Jason Houck-Chair of the New York Chapter of National Parents Organization.
He discusses some of the benefits of shared parenting and some of the challenges in getting laws passed in New York State.
National Parents Organization looks to bring shared parenting to the forefront of family law. Learn how YOU can help pass shared parenting in New York!
FMI:
https://www.facebook.com/NPONewYork https://www.sharedparenting.org/new-york
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
Twitter: @claytoncraddock
As with all things political set in motion to seek a better (or at least no worse) involvement of civil servants in private lives, I immediately suspect the means of entrapment which, in only a matter of time, can and do get attached to what amounts here to just another call for programmatic justice, probably at least in part to be funded by federal grants.
The first trap that springs to mind recalls a phrase I heard a time or two among my fellow inmates during a recent overnight adventure as a guest of the county: 'put you in a program.'
I cannot see any means by which any such legislation even distantly connected to this theoretical objective of 'shared parenting' could ever pass, other than that any final version to be signed by whoever is passing as Governor of your fair state presents to that office some new program or programs to be enacted for the purpose of overseeing the outcomes of this new form of judicial rulings in custody cases.
Programs have staffs, officers, and budgets. Depending on whichever source or sources of direct funding any such shared-parenting program might run on, whoever has the gold makes the rules. All sorts of exemptions and exceptions and loopholes would most certainly be installed in the legislation, by those gold-holders and their lobbyists, and every law firm practicing this kind of law across New York State would immediately set about re-crafting their negotiating and courtroom strategies to have on hand all the available workarounds to deliver whatever result is being paid for by their clients.
There is every chance that increasing numbers of litigants (and I would expect primarily men) would begin to encounter more and more legal obstacles to even being ruled as eligible for such a custody outcome. It goes without saying that scarlet letters such as prior history with the courts, police interactions, unflattering employer records, clinical remedies sought in the past through psychologists and psychiatrists, or any number of factors, would be required as disqualification conditions before such a bill would ever be signed, by any governor but especially so by whoever is at the head of New York's ponderous and deeply entrenched civil-service sector.
Having some experience with the kangaroo-justice show trials that pass as custody proceedings where the object of the game is either to break a man with legal tricks or stress him out so bad with them that he breaks himself, what I see here is a whole new and potentially much more agonizing and humiliating experience for fathers than ever: having made so bold as to assert that he is indeed eligible to be under this utopian umbrella administered by government employees, the entire system quite dispassionately goes into motion in requiring him to prove it.
And Dad is right back where he started: applying to the State for a license to parent his own children, with a hundred different reasons the opposing counsel might seek motions against him, one right after another.
Then, he loses the fight to co-parent under this particular program, and what is he? From then on?
Just another deadbeat dad who couldn't even pass muster for court-ordered joint custody.
What these fine folks are after is essentially a, sadly naive, vision of court-ordered filial piety: parents in separate households must be able to substantiate continuously that they are indeed each meeting the State's requirements to stay in the program, when the only way any mom and dad ever sincerely managed to set this up fairly and decently for their own kids was to decide to, together, and then come to their own terms. Parents either agree to continue to treat each other like family and allow their kids to, or they don't. Once that has been destroyed or abandoned by their own actions, no legislature ever convened is going to be able to patch it back together.
All I see is just another field of traps for a guy to fall into, ready and waiting and skillfully crewed. A brief bump in the road to get over, for the screeching, grinding, thoroughly indifferent wheels of social-democracy theory's inevitable reliance on programmatic justice rubber-stamped by jaded and corrupt bureaucrats, and on ahead with business as usual.