THIS PAST WEEKEND I WAS WALKING my dog through Virginia Avenue Park and as usual saw many dads with their kids in the park. It caused me to realize the difference between the weekend days and the weekdays. During the week, I see the moms with those same kids.
In our law office, we deal with a great many fathers, men who want to be dads to their kids but feel that the system is too hard to navigate alone, and that the deck is stacked against them. These fathers use their every other weekend and maybe a weekday dinner, but they’d like more. Not a week goes by that someone doesn’t engage me at the gym, or stop me at the Farmers’ Market to vent about “The System” and how unfair it is to them.
Almost always the dads scream about how viciously the state makes them pay child support, but makes it so hard for them to see their kids. It almost never is the money that they are upset about, it’s the fact that they can’t see their kids. It’s the fact that the district attorney will doggedly enforce a child support order but not a child custody order. It is a very sad situation, but there are two good reasons why it happens.
First off, the state is limited in what it can do for people, and secondly, the men don’t fight hard enough. It is not difficult for a judge to look at what a person earns, and use that number to decide how much money they should be paying for child support. In fact, it is so easy, that in most cases, the judge doesn’t even have to use their judgment, it is done by a computer program and the decision is made.
On the flip side, when it comes to how much love one parent has for their children versus the other parent, this is a problem of biblical proportions. In fact, one need only look to Solomon and the dispute between two mothers to see how difficult this choice can be. In that case, where two women were each claiming a baby as theirs, King Solomon had to make a decision. But rather than choosing one mother over the other, he chose to cut the baby in half. The real mother cried out, she would rather let her child go, than have it killed. She won.
In today’s world, where judges are the modern King Solomons, they don’t have the luxury of such novel tests to determine who is the better parent. They must rely on a few guidelines, some gut instinct, and how hard the parties are pressing to see their children. This situation means that the fathers must work harder to show the courts that they want, and are able, to raise their children. It’s that “want” part that makes the difference.
For fathers who want to be dads, they have to be willing to fight, they have to be willing to tell a judge about their feelings, which is precisely why so often they wont fight for their kids. This is a mistake. Once a judge sees that a father wants to be a dad, they’ll work to make it a reality.
This is where the spring cleaning comes in. As children grow, their needs change. Many times in child custody matters, the mother is granted primary physical custody and the father gets a few visitations a month. But as the suckling infant becomes a toddler, fathers have a right, and in my book, a duty, to be present for their children. They must take a proactive role in their children’s upbringing, whether they all share one roof or not.
As a society we encourage people to have children. We spend considerable resources each year to make sure that those children are supported financially, but what we should also be doing, is spending just as much of our resources to make sure that dads have an equal opportunity to be with their kids.
We cut the dads out of their kids lives, and then blame them for not being there. It is fundamentally unfair to the dads, and the kids, who are going to grow up feeling like their dads were never around.
If as a society we are going to have children be “the most rewarding job you’ll ever love,” then we should support both parents equally in their responsibilities. It should be an automatic 50/50 division of time for the parents.
DAVID PISARRA is a divorce and child custody attorney in the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He or 310/664-9969.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 18, 2008. Read the original PDF.