I've been through it, there's nothing you can do and if the mother is really out for blood she will use your child against you.
Women get rights, men get obligations.
Women get rights, men get obligations.
Of course it can be very difficult not to leap from painful experience to dramatic generalization. But it's the sort of thing we all have to work on in order to have HN be the kind of community we're trying for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If men comtemplating suicide could realise this and see it as the light at the end of the very dark tunnel then they might keep their faith in themselves and their future.
I was struggling with identity and responsibility when the kids were young and and extremely helpful person on a forum told me that my life would not forever be “swamped husband supporting family with young kids”…or even “parents in a faily of four”…sure I’m still a father of two kids, but they’re off doing their own things and my relationship with my wife is a LOT more like the one I had as a couple, before being parents.
You are doing disservice to both kids and men when you tell them they cant have it.
That's a nice statistic. Where did you get it?
> You are doing disservice to both kids and men when you tell them they cant have it.
Well I apologise for that, every lawyer I spoke to during my divorce (maybe ... 10?) said not to bother, the odds of a court deciding in favour of the mother were 3/5.
It only seems like that because you're looking at the raw numbers. When you look at the actual stakes, it's quite different.
Let's say we play a coin-toss game: Each time I win the toss, I give you $1. Each time you win the toss, you give me $100.
Would you play? Think it's not fair? Okay, lets make it fair.
Each time you win, you win $1m. Each time you lose, you pay $1m. Would you play against me (I'm not rich)? Would you agree to play against Bill Gates/Jeff Bezos/etc?
It's not just the odds that matters, it's the fact t, even on even odds, in some cases you stand to lose much more than the opposing side.
That is completely absurd risk reward ratio to reject.
Not really. The impact of losing is "lose hundreds of thousands, be in debt for the next decade and have my work (and life in general) suffer", while still having to deal with having to then fight for access continuously.
The impact of winning was "losing hundreds of thousands, be in debt for a decade, and still have the risk of custody reversal in a future case".
The only winning move here is not to play[1] unless the odds are greatly in your favour - it's cheaper for the female so the female's impact in a win or a lose is substantially less.
Regardless of the risk/reward ratio, when 10 lawyers tell you not to bother, you'd be stupid to ignore their advice.
In any case, I still want to now where you got your statistics from.
[1] All I had to deal with after that was to enforce the contact. That took 3 court cases (luckily, all in my favour).
Also, filing does not costs "hundreds of thousands". That is just not true. Poor people have those hearings and while it costs money, it costs significantly less.
This discussion requires the same standards for all arguments, and no appeals to authority.
Irrelevant - I didn't present it as stats applicable to the populate, I presented it as "10 lawyers I spoke to".
Parent presented the 50/50 statistic as a fact, I want to know where he read that.
I also don't find your unique experience useful though.
All of this is anedoctal but in my experience I saw many women willing to use false accusations of violence knowing it was a win win. They knew they wouldn't be punished even if it was proven the accusations were false. And that is a powerful tool to get custody.
And of course for younger children the custody to the mother is often enshrined into law directly.
Both situations happen.
Someone will be hurt, or by the actions of a member of the second group or by the societal actions to protect the second group.
I just wish the compromise was clear and we abandoned the kind of puritanical thinking that we "ought to protect group X" no matter what. We need to talk, qualitatively and quantitatively, about all the sides of the coin.
But that's not a random sample. Given the widely perceived bias against men, one would expect only the men with the strongest cases to try for custody, and you would expect them to have better outcomes than average men.
If as an experiment you randomly selected a group of men and got them to file for custody, their success rate would probably be lower.
Actually, even on close-to-even odds, men don't try anyway (losing has a much larger effect if you're a man). See my response in this thread elsewhere for why I declined to fight when my estimated odds were 3/5.
You're pulling that statistic from where? At least from the US census bureau, here are the stats from 2002 that go all the way back to 1994 [1]: "In the spring of 2002, an estimated 13.4 million parents had custody of 21.5 million children under 21 years of age whose other parent lived somewhere else. About 5 of every 6 custodial parents were mothers (84.4 percent) and 1 in 6 were fathers (15.6 percent), proportions statistically unchanged since 1994 (Table A). Overall, 27.6 percent of all children under 21 living in families had a parent not living in the home."
[1] https://valme.io/c/mens-rights/88qqs/a-tale-of-two-children-...