Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
SpiralStairs wrote:
Nas wrote:
SpiralStairs wrote:
Nas wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Yeah, that's not my experience. Most of the time I run into the man who never did shit for his kids while the parties were married and suddenly wants to be a hands-on dad so he can avoid/reduce his child support obligation.
Yep! Or he believes he will pay less child support if he spends a few minutes with his child. Some of these mothers are shit parents too, but the court forces them to "care" for the kid.
I'm seeing MANY such cases lately. MANY unmarried parents entering into 50/50 visitation schedules because they can't handle having the kid(s) the majority of the time. I don't see how this arrangement is beneficial to the kids because oftentimes the parents live nowhere near each other and the kid is being shuttled back and forth MANY miles each week between two households.
Had a lady who lives in DuPage County tell me this week that her and kid's father (who lives in Chicago) split time with the kid. Kid goes to school in Chicago and she gets the kid up at 3:45am on her days in order to get kid to school on time. That's no way for a kid to live.
Why is mom the default custodial parent? I think it is probably the right decision in most cases, but I'm not sure why courts default to the mother having the kids
Because mom is, more often than not, the primary caretaker of the kids.
I'd say 85% of my cases have mom ending up with the kids. 10% of the time the parents split the kids 50/50. 5% of the time dad ends up with the kids because mom is a nut.
It seems to me that the mother being the default parent for residential custody isn't really the case anymore. It just happens that the father isn't usually going to fight for equal parenting time unless he's trying to shaft the wife out of support.
I've been pretty open about this on here in other threads....
Women still get the default residential custody. The Mom would have to be a complete strung-out crackhead to lose. For me....the battle wasn't worth it. I would have fought it had I thought I had a chance...I would have lost and it would have been an ugly expensive battle.
I paid dearly over 7 years. The law is the law. My issue isn't that I had to pay...my issue is that my ex used the money to support herself and did very little to increase her own earning potential. She did is little as she had to do because she had money from me she could count on. It sucks, but you can't legally force someone to be motivated.
As RPB mentioned, I lived within 10 minutes of my kids and was able to maintain the same level of involvement as I always had. My kids live with me now full time as she moved 40 minutes away. It all worked out fine, but I would not call it fair by any stretch. I don't know how to make it more fair. It is what it is and I've always maintained that the long-standing history of deadbeat fathers are what caused the default custody to go to the Mom.
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This Ends in Antioch wrote:
brick (/brik/) verb
1. block or enclose with a wall of bricks
2. Proper response would be to ask an endless series of follow ups until the person regrets having spoken to you in the first place.