Parental alienation and the unregulated experts shattering children’s lives
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Child raising is too delicate and nuanced to be relegated to process level decisions. It’s too late for my situation but family court with children involved is something I hope gets revamped sooner rather than later.
Many of the family court laws are a relic from a time when the roles of men and women were very different from the standard of today and unfortunately many women use this to their advantage (which I suppose is the rational thing to do).
Now, whenever I see a woman claiming to be a victim in a family matter I look way more closely than I would have in the past and I hope society as a whole starts to do this too.
Of course, I’m not saying only women use victimhood to their advantage but I am saying that there is a very clear incentive to claim to be a victim in todays society and in family court especially. As long as a woman is ok with lying, it’s almost foolish for her to NOT claim to be the victim. The incentive needs to be removed.
I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said but this. I understand why you said it. But for any mother, it is never rational to attack your children's father in front of your children. By doing that, you are attacking 50% of your own children. The more successful you are at getting them to hate their father, the more successful you'll be at getting them to hate half of themselves. The damage done to children from this is incalculable to the point that any parent that engages in it is a bad parent regardless of any other redeeming qualities they may have.
I'm sorry for what you went through and hope things have gotten better for you.
I agree, it feels kinda gross to say it’s the rational thing to do but in my experience incentives always win and it seems like it’s difficult for some mothers to see their childrens father on the same level as them as a parent. It’s toxic but I think it’s much more common than people realize. And this is even when the parents are still together, once a separation is initiated, I think it’s natural for this feeling to grow.
I can see my childrens mom rationalize what she did very easily. She had to keep her babies safe etc… when your in the process of breaking up a family long term thinking is much harder, survival is the goal and I think for many moms the thought of losing access to their children part of the time is unbearable.
Of course that thought (and reality) is unbearable for me too but I don’t have the family court on my side because I’m a man, if I did, I’d probably make the decision to keep their their mom in their life but it would be a very difficult decision to say goodbye to my children half the time. It’s emotional torture which makes rationalizations very very enticing.
So yeah, I think long term you’re right, but in practice it’s really hard to be purely rational in the moment.
I can think of plenty of scenarios in what’s described where the mother is incredibly manipulative and plays the victim card as soon as there are consequences.
It's really hard to get a grasp of the situation with the initial example, we'd need to know how often these situations happen. So these examples elicit many feelings but don't provide a lot of information.
Based on my experience from court battles, there is something not told.
》expert found her to have psychological issues
》Months later, she was allowed two hours of supervised contact once a fortnight.
And of course, what they present to the media and what the truth is, are both two very different things. I am close friends with Mr A in this "article", which happened after his ex-wife was told by a judge to stop trying to alienate the children from their father.
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2017/10/10/52651/sisters-stage-on...
All the patients complaints referenced were made by his ex-wife, none were upheld.
And even the way the reporter phrased things was amazing:
> When approached for comment regarding Mr A’s case, the authority’s media spokesman confirmed he could no longer work in New Zealand
It implies certain things, but in reality, he was no longer renewing his practising certificate in NZ (because he lived in Australia), but if he chose to, he could renew it any time he likes.
https://www.californiacasa.org/state-priorities
The primary goal is to keep children with their parents/parent wherever possible while speaking for the child in the court system to allow their voice to be herd. No matter how awful the family relationship they still have a family which is ultimately more grounding and stable than anything else.
I'm also a British citizen and I find this Guardian article disturbing because it doesn't appear the authorities are putting the child's needs first.
It doesn't sound like children that are taken away in these cases end in the foster system, they are just taken to the other parent (who may be abusive).
Also, if both parents seem to possess severe, codependent drama-attracting personality disorders, wouldn't the risks of foster care end up being lesser than horrible parents?
Finally, family court is rigged in non-rural California against the fathers in numerous ways. Community property division is one way, even if both parents make similar amounts. Statistically, mothers initiate divorce and alienate the kids from their dad by demonizing him. It's the most common pattern in divorce proceedings with children, but not the only pattern as there are infinitely many, no angel and no devil, only pain and travesty in one sort or another that isn't limited to being inflicted or suffered by only one party.
is it possible to improve "anything else"? that seems like the main problem
When one reads stories like the New Yorker article on Mackenzie Fierceton (née Morrison) [1] or various accounts of physical abuse rendered in /r/asianparents, one is very skeptical of your assessment. Is a gilded cage an acceptable tradeoff for mistreatment and contempt? What's the point of keeping children in the company of people that think of them as little more than chattel? That can't be good for a child's self-esteem or development.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/mackenzie-fier...
> Basically it is the tradition of the United Kingdom, recognised in law, that children are best brought up within natural families. Lord Templeman, in Re: KD (a minor ward) (termination of access) [1988] 1 AC 806, at page 812 said this:
> > "The best person to bring up a child is the natural parent. It matters not whether the parent is wise or foolish, rich or poor, educated or illiterate, provided the child's moral and physical health are not in danger. Public authorities cannot improve on nature."
> There are those who may regard that last sentence as controversial but undoubtedly it represents the present state of the law in determining the starting point. It follows inexorably from that, that society must be willing to tolerate very diverse standards of parenting, including the eccentric, the barely adequate and the inconsistent. It follows too that children will inevitably have both very different experiences of parenting and very unequal consequences flowing from it. It means that some children will experience disadvantage and harm, whilst others flourish in atmospheres of loving security and emotional stability. These are the consequences of our fallible humanity and it is not the provenance of the State to spare children all the consequences of defective parenting. In any event, it simply could not be done.
(Emphasis mine). I'm not sure I like it, but I understand why this is where we are.
Of course, we haven't outlawed beating children in England yet, unlike Wales and Scotland, so there are still obvious improvements to be made...
Many things can be problems we all hope to be better that do not fit into the set of problems the state should be responsible for.
People seem to think and want more and more for the government to take the responsibility to fix things despite plenty of evidence that they really can't do so all that well. Beyond a certain threshold yes, but that threshold is not "if there's still a problem the government isn't doing enough".
https://nypost.com/2020/09/24/blm-removes-website-language-b...
What has to be considered is the alternative, there is not an infinite supply of good places to send children to if their parents are terrible.
The foster system has quite a lot of negative outcomes, to put it generously. Not very many people want to adopt a half grown child with behavior problems from earlier mistreatment, it is not at all an easy thing to do.
A family court has the unenviable position of picking lesser evils when surrounded by manipulations while attracting incompetent zealots.
Everyone wants to be upset about the mistreatment of children, few good competent people able to support a difficult child actually want to take on that responsibility from someone else.
Almost anything is better the removing them. We adopted a teen from foster care. Every single person she knew that ended up in the system is either in jail. On hard drugs. In Abusive relationships. Or have kids already taken away. Or all of the above.
Being bounced around from home to home just destroyed their sense of belonging.
We had a brutal number of years of lost health l destroyed finances and everything else before she finally knew we loved her and wanted her. But I did get to finally walk her down the aisle and she is with a good man now.
I've put off starting a family until my mid 30s due to being abandoned by my mother as a child. Luckily, my dad did all he could to shower me with love and raise me well. It took a while for me to truly appreciate him (early 30s) and accept he will always be there.
When my time comes to be a dad, I hope to harness the patience and empathy of great parents like you and my dad.
No they don't. At best they're extremely risk averse to the point of taking a child away just to be safe, but it isn't what's in the child's best interests
The picture of a mother losing custody of their children is always going to be an emotional picture to paint, but if you step back and focus on the well-being of the child, then you need to take this stuff into consideration.
The point of the article is that courts are (sometimes) ignoring childrens' testimony and instead siding with unqualified experts who have a financial incentive to remove children from their preferred parent.
There are so, so many cases of children testifying against a parent while living under the care of another, then recanting years later as adults.
I don't have a good answer here because I think often the experts are unqualified and give bad advice, but it's important to acknowledge the depth of the problem
The issue is sometimes (maybe often) the children's testimony is in fact tainted and should be ignored. Here in the US there's actually a surprising number of high-profile historical cases that involve children being manipulated into false testimony, see for instance the McMartin preschool trial.
Legal processes -- with lawyers -- inflame conflict and turn things adversarial.
We need clear, simple, consistent rules. We also need social workers instead of lawyers.
Once both sides know their rights, mediation is the preferred solution for both pre and post divorce concerns.
Note that some courts (CA, for example), have mandatory "mediation," which is not really mediation. True mediation is voluntary and confidential.
The costs of mediation for divorce average around 1/10th the cost of an adversarial divorce with attorneys. Of course, the real costs of an adversarial divorce are the massive detrimental effects on the children.
The industries that grow around the incredibly emotional (and lucrative) topic of divorce are vast.
I’m currently going through something similar, but on the opposite side of the fence. The courts have generally found in my favor because I’ve kept meticulous evidence of my wife’s abuse and how she involved the children. If it weren’t for this system, my life would be destroyed.
What can possibly be done to make the system more equitable?
The experience has made me truly believe something is fundamentally broken in our society with how we raise children. It takes a village, yet the western world runs on a two parent system that inherently creates conflict when it comes to career opportunity and so much more. It can’t be a coincidence that the divorce rate is so high.
>What can possibly be done to make the system more equitable?
A lot could be done to fix the root problem by educating young people on the nature of abusive relationships, and what the signs and red flags they should look out for are, so we don't end up with so many people in such situations. Imagine if the government treated it like an anti-smoking campaign, showing scenes of people tolerating and excusing a bit of bad behaviour from a new partner, then cutting to a few years in future when they're a nervous wreck and their partner is doing all kinds of horrible things to them.
Arguably it's one of the most important things in life, knowing how to avoid abusive relationships, but there's absolutely zero education on it. In some cases the entertainment media even (inadvertently?) tries to normalise such abusive behaviours.
Smoking is binary: you know if you are smoking or not, and other's do too. An 'abusive relationship' is not binary, and is laden with evaluative meaning, subjective, contextual, differing from culture to culture.
Perhaps most importantly such terms are subject to concept creep due to prevalence changes in society. This is not something people put much consideration in to, but the trade-off in educating people (a good thing) is the slow pathologising of every aspect of healthy human relationships. Which, incidentally, is what this article is about.
There's almost no boundaries to what can be part of healthy relationships as long as ther is information consent.
But mixing up the two is not, um, healthy for society.
There was a man who had to take his dead wife's urn into school because they repeatedly insisted on talking to "the child's mother".
My kid's medical records are literally attached to my wife's medical records - I have to login with her username and password to view after visit summaries etc.
In effect, child related institutions like schools and family doctors systematically treat fathers as second class parents.
And then family courts look at things like involvement with schools and doctors to decide who gets custody - as if those institutions weren't biased against fathers in the first place!
We should have laws to (1) prevent discrimination against fathers by all these institutions (2) order courts to take into account that discrimination when determining custody to avoid perpetuating the existing bias.
(And if you agree these should be laws - please call your legislators and tell them! Nothing will change if people don't tell their elected representatives how they feel about these issues.)
Some of these decisions are in the hands of software teams. Ask out loud in a team meeting about supporting other family structures: single parents, orphans, same-sex couples, grandparent-as-guardians, etc. "The MVP works for most of our users" isn't good enough.
It's likely that the generalized solution is overall simpler too even if you won't get to use an easy label like "mother" on the form.
This isn't the only drawback of capitalism as we practice it. While it might not have featured much modern comfort, the traditional village also wasn't relentlessly commercial, relentlessly measured. There was some space for humans to live as they would, without accounting for every square inch of real estate and minute of life. (i.e., a child who wanted to stay somewhere else in the village than her parent's hut for a few weeks simply would have done that) Over time, these slack areas have been eliminated. Everything must be legible to the bean counters. What isn't, is made a crime against shareholders or taxpayers or security or democracy or property values or whatever. Of course, slack areas are the only source of resilience humans have. We just don't allow ourselves to think of that. "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."
Some will dismiss this as theorizing about conspiracies. The whole "conspiracy theory" meme is a distraction. Quasi-rational actors don't require coordination to respond identically to identical incentives. In general, that's how society has functioned, for millennia. The capitalist "innovation" is to tie more and more individual incentives to the preferences of capital. Capital cannot tolerate a village.
My grandmother (1926-2016) grew up in a remote eastern Slovak village well before it acquired electricity and other perks of modern life. You cannot get much more traditional than that.
Wealth and poverty still played a role, it does everywhere. The village wasn't "relentlessly measured", but it was relentlessly judgmental and hierarchical. You couldn't do shit if the most powerful people mistreated you. And you carried an unshakeable burden of your ancestry with you. If your mother was considered a "witch" (seriously) or a "slut", your place on the village pecking order was somewhere down below.
Plenty of people escaped traditional villages to get rid of this burden. Urban anonymity has some positives. Capitalism can be cruel, but at least it is not utterly rigid. Often, you can make money somehow - perhaps not millions, but enough not to be a pauper. But in a traditional, closed village, you could never shake off the stigma of a "slut's daughter" etc. If you didn't want be disdained forever, you had to move out, end of story.
> An expert report can cost as much as £10,000, but the costs of therapeutic interventions can run into tens of thousands of pounds.
> The options for a parent who believes they have been wrongly accused of alienation are limited and costly. “There is no way of getting your children back unless you admit you have alienated them,” said Waxman. “Not wanting to do the therapy is seen as resisting.”
This honestly seems like a Kafka-esque nightmare driven by greed.
Parent: "My ex hit me."
Psychologist: "Lol, that's parental alienation, you need to give me monies, it's 'for the children'."
Parent: "No, I was actually hurt by this person."
Psychologist: "You're clearly in denial, courts, take the kids away until this person pays up."
1. Check the definition of an analogy (this is the case where the dictionary is actually useful), maybe it will make clear why what I wrote was not meant as a perfect depiction of reality;
2. Psychology has not really a good track as a science: between replication crisis, statistical illiteracy of the researchers, ideologically motivated reasoning and outright fraud it is not clear to me that believing in Psychology is any different that believing in Theology: they are both self-consistent systems that fail to make prediction on the physical world and, while intellectually interesting and provocative, I would not like that anyone makes decisions about society and my life using concepts from these disciplines.
P.S.: Actually, thank you for giving me the opportunity to reflect much more about the similarity between these two seemingly different disciplines.
Like glaugh, I appreciated the definition of a new-to-me word appearing inline :)
It is a cut-copy-paste definition of a rarely used word.
I know a few people who benefited from therapy; some very much.
If you think your therapist is the equivalent of an astrologist, you should try another one; it's not unusual.
If you try enough astrologers, fortune tellers or priests, you'll probably find one with the necessary life experience and empathy to earnestly benefit you. Their stated methods differ, but I think all these people are basically in the same line of work and, insofar as any of them are capable of helping others, they're all doing basically the same thing. They ask questions and have people talk about their problems, evaluate what they hear, and offer advice based on what you've said and their professional and personal experience.
And all of them should be thrown out of court rooms. Expert testimony from fortune tellers and psychologists is trash as far as I'm concerned. Rolling for a new psychologist to help yourself get better is fine and dandy, but in an adversarial courtroom environment this whole thing breaks down. When your ex-spouse brings a psychologist to court to testify against you, you don't get to "try another" until you get good results. All you can really do is hire one of your own to throw shit back in the other direction. It's farcical.
You cannot be serious with this comparison. Changing therapists once or twice because different types of therapy work on different people and because you need to be comfortable around yoir therapist is in no way comparable to people dialing the TV astrologer every morning until the nonsense they literally make up on the spot happens to be what they meeded to hear by pure chance.
Psychology might not be as rigorous of a science as physics or whatever, but it still follows the scientific method and therapy is primarily evidence-based. Would you also be so quick to compare a doctor trying multiple different antibiotics on a patient dying from an infection to repeatedly throwing a dart into a pharmacy and trying whatever it hits?
(Also a newspaper or TV astrologer who talks at people using mass media is not doing the same sort of thing at all. I'm talking about astrologers who do one-on-one consultations, as priests and psychologists offer. And just to be clear, I have no religion and I don't believe in astrology.)
If one complains over the internet that therapy works like astrology, instead of actually talking to their therapist about this topic, then therapy is for them a waste of money, as it's clear that they have no participation and trust. Changing therapist - like I suggested - misses entirely the point, now I see.
Complaining that patient X went to therapy and didn't work and therefore therapy doesn't work is like complaining that a computer science degree is useless because developer X doesn't find a good job.
People is complex and treatment is complex as well. It's perfectly possible that even an unqualified person (e.g. the so-called "coaches") can improve a case, that qualified people didn't, for legitimate reasons. I actually do know at least one unqualified person who practices therapy, and I think they're able to help some cases, but that doesn't detract from qualified therapists.
On the other hand, there is a structure to human mind, and people who systematically studied it for years have tools that unqualified people generally don't have. One may not subscribe, say, to Freudian theories, but the relation with the parents is extremely relevant to one's development, and without knowledge and tools, the practicioner will likely stumble.
I did recently bump into her new partner during the stroll with my new family which he confided that she was going to do everything in her power to destroy me financially and emotionally but didn't think I would do what I did.
Brave man, to know that and still get involved with her..
Given how biased the current system is I think this is a reasonable default choice. If the ex is throwing crazy accusations and the courts continue to reward liars, this is probably the only way to avoid spending yourself into bankruptcy trying to stay in your kids’ lives.
It’s definitely not good for the kids at all, but it’s also not good for them to have the whole family’s assets spent on attorneys, and to risk the father being accused of so much stuff that he ends up in jail during all the gamesmanship.
When they’re older hopefully you’d be able to reconnect and explain what happened.
I think this is when you eat your children.
Yes, until such time they want to reach out and meet their Dad if they don't then hope they're aren't hungry.
@em-bee
The restraining and the DVO orders effectively abated then expired after two years. During such time the partner found out about the new family and sought to enforce new orders they're (intimation, rape, child abuse) orders, and stalking orders). They didn't even make it to the judge as they where lodged during effectively all the other orders and the technicality that I was in another country at the time.
Except that accusations of parental alienation are still relatively rare, and often frowned upon by the court. False DV claims are routine. The scale of one is much greater than the other. But because one is sometimes used by fathers that one is getting cracked down on in articles, even when it’s maybe 1% of the problem. Where’s the mainstream articles about the epidemic of false DV accusations during divorce?
> but the costs of therapeutic interventions can run into tens of thousands of pounds.
More like hundreds of thousands. Courts have no limit on what they can order and they often order expensive, private therapeutic schools. In my case, I estimate about $150k per year in therapeutic expenses has been ordered by the family court presiding over my case. Mostly in the form of a few private schools. I'm in support of almost all of it, fwiw.
> Parent: "No, I was actually hurt by this person."
There's nothing wrong with talking about being hurt by your spouse to other adults (though- family courts may order that you can't!). The problem here is talking about it with your children in an inappropriate fashion, such that it damages their parental relationships.
Doubly so when the events never occurred, or when the parent accusing is actually the parent doing the abusing.
> there has been growing anxiety about the potential conflict of interest presented where an expert could be financially incentivised to make a finding of PA in a system that allows them to recommend their own therapy or that of colleagues.
That sounds pointless. If they want me to pay 1.5x my yearly salary just to see my kids I might as well… I don’t quite know, but something excessive.
Parent: "Your mother hit me. She wants to take you away from me and hurt both of us."
Child: "Mommy is bad?"
Parent: "She doesn't want us to be happy, she doesn't want to do what's right, she just wants to win."
Psychologist: "Please stop sabotaging your child's relationship with her mother."
Parent: "But she did hit me, and she's unreasonable. She won't be happy until she takes everything away from us."
Psychologist: "Yes, that's another example of a thing you shouldn't say to your daughter until she is a lot older, even if it is true. True does not mean helpful."
Psychology is not a science and we need to stop treating it like one. So much harm has been done by people giving credibility to faddish psychological theories. For example: https://psmag.com/social-justice/dangerous-idea-mental-healt...; https://lithub.com/moral-panic-and-the-myth-of-recovered-mem....
It's not just "a few bad apples," either. These things keep happening because the field isn't rigorous, and can't feasibly be made rigorous.
To the extent there is a strategy for legitimately addressing this, its patiently documenting over an extended period time. Logging things like significant decline in social life, significant negative change in grades, significant comments from teachers, significant negative changes in behavior. While documenting this you have to be squeaky clean, refraining from disparaging the other parent and engaging in your behaviors that may muddy the waters.
More often than not, one or several of your kids will show signs something isn't right to an extent that a 3rd party (Guardian, the Court, etc) or even your former spouse can't deny it. At that point, for many people, the system gives way to change. For some people justice for the child is never done and the family and society often pays a terrible price in those cases. Can't recommend this book enough if this topic hits close to home for anyone: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Boy-Crisis-Audiobook
The fact that its clinical doesn't make it rigorous. Psychological disorders in general are not even defined in a rigorous way, and even the expensive diagnostic methods are qualitative and not rigorous.
Utterly ignored, especially by the courts, is the child's emotional and developmental need to grow up with both parents.
Equal time with both parents allows children to grow up and learn that parents are imperfect people who are doing their best in the circumstances they have been put in.
My late mother still carries unremitting blame for enabling an alcoholic PTSD afflicted stepfather from hell to blight my life - all while claiming she was doing the right thing.
There's nothing wrong with the family court system that a tac nuke couldn't fix.
WTF? Why in the world does the other parent need to be "entirely unproblematic" to recognize the deleterious effect to the child of one parent brainwashing the kids against the other?
In my (pretty vast) experience, parental alienation is very common to varying degrees. Of course that doesn't mean the reactions should be further weaponized.
Make pre-nup agreements a requirement to get married. It's really the only fair way to handle the incredible universe of situations.
In addition, by pre-negotiating the financial considerations, the two parties might better be able to negotiate what's truly in the best interests of the children instead of weaponizing them.
It makes no sense to permit parents to agree in advance as to who should have parental responsibility. Things change, particularly when divorce occurs, and the best interests of the child is what matters - not what's agreed to beforehand.
Contracts inherently deal only with property interests of the contracting parties; they can (within certain bounds) address custody because our legal system treats that as a property interest that is subject to some domain-specific limitations and oversight, because the general premise is that it is not a natural property right, but a legal contrivance for the interests of the child because parents will normally be the best motivated to serve those interests. (Though there is definitely a not-uncommom view that children are naturally property, as well.)
Best interest of the children are to minimize parental conflict. No matter the outcome, a legal process inflames conflict.
Arab countries have this right. There is a strong presumption that kids go with mother up to some age, and father beyond. The rules are clear and simple, barring exceptional circumstances. Some of the Scandinavian countries do to. Barring exceptional circumstances, there is a presumption of 50/50 custody and child support is capped.
There is nothing to fight over, and fighting dies down. The US high stakes system, where child support is astronomical and where everything is up for fighting over, is the biggest loser here.
A 'general pre-nup' is a contradiction, practically. The point is to have extreme customization, at least as suggested by GP comment.
That's why the solution suggested to cumbersome divorce law would be to enforce pre nup agreements.
I don't have a strong opinion, but I bet a pre-nup could include many "decision trees" and mitigation strategies. I don't have a pre-nup, so I don't know.
No, it doesn't because:
(1) interpretation of legal documents, like interpretation of law, is not deterministic,
(2) pre-nuptial agreements, and other contracts, are subject to the law, rather than superceding it,
(3) marriage isn't ways about love,
(Of course, if you want to substitute a purely contractual arrangement—still subject to the law—for the default treatment provided by marriage, that's always an option, anyhow, and you can still have whatever celebration you want if entering the contract, and can skip legal marriage altogether.)
For example: My grandmother married a nice, kind man. A year later, he had a stroke. He increasingly became more and more abusive, compounded by the fact that he was home all the time and needed care. My grandmother finally kicked him out when he expanded the abuse to my aunt, 3 years younger than I and a teenager at the time. She was accused of abandonment.
And seriously, this isn't something they could have predicted and really is a good reason for the laws. There is no reverting back to a more optimistic time at these points. Even if they had a prenup, the only fair thing to do is to look over it and make sure it is still fair to the couple and their children, if any.
People aren't computers. We often don't "deterministicly revert to a sane state." Your approach is far too limited. The laws should be more understandable and expedient, and the overriding well-being of the child should be taken into account. The child's wishes should be taken into account as well to inform the decision but not decide it. CASA in the US do this well in the majority of cases
Even in the context of a prenup I'd think twice before making that statement. It seems logical someone inclined to write a prenup would think twice about having kids out of wedlock, until you consider marriage itself has a different set of rules in many countries which cohabitation with a partner and a child don't bring (and vice versa, you'd have the same problems cohabitating with a child as being married with a child). Many, many people have been spooked by divorce horror stories these past few decades.
Then some data [1]. It’s in there. Most marriages occur before the first child.
All I was arguing is that a prenup is an illogical moment in time to think about children in the context of divorce. I’ll go out and state that there is no way I could phantom what being a dad means before I was one for a few years. A prenup in my case would thus be empty of emotional baggage with regard to yet to be had children at that moment.
A “children and separation” plan might be a good exercise for any couple after one year with a first baby. But with these plans it is with everything else: those likely to think and talk about it, aren’t the most likely to get into a (messy) divorce.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/52215-divorce-risk-premarital-ch...
The idea that a prenuptial agreement could effectively address the concerns of children not yet born is absurd. I have been married for around 20 years now, and today have two children in elementary school (i.e. prime age to screw them up with a divorce). When I try to imagine the prospect of my silly mid-20's self and spouse, writing an agreement about children around 9/11 that would make any sense today, I laugh out loud.
Even a prenup dealing solely with money and property would have little purpose years into a typical marriage of young people. Prenuptial agreements generally cover money and property that the couple had coming into a marriage. Not "common property" that is accumulated together after the marriage. My mid-20's spouse and I had no property and subzero net worth on our wedding day, it's all post-marriage common property anyway.
What if we made it mandatory to renegotiate the pre-nup every year or so?
I suppose that could cause problems of its own, but it would 'fix' the outdate pre-nup problem (which would in turn fix the general divorce law trying to address very specific cases problem).
I’m wondering if you’ve ever been married.
People generally don’t live their marriage with the intent of divorce, so planning in the way you suggest seems obtuse.
I can’t ever imagine my wife, who does not have a career and depends on my income, annually renegotiating a prenuptial agreement.
I haven't, apologies for being naive.
> People generally don’t live their marriage with the intent of divorce, so planning in the way you suggest seems obtuse.
Having witnessed firsthand how absolutely traumatic my parent's divorce was, I'm currently approaching the idea of long-term relationships, possibly with children, as one where "hope for the best, expect the worse" is the optimal policy.
Obviously, if I marry someone, I'd like to stay with them my whole life. Nevertheless, I think it important to ensure that if things do go south, which, statistically speaking, they do quite a lot, collateral damage is limited. By which I mean, there is nothing for the lawyers to fight over.
So, you want to fix a problem by requiring that people rewrite the law of marriage from scratch in order to get married and then also force them to redo the exercise annually to remain married?
Wouldn't people just opt out of official “marriage” for a regular contractual agreement to avoid the legal maintenance burden?
Yet she might be biased. Most people she meets needed it.
There are also many other scenarios in which a pre-nup or its terms can be invalidated during divorce proceedings.
It's going to be difficult to come up with an agreement that covers all scenarios and is enforceable.
You will be assimilated.
It cannot punish other than removing access to children. Anything else punishes the children as much as the parent.
In my opinion the missing solution is a community-based arbitration process that requires the participation of those who know more about the history/reality. Too often people are afraid of taking a side.
I can think of other possibilities, but I'm sure they wouldn't be popular (in the west anyway.) For instance, moderate caning.
Community-based arbitration falls apart when you account for the modern lifestyle of knowing so little about your neighbors, you don't even recognize their faces let alone know their names.