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.
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.