successes, benefits, and struggles.
Family courts often still pick one parent to “win custody" and the other to lose. In the long run, the children are the biggest losers. When one side of their family suddenly is cut off, children have a strained relationship with not only the non-custodial parent but the extended family as well. They may rarely see their aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Those family relationships are not only important from a historical point of view but they are often a vital support system.
Social scientists have concluded that barring the verified presence of abuse, children are better off when both parents play a meaningful role in their lives. This is best achieved through equitable custody arrangements.
Shared parenting is generally defined as equal decision-making and equal parenting time. Shared parenting arrangements after divorce or separation are desired by children, make them happier, improve their school performance and decrease delinquency. Shared parenting also gives both parents the chance to work, relax, start new businesses, have time to form a newer, healthy romantic relationship, and actively participate in their children’s lives.
A bill in Texas - HB-803, the Equal Parenting Bill, was recently introduced to protect children of divorce in Texas. Texas HB-803 would give children of divorce equal access to two fit, willing, and able parents. After months of hard work and 22 bi-partisan co-authors later, a hearing for Texas HB 803 was filed by Representative Mayes Middleton. With a three-day notice, the people of Texas showed up from all corners of the state. Testimony for HB 803 occurred on April 26, 2021, and the only people who opposed the bill were a handful of people involved in the family law industry who have a financial interest. There were well over 100 men and women voters from all races and political parties who supported the bill.
Although HB 803 got a hearing, it still needs to move out of committee and out to the house floor. I’m hoping committee members in the Texas legislature do the right thing and move this bill along.
In 2018, Kentucky became the first state to make shared parenting the basis for parents during a divorce or separation. That means that when you divorce or separate in Kentucky, time with the kids is equally split in half — and the onus is on one parent to argue the other should have less time. Kentucky statutes declare that "there shall be a presumption, rebuttable by a preponderance of the evidence, that joint custody and equally shared parenting time is in the best interest of the child.”
More than 20 states have recently considered laws to promote shared custody of children after divorce. Let’s help bring each state into the 21st century and do what’s right for our kids. An update in matrimonial law would mean neither parent is afraid of losing significant contact with their children simply because they no longer wish to live together.
When people divorce or separate, it doesn’t end the family, it just rearranges it.
Clayton Craddock is a father, independent thinker, and the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
He's an alumnus of Howard University and is the drummer for the Broadway musical Ain't Too Proud - The Life and Times Of The Temptations.
Other musicals include: "Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, and Lady Day At Emerson's Bar and Grill. Also, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Spongebob Squarepants, The Musical, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.
Follow him on Instagram, Twitter or read more on his website: claytoncraddock.com
Children Need Both Parents
Nothing personal as I hold you in the highest regard, but whenever I encounter this sort of drive to impose state-managed outcomes on anyone over anything, I have to question first, 'what is your personal stake here?' Or to put it more abrasively, what makes anyone else's divorce-custody results any of your business?
The past year and a half, if not all of modern history, have demonstrated clearly that bureaucratic management of human lives is far from reliable and results more in unintended consequences and personal opportunism than it ever manages to produce anything like 'justice', social or otherwise. Narrow down this historic given to the particular issue at hand, and all you will ever manage to achieve is to create different procedures and different training for the same indifferent factory workers of the state social-services apparatus to tick its boxes with.
However well-meaning or statistically accurate your own opinions about what is best for children might be, taken one human life at a time, no such re-alignment of the laws and regulations governing it will ever manage to create anything but different circumstances of official box-ticking and ass-covering, and different obstacles for personal opportunists to have to navigate. Given the current climate of a national regime more motivated than ever to base policymaking on simplistic ideological memes currently in vogue, probably you would see a dramatic spike in 'violence against women' agitating in individual cases, in order to make the necessary end-run around your 'shared parenting' requirements, and such claims would be better funded and more apt to be taken at face value by the factory workers than ever. Just for instance.
Since every situation is different and no one not directly vested in it can really know what all the factors are, the ancient and reliable axiom of 'mind your own business' seems the wisest counsel. Just to offer a few different angles to substantiate this, in my own history is a young couple nineteen years old who each decided for all intents and purposes to 'divorce' both their extended families, leave their home town shortly after marriage, and cast their entire futures to the numb mercies of an urban-suburban world they knew nothing about and had even less skill to assimilate themselves into. The results, for the three of us children who grew up in their household, were a sustained catastrophe. I can't say they were really 'abusive' to any of us in the currently-fashionable sense, mostly because they were too occupied with abusing each other. The whole idea of this 'aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, could have been neatly summed up by any of us as 'strangers', people who had no connection to our lives by our parents' design to begin with. I remember that, once I worked out what this word 'divorce' meant, I spent many years wishing they would get one, just to be able to live in a quieter house if nothing else.
If at any point one of three different State mechanisms tasked with child welfare had become involved, the things they would have discovered would probably have resulted in all three of us being thrust into the nightmare of foster care, probably separately, and from that point the whole concept of which parenting scenario was best for us would have been tragically moot, and we would have grown up with no parents at all, and even less family than where we had been taken from.
I also can attest first-hand that in my two subsequent occasions to be faced with this separated-parents equation, in each one over the long term it turned out that the only defensible decision I personally could make as a father was to stop trying to assert my 'rights' as a parent and allow two mothers who were never going to cease their extreme hostility toward my very existence to raise each of them the best they could. Having two parents permanently at war with each other is something I already knew way too much about, and in either case a 'shared parenting, mandate imposed by the regime would have simply sustained this nightmare for my children indefinitely. Ad to this the undeniable reality that each of the two mothers despised each other more than either one did me, and a brother and sister would have been taught their whole lives that their sibling was no more than an archetype of both me and the other mother and subsequently untermenschen.
Much as you want to believe otherwise, what happens with other people's kids really just isn't any of your business to interfere with, no matter how sincere you think your motives are or how clinically defensible you want to believe your proposed means are.
And the results of even the most slam-dunk successes in the lobbying arena will NEVER be what you wanted them to be. Which is why minding one's own business is probably the most sacrosanct law of human interactions I have ever been willing to uphold. Try and mind others' business for them, and whether you meant to be or not, sooner or later you're just another uninvested do-gooder with some theories and proposals, leaving everyone affected by them wondering, as always, what made anything about their lives any of your affair to begin with.