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Comment by motive | Hacker News Reader

I really empathise with the mother in this situation, it really does sound awful.

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.

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> What can possibly be done to make the system more equitable?

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.)

"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"

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.

>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?

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.

> Imagine if the government treated it like an anti-smoking campaign

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 definitely room for improvement in a lot of human relationships.

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.

It takes a village, yet the western world runs on a two parent system that inherently creates conflict...

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.

Please don't idealize the mythical village. Too many people do, because they are distant enough (in time and space) that they view premodern life as some sort of Golden Age paradise.

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.

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