November 12, 1994

DISCLAIMERS

This guide does not contain legal advice. According to the laws of the United States and of its constituent states, no one is permitted to offer legal advice without being a member of the select group of approved lawyers. To obtain bona fide legal advice, please consult a lawyer or another approved source. This book contains non-legal opinions, anecdotes, and discussion. Examples and individuals mentioned in this book do not represent any real persons, living or dead. Any resemblance to such persons is coincidental and unintentional. KiDDS does not take any responsibility of liability for any action taken by a reader of this book. There is no guarantee offered or expressed that any information in this book is free from error or omission. Each person reading this text must take responsibility for his own actions, using this and all other reasonable sources as possible sources of information. No advice herein recommends the violation of any law of the United States or its constituent parts. Any comment herein that would tend to advocate any illegal act in any particular location is hereby repudiated.

Table of Contents
KiDDS Notes on Doing Custody
19. Pampering 56. Blocking 2. the victims ............................................................................ 1 3 6 8 11 14 16 18 21 25

visitation.......................................................................................

Playing Mom and

Dad.................................................................................

20. Their mother' s Image................................................................................... 18. Maternal grandparents

27. Sitting with the mothers ....................................................................... 47. Good example .................................................................................... 50. Budgeting time ........................................................................................... 64. Child care .............................................................................................. 91. The role model job

KiDDS Notes on Protecting Custody

28. Defensive moves ................................................................................... 37. Legal custody 28 33

90. Temptation
30. How women avoid paying child support ...................................................

35
37

Complete KiDDS Notes Listing ............................................................

39

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

Pampering the Victims

A custodial father has to plan on spending plenty of time helping his children recover from divorce. Learning how children develop and then applying this knowledge daily is the best way. There is no substitute for quantity time.

Even if you and your ex worked out a simple divorce and a mutually acceptable custody arrangement, your children will still have endured a great amount of stress from having gone through the divorce process. The separation from at least one parent and the ending of the marital relationship between the parents causes them to be confused and upset. If there has been squabbling, long court battles, psychological investigations, verbal attacks by one parent on the other to the children, violence at home, financial difficulties, or any of the other host of terrors that divorce can bring, the emotional injuries to the children can be very severe and can interfere with their functioning. Schoolwork can be halted, behavior can become bizarre, peer friendships can become impossible, depression can result, sibling rivalry can grow to imitate parental conflict, drug or alcohol use may start, or any of a host of problems can beset children following a divorce. Some ag~s are more susceptible, and some children are more susceptible. Some recover faster and some slower. Some effects are regrettably permanent. Most are temporary, but should be relieved as much as possible anyway. Some of the effects are obvious, for example if schoolwork has been interfered with and the child does not learn some basic building blocks that he or she needs to go forward with. Some are subtle, as when a child blames himself for the divorce and in so doing, shatters his or her own selfesteem. Some effects become physical, as when a child reverts to earlier behaviors such as thumb-sucking. Others remain mental, for example, periodic unexplained moodiness and uncommunicativeness. As custodial parent, you should do what you can to ameliorate the suffering starting as soon as you are able. Do not wait for overt symptoms to arise. Start immediately, even before the divorce is over, to help your children get through the divorce and the change to your custody. To do that, you need to show your children that you are a reliable parent, that you can be trusted and that you have their interests at heart. You need to prove to them that you will not add to their feeling of abandonment. Never even mention leaving them. Time is essential. There ain't no such animal as quality time for a child suffering from the pain of divorce. Quantity time is necessary. Be there all the time you can. Forgo personal activities you might be used to, such as weekends off or nights out. Leaving a child with a sitter simply implies that the child is not important (there goes selfesteem) and that you are likely to go off permanently. Be there constantly if at all possible during the year or so after the initial separation, except for something like work that children can understand demands your time. There was a rash of recommendations some time ago that parents "get away" frequently. These suggestions were given both to intact parental pairs and to single parents. A better suggestion is to let yourself love your children so much that time with

-:

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

them is better than any getaway vacation. Children are a fantastic excuse to have fun. They love activity of any kind. Go to a park or a zoo. Go to the library, bring home books and read them. Do a jigsaw puzzle. Play ball. Take a bike ride. Go camping. There is virtually no limit on what you can do as a custodial single parent. Find activities that you can all enjoy and do. You build up your own self-esteem at the same time as building theirs. There is little more to be proud of than to help your own children recover from one of the worst experiences of their lives. Material possessions do not replace quantity time. You cannot buy presents for your child and hope to replace what they are missing in parental contact. New objects sitting in a playroom mean little to a child who is left alone by both parents. Even if you could distract your child with fascinating toys, you do not want your child to grow up focusing on objects instead of relating to people. You are the person they need to relate to the most, and you need to be there to do it. Even if your ex makes a point out of buying gifts for your children, do not get into a race to spoil them materially. Let it become a race between her presents and your attention. There is no contest there. Certain ages have special requirements. If you are not a very experienced parent, and few people are, take the time to learn what you can about child development. Many books exist covering all ages of children. For example, it is extremely important that a parent be physical with younger children. Hold them, hug them, dance with them, carry them around. Studies have shown that babies must have physical contact to develop normally. One could assume that younger children crave it as well, up to elementary school age. School age children need communication. A parent needs to develop a sense of how to talk to his child or children. The key to this is listening and adapting your style of communicating to match the intellectual level of the child. It is very frustrating for a child to be unable to comprehend the adult speech that his custodial parent uses. Adult speech does not impress younger children, and there is no need to impress children anyway. The point is to be someone they can talk to. By the time a child gets to be a teenager, relations between parent and child change. There is less physical contact, fun and games, tender attention. What replaces it is being a good example. The early teenage years are ones in which the child is patterning his life after the examples he or she sees. Be the kind of example that you want your child to follow. Be honest and tactful. Be punctual and reliable. Be whatever it is that you wish your child to be. Be the kind of parent you would have wanted your own father to be. If you cannot live up to your own goals, do your best and possibly let your child know that you wish you could be better. Share your own goals with your child. Help your child set his or her own goals. The time and effort that you spend with your child at each year of the child's life will make parenting the child in later years easier. A parent-child relationship is something that should be ideally grown like a tree, with each year having it become stronger and more resilient. By the time your child reaches adulthood, the lessons you taught and the good example you set will be the standards that your child follows. Nothing can replace the pride of a father in a child who has turned out well.

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

Blocking Visitation

If a mother is bent on destroying the psychological stability of her children during visitation, and the court will give them no help at all, a father might simply block visitation. It's not easy, but neither is helping the children to recover.

It is the stated policy of most if not all states to promote contact by both parents with their children. When it comes to enforcing visitation by fathers, that policy is simply a loud, raucous joke. One of the most common complaints by male court victims is that they don't get to see their children. And the courts do nothing. The other universal complaint by male court victims is that their ordered payments to an ex-wife who has custody of their children are excessive. However, the legislature of at least the State of California, and probably all others, have made it clear that an ex-wife who continues to thwart visitation can still collect every cent of her expropriation. Like always, there is no recourse for a father in this situation short of mass action. The other side of the coin is the situation where a man has custody, and his ex-wife has a visitation schedule. It seems that generous visitation is always provided to women who are not confined in solitary on death row at the time of the award, whereas a man, even a pillar of society, might get a weekend now and then. Women's visitation often has options in it -- she is not required to do any visitation. Only men get billed for expenses when they don't use their visitation. What can a custodial father do if visitation by his ex-wife is undesirable and not in the best interests of the children? Turning to court may be stupid, if the judge involved is one of those who never looks beyond a person's gender to make a call on a decision involving discretion. There are remedies beyond court. Why would a visitation with an ex-wife be bad for children? Perhaps she delights in condemning her ex-husband to the children, who are not old enough to appreciate that Mom is simply overcome with her own anger and hatred for her ex-husband. If the children are depending on their father for their daily needs, it hurts the children to have to hear the mother tear him apart, tell them he is unreliable and will desert them as he deserted her, that he is bound to hurt her and they are only helping him by being obedient to him as she was, that he is making her suffer, that he is lying to them when he says he loves them, that the only reason he wants to have them with him is to avoid paying child support to her, or some other of the sickening list of verbal assaults that women use to degrade their children's father. The children may be simply too impressionable to ignore what she says, and so each visit to their mother pushes them back further from recovery from the divorce. It may be that she is simply crazy, harmless but crazy. She may have paranoiac fantasies and whisper to the children that their father is going to get them all one day. How can a child grow up with any semblance of normalcy when he or she has to listen to nonsense like this? A teenager can appreciate that his mother has a cracked brain, but young children can not. It is incredibly difficult for a father to overcome his ex-wife's propaganda against him. He doesn't know exactly what is being said, and the children may

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

be too stressed out by the divorce to confide in him or else they might believe their mother that he cannot be trusted with knowing anything. . It may be that she plays favorites, and to have two or more children visit her means that one of them comes home feeling like dirt. It may be that she doesn't believe in education as a noble goal, and tells a struggling student not to bother trying too hard. It may be that she hates the father's girl friend or second wife, and makes fun of her in some despicable way that the children absorb. It may be that she is prejudiced and teaches the children to be the same. It may be she is a welfare drone and proud of it, teaching her children each visit that work is for fools. There are simply dozens of reasons why visiting the mother, falling under her influence and letting her be a role model is bad news for a child. Of course, it would be almost impossible to document this type of psychological effect, so expect zero help from the court to protect your children from it. It could be that she has abused the children and may do it again if she goes back on drugs or alcohol. It may be that the memories of her abuse in the past are brought to the surface when the child or children visit. It could even be that the child who was subject to abuse is depressed, made despondent or hostile, or even pushed to talk of suicide by visiting his mother. Of course, no matter what documentation you have of this, many courts will overlook it. It doesn't matter if five witnesses have observed the child directly after he or she returns from a visitation to be completely upset, distraught, non-responsive or in any other abnormal mood. Still the court ignores such evidence. It might be necessary to deposit the corpse of a suicided child on the judge's bench to get her or him to halt a mother's visitation. Short of that, expect that there will be no help from that quarter. What can be done? If there are any loopholes in the visitation order, they can be exploited. If some sort of notice is required, learn what is the mandatory form of proof of the notice, by either consulting law books or a lawyer, and refuse visitation if it is not met. Any ambiguity can be resolved by yourself as favoring no visitation, and you can deny it. You may be dragged into court on these ambiguities, but most likely the ambiguity will be straightened out at no loss to yourself You will appear to the court as a parent who is discouraging contact by the non-custodial parent, and if you are in no danger of having custody turned over to your ex-wife, this might be ignored. After all, the court is out to wreck your life and is indifferent to the psychological needs of your children. What difference can it make if they have one more reason to harass you? Being a custodial father is enough to incite them to do their worst. What's left to do to you? Emergency situations that cause visitation to be denied might be supported. If a child is sick, you can refuse to allow visitation. If a homework overload occurs, visitation might be denied. The court can bang on you for putting a child's health or education over the right of the mother to further attack the child; you probably showed good judgment. If the children are old enough to begin to appreciate how bad their mother is, they can simply refuse to go with her. Legally, she would have the right to collar them and force them to go with her. Practically, this may never happen. You might have to explain to your children about psychology in order for them to appreciate that visitation is damaging, and they might not be able to comprehend it or may not believe it if their mother has indoctrinated them that you lie all the time, and your attempt to make them

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

informed visitors might not work; then again, it might. After you have had custody for a while, and have shown the children love and compassion, they will come to believe in you rather than in their mother's tirades. Problems in doing visitation can arise also. You might get home too late to turn over the children to your ex. The children's baby-sitter might keep them too late. Other problems can arise with the children. Creativity might be appropriate here. Just be careful not to violate state law, as men are often hit with charges relating to this. Do not take a cue from the fact that women from coast to coast get away with denying custody for year upon year to their children's fathers. Never forget you are not a mother and you're not apple pie or the American flag either. Expect no relief. Another necessary step is to keep in contact with the evaluator who decided your ex's visitation schedule. If she gets transferred, contact the replacement. Perhaps the replacement is not prejUdiC~ in favor of mothers, and you can work out an improvement in visitation, reducing it to a level more tolerable by your children. Keep in touch with changes in judges as well. ou might find one appointed to the bench who is sensitive to the needs of children, at leas until he gets burned out, and you can see if it is possible to go back to reduce visitation. Other than that, you can ensure that grandparents have visitation as well, perhaps both pairs, or if a divorce occurred in that generation, three or even four pairs. The more visitation that they have, the less your ex can have and the easier your children can survive her harping on your criminal tendencies. How about going off to camp in the summer? School trips? Sports involvement, scouting, tutoring, club membership and other activities will both take your child away from a ruinous visitation and help him or her recover from mother's treatment. Anything that will help your children not be brainwashed by your ex could be a good idea. In short, when you are faced with an ex-wife who deliberately sabotages the children's welfare in ways that the court chooses not to perceive, you have to do whatever you can to protect your children. If your willpower wilts, just remember that more and more children kill themselves every year, and allowing yours to be subjected to psychological battering by a mother who does not see the damage she is doing may lead them down that terrible path. Do what you can to help them; don't despair if you slip up some times; just remember that children are resilient and that the help you give may make the difference that they need to survive years later when these matters form the subconscious part of their minds. Persevere, love your children, and trust in the future.

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

Playing Mom and Dad

Any man can learn to communicate with his children and give them both the love and the discipline they need. Fear of not being able to deal with children is no reason to avoid seeking custody, or to do it poorly. Human brains are designed for this task.

In a two parent family, the parents often split up their roles when dealing with children's problems. The idea is reminiscent of the "bad cop, good cop" roles that are often portrayed in police-oriented movies. One parent, usually the father, provides the discipline. He teaches character, honesty, values, and punishes a child when necessary. Children learn to fear his judgments, even though they may love him tremendously. The other parent, of course the mother, provides the support and caring. She emotionally connects with the child and helps him or her to feel that there is always someone there to defend him, even if he or she is in the wrong. It's a nice arrangement in some ways, although it caricaturizes the parents and prevents both of them from feeling, or at least displaying, the full range of human emotions toward their children. It's simple, traditional, and easy to understand and follow. Is it desirable? It perpetuates the myth that the sexes are tremendously different emotionally and that roles should be sex-linked. It sets up the children with a pattern of what to expect from the opposite sex that may be so outmoded that the child will have a hard time adapting to the types of people he or she will come in contact with as an adult. It shows a sex role that the child may adopt as his or her own, which may limit his or her responses in situations calling for something different. A single father does not have to worry about how to deal with these two extremes of behavior, whether he should oscillate between being disciplinarian or comforter. There is no need in either one or two parent families for anyone to adopt these roles. A father can be quite competent at the fathering job without ever imitating either type of parent that the past half-century featured. A single father, unless he has some mental disability, can easily listen to a child's sorrows and sympathize, just as he can figure out what to do when he finds his child being deliberately destructive. Sometimes there is a transition that occurs. A father who gets custody has to wake up one day and realize that there isn't anyone else who will give his children what they need to develop into happy and competent adults. If he doesn't provide comfort and support to his children, they aren't going to get it. All young children need to be comforted and those that are not, may not develop normal personality characteristics. A newly custodial father needs to forget any nonsense he may have stuffed into his head about sex roles and learn to use his full human potential. Everyone who does not have mental problems can feel the emotions that are needed to relate to children. They are inside, part of the mental equipment that we are all born with. Anyone who was loved as a child can love a child. Anyone who has experienced what sympathy is can bring themselves to give it. Children perceive in limited ways. They are not adept at discovering nuances in adult behavior. They are not sophisticated and have no knowledge about social customs when young. This means that adults reacting to them need to display any emotion they

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

have in an obvious manner, even dramatically, if the child is to appreciate what is happening. Young children react to facial expression and to tone of voice as much as to what is said to them. Even younger ones react more to physical contact. A father can easily provide this form of communication with his children. Fewer and fewer men now are limited in this regard, and those that are mostly need only to attempt to communicate with their children in order to be successful. They simply need to leave the modes of communication that adults use behind. Children are not impressed by eloquence, they are impressed by sincerity. They don't need complicated logic, they need fairness and consideration. No father should think that he is inadequate at being a custodial father because of his inexperience in communicating with children. The skills are a natural part of our evolution. They are available to fathers as well as mothers. It does not take much practice before one becomes an expert in this. The reason for this is that young children give plenty of feedback. For example, when distressed, young children don't stop crying until the communication starts. A father gets to learn very quickly what works and what doesn't. Child-rearing by trial and error is not a mistake, it is a human capacity that we should be proud of One more time, there is no reason for a father to worry about his ability to provide the range of human communication to his children that they require. Just do it!

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

Their Mother's Image

Never use your children as a battleground for your divorce problems. Instead, be as good a father as possible and as reassuring and positive about their future as you can be. Children deserve to be shielded from parental disputes as much as possible.

Your ex may have destroyed you economically, embarrassed you socially, lied about you on the public records of the court, and committed several other new and creative acts designed to injure and insult you. You naturally have some negative emotions about her. Keep them to yourself. They are not for her children to hear. Young children identify with their parents. An attack on their mother will be felt as an attack on themselves. They will have enough problems adjusting to the changes that divorce brings about without having the burden of questioning the integrity of their parents. Let them think of their mother in positive terms, at least until they are able to think clearly about real life, perhaps around age 12. They do not understand the process of divorce. The world of judges, lawyers and evaluators does not fit within their experience, and they have no way to relate to it. It is confusing to them. They need some stable pivots to revolve around, and almost the only choice of them is the parents. They relate strongly to their parents. They also relate strongly to the emotions of their parents, and the less chaotic they are, the easier the adjustment process will be. . There is little to be gained and much to be lost by trying to undermine the feelings that a child has for either parent. Even if your ex is working hard to make the children fear you or hate you, do not do the same to her. Let them have a positive image of their mother. Instead, maintain your image without attacking hers. Work by word and deed to show them that you care for them. Treat them with tenderness, spend time with them, talk to them and reassure them that all will be well. Children will simply not believe their mother if she condemns you when they see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts that it is not true. Her actions will only serve to make her appear untrustworthy. You do not need to tell your children that their mother is lying about you, but only that their mother is very upset and angry with you and is saying what she did because she is so angry. Let them know that their mother will get over the anger soon, and life soon will get better. Even if you were to be successful in convincing the children that their mother is sinister, you would not have accomplished anything of use to anyone. The preferences and beliefs of young children are not much taken into account in making custody decisions. Working hard to make them prefer you by attacking her is likely to backfire. Simply treat them well. Your children's mental health is much, much more important than some phrases that you might teach them to repeat for you. Let them love their mother. There may be a few courts that have not yet learned that children under the age of 12 do not form credible opinions on their preferences for parental custody. However, the vast majority that do interview the children do so to find out facts about custody, that is, what is the quality of attention and care given. Do a good job at being a father and let the rest wash out.

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

Older children are different, but the same rule should still apply. By the time a child is able to reason and think in an adult manner about adults, he or she is also able to observe them and form his or her own impressions. There is little need or point to trying to force-feed negative impressions. What will happen is that instead of remembering that Mom is a liar they will remember that Dad hates Mom and denigrates her. That is not the kind of memory that you want your children to have of you. This does not mean that you should not discuss what is going on between you and your ex-wife with your children of any age. They may know the actors and locations that are involved, and you can tell them that the judge is the person who makes decisions, and court is a place where they are made. Telling a child that his or her future is in the hands of someone who is not fair or unbiased is not likely to help that child face such a future with confidence. Let it go. Your children are not your counselors. They are not substitutes for companions. They are children, and children need reassurance. They are definitely not in your home to be your moral support, although just having them around may make you feel good enough to continue the struggle for their future lives. If an older child asks a question, answer it honestly unless it relates to areas of no concern to a child, such as finances. You can phrase your answer in a neutral tone when they relate to your ex-wife. Perhaps you could say something like "Your mother has forgotten what happened," instead of "She lied again." Work at keeping your negative feelings about your ex or the court personnel from making worries for your children. Children going through divorce have enough to worry about without someone deliberately making their view of the world worse. Let it go. Be strong enough and proud enough not to stoop to using the minds oflittle children as a battleground. When they are older, they will remember you as the parent who was. kind and forgiving, not the one who was mean and vindictive. Perhaps you will not be able to obtain custody when they are young. When they reach the age of being able to choose who they want to live with, around 12 to 14 in most jurisdictions, you want them have the best possible memory of you. Let your home be the one that was free of hostility, a place where they could escape any sarcasm or belittling remarks about the other parent. Another consideration about what to tell your children relates to spying. If you suspect that your child is being used by your ex to find out information about you, you may want to let them know that Mom's world and Dad's world are two different places, and you won't ask them questions about her world. Let them realize by themselves that it is improper for their mother to ask about yours. Children may volunteer information, such as "Oh, there's where Mom's bank is!" Even if you use the information to find out some sequestered accounts, unreported income, hidden assets, etc., do not put the children to task to remember more. What comes out, comes out. What stays in, let stay in. Of course, this does not hold if the children are being endangered, subjected to bad influences such as substance abuse, neglected or abused. Remember that the majority of child abuse occurs in mother-headed households. In such unfortunate situations you will have to violate the two worlds rule to find out what is actually happening. This is a most difficult position to be in. For example, if you notice bruises on a child when the child returns from visitation with your ex, you should not extract information about it by interrogation. You need to ask in a non-threatening way. Don't react by saying you will

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

10

call the police and get Mom put in jail for hurting the child, as you will never get any more information. Best to let a professional handle it, if you can find a competent one, and check on him or her to make sure he or she does what is necessary. Rules for this reporting depend on the state. A safe bet is to call some local psychologists to locate one who specializes in child abuse, and then let him or her advise you. You may need to call a state agency, or the state could certify psychologists to do such interviewing. Get expert help. You might want to take a picture of the injury, "for the doctor," and talk about it sympathetically, but do not dwell on the topic for too long. If you suspect abuse, it wouldn't hurt to read every book you could find on the topic of abuse to help you formulate what to do and how to help your children. A little unobtrusive pocket tape recorder might come in handy if your child gets to talking about what happens. A question that will probably arise when your child is around 13 or so is, "What happened in the divorce?" One way to answer this is to simply save all the paperwork that is involved. If a child reads the paperwork, and it is certainly not beyond the capability of a 13 year old to understand most legal filings, he or she can form his own impression of what you did and what your ex-spouse did. Then, if your ex has been misinforming your child, you won't even have to defend yourself. Let the record of what was done speak for itself. Let their mother define her own image by what she does. Another question you might have to face is, "Can I help you win the divorce, Dad?" If the divorce is going on when your children are teenagers, you might have to figure that, if they love you and understand that your spouse has put you through hell, they might volunteer to help. Kids can volunteer to spy on their mother, to mislead her, or take on other missions even without your ever mentioning the possibility to them. Let them know that vigilantism is not necessary. Usually just being able to state their preference for custody in court or to an evaluator should be enough. Just make sure you let them know you appreciate what they are willing to do. The bad side of preserving their mother's image in their eyes, while she destroys yours, is that unless the children have a chance to appreciate what falseness she presents, they could be swept up with their mother's hostility toward you and develop some of their own by imitation. If their mother is crazy or paranoid, having to live with her may induce some of the same in your children. This is especially likely if the prejudice of the courts prevails and you are even deprived of much contact with your children. It is certainly possible that a mother could brainwash her children by constant repetition of false accusations against you. There is little that can be done about this except to continue to struggle for more contact time. What you can hope for is that at some point in their development, perhaps around, 14 or 15, they will start to question the assumptions of their youth. With any luck, it will dawn on them that you are merely a victim of calumny, of falsehoods, of perjury or fraud. If that happens, your efforts at maintaining yourself in the role of as good a father as the courts will allow you to be will have paid off It would help if you mastered the art of patience, as a child who has had to experience brainwashing is not going to be able to get over it quickly. You will then have a struggle on your hands helping your child to recuperate and to get his or her life back on track. Simply resolve never to give up as long as there is any hope of helping your child.

KiDDS Notes

Custody Collection

11

Maternal Grandparents

A custodial father has to decide how to deal with his children's maternal grandparents. They can be a very positive feature of the children's lives. Some caution is necessary. both in setting ground rules and in monitoring how the contact goes.

You are not the only person with a strong interest in your children. There arefour grandparents who have a direct interest in what happens to them. There may be up to four step-grandparents as well, if you and your ex happen to have been born into families that don't seem able to handle stable marriages too well. Once you have custody, you need to decide what relations you want to have with them. Some states give grandparents a right to visitation with their grandchildren, although few grandparents go to the trouble of going to court to establish such rights. In most situations, the custodial parent runs the show. You probably have already figured out what arrangements you want to make with your parents for visitation and other events related to your children. Figuring out what to do with maternal grandparents in another question altogether. If your ex is a non-custodial parent with a substantial amount of visitation time, she may want to sublet some of that time to her parents so that they can visit with the children as well. If that is not the situation, one delicate question that you need to address is what you to do about them yourself For example, your wife has abandoned the children and gone off to Hollywood to get into films; you are left with them full time and need to wonder what to do about her parents. You need to consider several aspects. First, the grandparents may regard you as the better parent, or their daughter as a problem child, and be more than happy to maintain or develop a good relationship with you in order to continue to have contact with their grandchildren. They may feel that they no longer have a role in their grandchildren's lives, but would respond favorably to your contacting them. Don't forget that you have parental authority now, and can break off contact if you ever decide that enough is enough. There is virtually no risk in your initiating something, and there is certainly something to be gained. The first prize to be gained is some more happiness for your children. If they had a close relationship with their maternal grandparents before the breakup, they can maintain that or resume it when the fireworks are over and you have had a chance to get your life back together. Grandparents give children something quite special that cannot be duplicated by parents. They give a more mature view of life. They have already reared their child or children, and understand, perhaps much better than you do, how children develop. They can respond to your children with that maturity. Of course, they could be complete dunces and provide no benefits at all to your children. But that is something that you can determine. You may find yourself in a situation where your grandparents are deceased, too elderly, too distant, or simply uninterested in the children and your in-law grandparents are the only ones who are willing and able to playa grandparent role. If you are going to help

KiDDS Notes

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12

your children have a full life, in other words, experience what being a grandchild is like, you may have no other choices. But tread carefully. In order to begin the contact, you might have the children, while in your custody, call the grandparents. It might be on some special occasion, such a holiday or one of the grandparents' birthdays. It could be to thank them for a gift. It could be a simple call to say hello. You could start off the telephone call and then turn it over to the children, or, if they are old enough, let them make the call. This could become a pattern, and if this works well, either you or the grandparents could bring up the subject of grandparent visitation. Perhaps taking the children to an event, a sports game, a show, or something similar might be a good first step. Eventually you may want to allow your children to visit the grandparents at their home, for example, for a summer vacation. You can make these decisions based on how the grandparents interact with their grandchildren. Unfortunately, there is another consideration. Before anything substantial is done by way of grandparent visitation, you need to establish some ground rules. Is this going to be an excuse for your ex to drop in? If so, you probably want to limit the grandparent visitation to one-day stops in your presence, unless for some reason you are in favor of your ex seeing the children more. If your in-laws sided with your ex during the divorce, and almost all do, you have to consider how serious is their continuing connection with your ex before you push contact with them. Do they frequently contact her and will the children's visits to them serve as a means for your ex to collect intelligence on all your faults as a parent? If you cannot establish that there is a safe haven for your children with their grandparents, and you are not interested in setting yourself up for a resumption of the custody battling, it is better to have joint visits. You could allow the grandparents to visit with the children in your home, or go with them to their home, but do not leave them alone. The other situation can work as well. If the grandparents take to you, they may be a conduit for information to you to alert you to what your ex is up to, or to help you understand her past so you can predict her moves in the future. Knowledge is useful, no matter what its source. The grandparents might be quite happy to provide you with whatever information you need, if they appreciate that their daughter would make a miserable custody parent, and that your taking good care of the children without her intervention is the best thing that could happen to them. You must simply be alert to all these options. Furthermore, relationships develop with time. It might be a year or two before you have established good relations with your in-laws; on the other hand, they may have known all through the marriage that you were the one who was good with children, the one who was reliable, the one who could take care of the children. Perhaps you were smart enough to think ahead during the marriage and make sure they had the opportunity to see that. One other role can be played by grandparents. If your ex has problems, e.g., is crazy, takes drugs, stays drunk for long periods, or beats up anyone smaller than herself, she might be given supervised visitation by the court. This means that she can not see her children alone and has to arrange for someone to be with her when she visits her children. Grandparents, if they can tolerate her, may be willing to serve as the visitation monitors. This is probably not a pleasant task for the parent of such a person, but perhaps their feelings for her may cause them to volunteer for it. You would want to check that the

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situation does not develop into a battle between your ex and her parents, in the presence of your children. Grandparents unable to handle the presence of a disgraced child should not volunteer for this task. This is a situation that you will need to continually monitor. Grandparents with more concern for their child than for their grandchildren might simply sign up to be visitation monitors and then fail to exert constant supervision. Instead, they simply allow the children's mother full control of them during their supposed supervision time. In this case, you need to collect data on their subterfuge, and then go back to court to have them removed as monitors.

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Sitting With the Mothers

A custodial father might often wonder why so few men show up to take part in their children's activities. sports excepted. It may be because of the hypnotic effect of television. possibly the worst disaster that ever happened to children.

When you become a single father, especially one with full custody rather than joint, you are going to spend a lot of time with women. It is a fact of our society that women still provide the large amount of time for children's care and children's activities. When you take your son to his baseball games and stay to watch and cheer, you will be surrounded by mothers. A few fathers will show up, weekends mostly. When you go to the parent-teacher meetings at your daughter's school, it will be mostly moms there to talk to the teachers. The fathers there mainly come as half of a couple. Very soon you will realize how unusual it is for a father to have custody. As a rare bird, you can expect to stand out. The almost invariable reaction is curiosity, never hostility. You may find yourself regarded, by particularly sexist women, as necessarily incompetent as the simple skills of child care, such as repairing clothes and preparing meals. You may also get wads of offers of help, especially from single mothers. This wears off as you become part of the scenery, "There's the single father." Until more men are given the opportunity to rear their children, the main emotion that you might feel could be isolation. Alternately, it could be uneasiness. Why are women the ones who are taking responsibility for the education of the next generation? Where are the fathers? Why are women the ones who support their children's activities with their own time, effort and ideas? The answer doesn't take an anthropologist. We live in a culture where children have become devalued by many men, This is a far cry from the situation that has prevailed in past times, Allover the world and all throughout history, wars have been fought, with deaths in the thousands, just to keep a throne for a king's sons. The goal of the nobility would be to accumulate lands and titles, which would be passed on to their eldest son, who would be groomed to take his father's place, Queens would be dismissed for lack of an heir. Dynasties and other hereditary orders were the desired result of revolutions, Although history speaks less about the remainder of the social classes, it might be assumed that they followed the same theme as the nobility: work to establish a birthright for their children, Parents assumed a large role in finding a suitable spouse for their children, unlike today where it is often left to chance meetings. Life could be said to have been focused on the next generation. All of a sudden, during the last half century or perhaps the last twenty-five years, children have become less important. Some people just decide not to have any. Some parents just decide to take off and leave their children to their spouse. Some fathers simply abdicate their roles in rearing their Children, even in an intact marriage. Does this make any sense at all? When you are sitting there at the PT A meeting surrounded by mothers, where are all the fathers? It would be nice to think that they are home, taking care of the children

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because they prefer close contact with their children to attending yet another meeting. Perhaps so, but more likely they are sitting home, trying to bring their families' total TV time up to the national standard. Isn't it true that the decline in attention to children came about at the same time as the entertainment explosion that radio and especially TV provided? Before TV was invented, there were still twenty-four hours in the day. The amount of time devoted to sleeping, working, and eating had not changed very much among the majority of people since centuries past. A little more time has been made available by the reduction in average hours worked over the last few decades, but commuting has taken its toll out of that saving. Housework time has also gone down as more and cleverer appliances have taken over the homes of America, but the flow of women into the workplace more than compensates for that. The time that goes into television watching had to come from somewhere. What gave? Child time gave. Instead of interacting, parents and children both put in a quota of television. Now, video games and home computer use add to the time spent separately by members of the family. Some of the fathers who don't show up to sit with the moms are simply not used to dealing with their children. They are used to dealing with a TV remote. If, after you have used up a horsepower of energy being a single father, you have some left, consider using it to be an example, a provocative example to non-single fathers who can't seem to orient themselves to their children. When you are sitting with their wives, suggest to the wives that they bring their husbands next time. Accept no excuses. Your life is a testimony to the fact that fathers can be involved. Send home the message and help your children's friends have more involved fathers. Have the moms tell their husbands they can bring the TV remote with them like a security blanket when they come to the next meeting.

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Good Example

Just being a loving, caring single father provides many good examples to children. It is not necessary to worry about the little habits of life, if the big ones, of caring for others, of sacrifice, and of perseverance are there for children to see.

Sometimes old sayings have an important core of truth that is valid for all eras. One of these is "Do as I do, not as I say." Of course it means that children will follow your example, rather than listening to you and behaving according to your suggestions, recommendations and commands. Science understands a little bit more nowadays about why that happens, in terms of how the human brain functions. The old saw is in agreement with what is known, as it should be. These old sayings evolved over centuries to embody what was known about life. Ifit was wrong, it would have disappeared. The only problem lies in interpreting it. In a one-parent household, it is even more important that the parent recognize that his habits, good or bad, are going to be observed daily and copied. "Like father, like son." is another of these old sayings. It means simply that, in older times when sex roles were distinct, sons copied their father's example -- he was there, giving it day after day. Daughters copied their mothers. In a modern single father household, the father has to give good example to both daughters and sons. Because there is no second parent around, it is even more important for a father who wants to give his children a good future to be a good example. This is of course one more reason to keep the marriage together if both of the partners are good parents and only differ about their own relationship. And it is one more reason for a single father to live with relatives, brother or sister or parents, to gain help in rearing his children. They can provide a wider range of good examples, and also serve to help the single father appreciate what habits he is giving to his children. Unfortunately, we cannot change habits like clothing. For example, someone who has bad manners in eating has to work hard to change them. You cannot simply read an Ann Lander's column and during the next meal eat like an English gentleman. Changing habits takes concentration. To change meal-time manners, you have to concentrate for weeks or months on remembering the change and thinking about doing it. Forgetting it after a few days, as we all tend to do, means that no change happens. It also means that your children see you unable to do anything about your inability to have good manners. One bad example turns into two. Because it takes concentration and is likely to fail if enough attention is not given to it, it may be better to save habit-changing until all the monstrous stresses of the divorce battle are over, and that source of distraction is not around. Then it might also be a good idea to only do one or two at a time. Maybe eating with good manners is enough for a half year, at which time you can think about changing something else. Of course, meanwhile, the countless bad examples you have are being picked up by your children.

There clearly isn't much you can do about this.

One negative impression you certainly don't want to form is of your own ability to be a custodial father. If you have the basic ingredients of good fathering, love and care for your children, it probably won't make too much difference in the long run whether you

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change all your bad habits. Being a good, loving, caring father is by far the most important part of fathering that you can do, and is by far the most important example you give to your children. If they grow up in an atmosphere where they are cared for, given the attention they need, and allowed to know how much they are loved, you can feel happy that they will probably take that on to the next generation with them. Rearing children to be good parents in this crazy world of ours is a major accomplishment, and one that any single father can be tremendously proud of. If they lick their fingers, so what. Instead of thinking of it as a bad example, think of it as a family idiosyncrasy. They can change that habit themselves when they are older. There are some other examples that you give by just being a good father. Most likely, you had to persevere to gain custody. Perseverance in seeking important goals is one ofthe most important character traits that you can give a child. If they appreciate how to continue to struggle, even though society is prejudiced against them, they will have strength of character that can come into use many times in their lives. You are not giving up when difficulties arise in caring for them. Being a single parent is almost a guarantee of difficult times -- and when you get through them, your children will appreciate what it takes to keep going in the face of problems and obstacles. Another important example single fathers give is sacrifice. A single father does not have the time that bachelors have to enjoy themselves. He doesn't have the time that dual parents do. Sacrificing your entertainment for an important goal, like rearing your children, shows your children how they should behave. When they have something they want to work for, they won't be so ready to give it short shrift and spend their time having fun instead of working on it. You have given them that. Another one is setting goals. You most likely chose to be a single father, and knowing what to do with your life is also a crucial skill that your children will benefit from. Too many people wander through life, never figuring out what is important and what is dross, never deciding where to go or what to do and only following whatever seems an easy path. Setting a goal and working to fulfill it, as single fathers do, leaves their children with an advantage that children from other situations may not have. So there is every reason to feel good about how you are being an example to your children. There is no reason to feel self-critical because there are some undesirable habits you have that your children may pick up. If you have some stamina left over, you can work on changing them, one or two at a time. The action of trying to improve yourself is yet another important example you show your children. One last point: by the time your children are old enough to reason, somewhere between eleven and fourteen, you can start to talk to them about what things about yourself you would change if you could. Being a single father gives you much more contact with your children than most fathers has, and if you are lucky, you will have good communication with them. They will listen to you. You can start them out on their own odyssey of changing themselves to improve their habits. This is just one more way in which you benefit them by what you do.

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Budgeting Time

A new custodial father has to figure out how to manage time better than he ever had to before. Some hints for planning time and money together are listed here.

Being a good parent in a two-earner household takes a lot of time; children prosper when they receive a lot of their parents' time. A good parent recognizes this and devotes the attention that they need. Most of the time, it's one of the most enjoyable ways that a humane person can spend his time. As a single custodial father, time demands have to be twice as great. There is an overwhelming need to budget time. Work that was done by two is now done by one. Furthermore, there are other demands that make matters more difficult. Finances may be more tight, either from the expenses of divorce and the wanton wasting of assets that occurs there, or from career sacrifices that are necessary to enable the father to spend adequate time with his children. Child care costs may be larger, as there are no longer two parents to juggle schedules to reduce the amount of time that the children have to be cared for by professionals. These monetary pressures translate into time pressures. First, the shortage of money may necessitate that the father does some of the tasks that he formerly had done for him. For example, a father who dotes on a clean car may have to forego the detailing service he used to use and spend time each weekend doing it himself. Eating out may have to be curtailed, which means more shopping, cooking and cleaning time. Shopping may no longer be as simple as it was before, because finances may only be up to buying what is on sale. Alternately, your maid, butler, chauffeur and chef may have to be given two weeks notice. These changes may have to come quickly as finances are choked up by the court. You may find your credit disappearing. Other changes can hit you at the same time. This means that you should be thinking through some new plans to help you get through a difficult time. Simply muddling through may not be a very good solution. Since time is money, it is imperative that a single father in a tough situation think out his plans for both at once. Otherwise, saving money by doing things himself may seem a great solution when he is doing his financial budget. But when he checks his schedule, there isn't enough time in the week to do it all. Some better planning is needed. The first step in any planning, as any book on the subject will tell you, is setting priorities. Some books tell you that this is simply deciding what are the most important things that have to be done. Single parenting isn't like that. There's too much to do. If you could divide up the things that you would like to do into separate pieces, you might attach an importance to each, say 1(very important -- crucial) to 5 (it might be nice to do this some day), and then decide how to work on the most important ones first and only do the lower ranked ones if you find yourself with leisure. But this simple method of prioritizing doesn't work very well in satisfying children's needs. Of course, there are some things that command top ranking in any scheme of priorities. Keeping a source of income is one. Keeping your children safe is another. Keeping your children secure, i.e., well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed and hygienic, is another. Your children's education is high priority. Keeping your source of transportation

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available is another -- i.e., car maintenance. However, the standards that you set do not have to be the ones that you were able to set before the divorce disaster hit. For example, while you have to provide shelter, i.e., housing, for your children, it is not as high a priority to keep them living in as expensive or spacious a situation as before. Having a roof over their heads is top priority, but living in a house rather than an apartment has to be lower in priority. It is the children that are important, not luxury or comfort or status in the community that matters. When making these priorities, there may be special situations that only apply to your own situation. Perhaps there are no available and suitable apartments within the area you live in. Then keeping them in a house is top priority, and whatever has to be done for that is top priority as well. Perhaps moving to an area where apartments are available puts you outside the area where child care is available -- again, staying in a house is top priority. Usually these situations do not arise, but if they do you need to think out what each of them means and adjust your planning. One way to think about priorities is to set two or three or even more levels for satisfying each of the children's needs. You can list the various children's needs in a chart like the one shown here and fill in the columns according to your economic status and preferences:

Need Shelter Food Education Clothing Entertainment Whatever

Levell Public shelter Soup kitchen Public school Discount store specials Hikes with Dad

Level 2 Apartment Minimal food budget Extra books and supplies Children's store Videos and movies

Level 3 House Eat out occasionally Home computer Department store Amusement parks and vacations

Chart for setting priorities and levels of satisfaction

These relate to financial requirements more than time scheduling. You can list what each of the needs on level 1 (or wherever you are) will cost, on a monthly basis. If you have other requirements, like your own clothes, your car payment, and all these necessities that don't directly relate to children, they need to be added in. Then you can see where you can jump up to the next level; or else figure out how much saving you can do. Time scheduling comes next. You can put together a weekly schedule of what you need to do. Always add 25% or more for contingencies that you haven't thought of -Murphy's law still works for custodial fathers. After your work time or time at the unemployment or welfare office standing in line, house/apartment/shelter maintenance

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time, sleeping and the other survival necessities are added up, you can estimate how much time each of the above activities is going to take. If you get to more than ] 68 hours per week, you are in trouble. This may mean you are at too high a savings level; you will have to spend more to save time. Eat take-out food instead of cooking for yourself if your palate can stand it. Once you make the financial adjustments, then you can go back to your time scheduling and see if it works. Never plan to the limit. Life needs slack in order to be livable. It is much better to live at a lower level than to press yourself too hard. Don't forget what are the real priorities in life: your children. They may want to have designer jeans because their peers in school have them or because they see them on TV (You didn't get rid of that yet?), but what they really need is a father who has time for them. What they will really benefit from is a role model who puts their human needs ahead of his own material ones.

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Child Care

A major headache for custodial fathers is child care, which is very diverse in America. Here a description of the major categories is listed, along with some tips for evaluating them.

One topic that a new custodial father has to face immediately is child care. The problems are finding a suitable source or selecting one of the available possibilities, and paying for it. The best solution, from the standpoint of the child's welfare and stability during the divorce and afterward, is for the father to do it himself. Usually that's impossible if he works, so that a father would have to go on welfare or unemployment, or, if he lives in a place with a disappearing Cheshire cat and rabbits who talk, live on child support and spousal support from a well-paid ex-wife. Most men would not contemplate such options if any other satisfactory solution were available, although if there is simply no child care or if a child needs special care, it may be the only solution. It is an immediate solution if the father is unemployed until his job situation changes, except that he has to have some care available for job searches, and some plan for child care should he find work. The next best solution is to have a relative do it. Often a relative will volunteer to do the care for free, because in some pleasant families, relatives stick together and help each other. Often a father doesn't have any relatives close enough to do this. Next is a close friend, perhaps someone who takes care of his or her own child or children. If he doesn't have that option either, it's time to check out situations where he has to pay for child care. In some areas there are students or other people who will come to a home and take care of children, often for a very reasonable hourly rate. Two or more single parents can get together to share such a person. Some of the people who do this are complete geniuses with children. They have their own supply of toys and games, and possess a repertoire of activities that keep children active. This type of situation is best for very young children, from babies up to preschool toddlers. The very personal contact that such a caregiver provides can go a long way toward filling in the hole in a child's life formed by the mother's exit. Often the child and the caregiver form very close bonds. Obviously it takes a special person to be able to relate to such young children as a career, and anyone who finds someone like this tends to keep his or her availability confidential, to avoid them being hired away. With very young children, naps are a must and the caregiver has a sizable amount oftime available to study or do other work. It is amazing that some of these people even do dishes and cleaning when the children are asleep or otherwise occupied. The obvious ultimate of personal child care is the au pair arrangement. There are a number of agencies that specialize in placing young people in homes for the purpose of providing child care. They usually have to be given their own room, access to telephone, car, and other services, and a salary. Many are foreigners, who come for a year or two to learn English, visit America, and earn something for their own purposes when they return.

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There are also professional nannies, who command a sizable salary, who also live in. There are placement services for such people. Without an au pair or nanny situation being possible, which are financially difficult for almost everyone in the middle class, some other situation is called for. Many people do child care in their homes, taking in children of various ages on a daily basis, with up to 10 or 12 in a home. This type of service is regulated by most states, but there seems to be quite a bit of informal home child care available. If the person specializes in babies, the limit that a person might care for is probably 3 or 4. Babies need to be held frequently, and simply do not grow mentally in the proper way if they are left in their crib for long periods. Toddlers are a different category. They interact with each other, and one person can deal with a few more at one time. Older children are not much easier to care for, and if the caregiver wants to expand her service, she often has an associate in the house to help her. The routine for this type of service is that full child care is available from early morning to evening, and the parent is responsible for delivery and pickup within those hours. The parent may bring the children's favorite toys, changes of clothing, diapers if needed, special foods or medicine and coats for outside activity, and then leaves everything to the care giver. The next more organized service is the professional day care facility. There are many independent facilities as well as several nationwide chains. They operate the same way as the home caregiver, but have large facilities and multiple people involved. Quite expectedly, there is less possibility for a child to make a personal long-lasting connection with a particular person. Personnel tend to rotate in and out of these services rapidly, as the pay is minimal. Meals are provided for the children at many centers, and the children eat (and play) in age groups. Some of these facilities have vans to pick up younger school children after school for supervised play until the parents return from work. Some also take children before school and deliver them. Some have nurseries where infants are cared for. Others demand that the child be toilet-trained before they will enroll him or her. Each service sets its own rules. Locating a selection of services is not difficult. Newspaper advertisements and yellow page ads are used by the larger services. Often home caregivers only advertise in referral services, run either independently with grants from some government agency or by the state or city itself Top-quality home caregivers are often in such demand that they have waiting lists, and never bother to advertise. Parents have even been known to reserve places for their baby as soon as it is conceived. Clearly a new custodial father is at disadvantage here, as he may have no network whatsoever to help him locate such good facilities. One task that an active men's rights organization could do to promote father's rights is to assist their members in this regard. Paying for these services is the next problem. A newly minted single custodial father can be expected to be flat in the wallet, if he has been victimized by the courts as most men are. However, virtually all these services require payment in advance. There is no credit usually available from child care agencies, and a father should expect none. The services are not great money-making opportunities, and the people involved are often there, not for the money, but because they love children and want a situation where they

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can be with them and assist them. They deserve all the help they can get and as little problems about payment as possible. Child care is not a special cost for the courts to assist with. It is part of the total bundle of expenses that are covered by child support. Since you probably didn't get any child support from your ex-wife, you can't go back to ask for more because of child care expenses. What you have to do is minimize your other expenses to take care of this as much as possible, and plan on slowly sinking into debt for the years that your children need such care, recovering when they reach school age. Your costs should go down when your children enter school. In America, schools do not provide a full day of care, although almost all of the other industrial countries do. In fact, most countries provide care from infancy to school graduation, but we don't here. So we have to make do. A father needs to figure out how much money he needs to pay for child care, and where to get it. Loans are available, but unsecured ones are most difficult. If you were lucky enough to keep your home, an equity loan might be possible. There are finance companies that will loan money on the basis of a car, so if you got a car in the settlement, and it is in your name, you can possibly get a loan secured by that alone. Or you could sell it for cash and buy something less expensive. Loans from relatives are also an option. It is somewhat easier to approach a relative or friend on a temporary basis, i.e., until the children reach school age, than for an unspecified time. Some employers have loan funds to help out employees in dire need. Obviously you may need to cut down on child care expenses as soon as possible if you are having trouble matching expenses and income. If nothing else works, you can go on welfare and take care of the children yourself. Otherwise, you need to include in your plans a cutoff time. Often kindergarten classes are only half day, so that day care cannot be cut offwhen a child reaches that age. The American institution oflatch-key children certainly does not extend to children much below the age of eight, if that young. Eightyear-olds are in third grade, so that day care is required up to that time or later. Often a neighbor might be able to do after school watching, which will help with younger children. Sometimes older siblings can care for younger ones. Some schools have graded lengths of school days, with children in some grades, e.g., first through third, attending school an hour less than children in the next grades, with another extension occurring around grade five, six or seven. This gradation in school day length means that there may be a period of a half hour to an hour where a younger child is home alone, and then he will be joined by an older one who can take charge. It is absolutely necessary to teach children how to be latchkey children. Books exist listing what is expected from such a situation, and they could be consulted for the purpose of training your child or children to be as self-reliant as possible. One other option is a fill-in baby-sitter. If school gets out early one day a week, you might want to have an older student, a college student, or a retired person baby-sit a few hours to relieve the child of so much time alone. In short, because of the variety of options available in this country for day care, and the lack of any organized system of care, or of regulation for that matter, a custodial father can expect to spend much of his time making arrangements for child care, finding some, checking it out and then figuring out the next stage when the children are older. It

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is no picnic, but it is certainly a doable task. On-cemore, the more money you save in the divorce, the easier it will be.

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The Role Model Job

Next to providing necessities of life and love and caring, the most important task a custodial father can do for his children is ro provide them with good role models. Here are some guidelines.

No one would dispute that providing the necessities of life, such as food, safety, and shelter, is the most important job that a custodial parent must do. There should not be much dispute about what is the second most important job: Providing the emotional support necessary for children to develop healthy personalities and self-esteem overwhelms the importance of other tasks. Without that support, children can not face adult life with much chance of being successful or even happy. But once a father has fed them and has given them the love and attention that children need, his job is not over. Children need to be taught how to live, and what to live for. They need values. Children learn primarily by imitation. This is especially true of younger children, under the age of 12 or so, who have not yet developed strong reasoning powers. They copy the examples of adults they see or hear about. Often one or two adults play an especially important role in setting examples for the child to follow. These adults, the child's role models, provide a different type of example than other adults in the child's life. They show values. An adult does not become a role model because he teaches the simple routines of life to a child, such as eating with good manners or how to repair household appliances. The role model is someone who is the child's example on how to live his or her life. The role model gives the example of how to treat other people, of how to set goals for life and how to achieve them, of the importance of education and training, of the utility of traditional virtues such as honesty and the pitfalls of traditional vices such as greed, and of other areas where the child has to make decisions that greatly affect his or her life. A single custodial father is the most likely candidate for his children's role model. He spends the most time with the children, teaches them the most, disciplines them the most, provides for them the most, and essentially is wholly in charge of their lives. The younger the child, the larger his father will loom in his life. This is considerably more responsibility than a father in a dual parent family has. In a dual parent family, the child has two examples to choose from and to pick the best from. With luck, the child can grow up imitating the best of both parents. But a child in a single father family has no such opportunity, especially in situations where the mother has disappeared or plays little role in the child's life. The father therefore has the responsibility for determining, as his children's role model, how his own behavior, preferences and values are transmitted to his children. He has a secondary responsibility, as custodial parent or even simply as a father, to influence who else appears as a role model to his children.

Being a good example is not enough. There are two ways in which a child can
react to a role model, even one that is a paragon of virtue. The child can take the role model as an example to imitate, or as one to reject. In the first case, the child patterns his behavior after the role model, and in the second, the child attempts to do the opposite in

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some way. A neat parent may rear a child who is similarly neat, or one who is a complete slob. A messy father can rear a child who is neat in reaction to his father's example, or one who is similarly messy. The child may choose certain aspects of his role model to imitate, and others to reject, although a uniform imitation or rejection may be more common. The child's choices may be a little different from how the father may see himself. Some habits and persuasions that he has, he may not want his children to imitate. Others he may see as crucial for their development. The difficulty is that his children may not make the same selection as he does. Very little psychological studies have been done on the question of role modeling, either how it works, or how to affect it. One might guess that those traits that are emphasized or praised by others in the father would be more likely to be picked up by his children. Another influence on the child's selection is the selection that the father regards as important to emphasize in his own teaching of the children. If the neat father joins with his children in cleaning and organizing their house, the children are more likely to follow his example. If he does the cleaning and organizing himself, they may be less likely to copy this behavior, and choose to imitate or reject that aspect of his example. The father's own opinions are also an influence. If a father smokes, but tells his children he despises it and wishes he could stop, he may be influencing them to smoke or not. He may also be giving the example of someone who is not in control of his own life, which is a more pervasive example and is a possibly much worse trait than simply smoking. It may be much less damaging to not emphasize a failed struggle to quit smoking than to simply smoke in as unobtrusive a fashion as possible. The second job a custodial father has relative to role models may be as important as the first, especially with older children who are more directly engaged in setting up their life patterns. A father should do what he can to see that the other role models that a child sees the most of should be imparting good characteristics to his child, not detrimental ones. This brings up television. The average American child spends four to five hours daily watching it. It is hard to see how that could not serve as even more role-modeling influence than the father himself. The undesirable imitable persons on the television range from buffoons to homicidal maniacs. What can a father do about this? Because television has almost no redeeming good features, getting rid of it would seem to be the best bet to control its effect. A few people have said that television is an educational influence on children. It certainly is, but the education that it provides can be toward mostly bad habits. There have been many studies that have shown that single parent families produce a much higher percentage of children who become criminals than do intact dual parent families. [Stepparent families seem to be worse in some studies.] Criminal behavior is certainly a result of the role model that the child accepts. Almost all of these single parent families are fatherless ones, and very many of the young criminals were boys without a father's influence. They were ones who searched for another role model, and found it somewhere else, perhaps from the ever-present violent examples on television and in movies and videos. A custodial father is certainly well ahead of this problem, just by being custodial rather than absent, but there seems to be little reason not to take the extra step of removing the undesirable influence of television from his child's life.

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Other adults or even older children can also serve as role models for a child. This happens with older children rather than with younger ones, where the adults in a child's life .are most influential. A father can make a selection of which teachers and other adults appear in a young child's life. This control slips away with older children, who play with others of their own choosing. If a child spends much time with children who are substantially older than he is, a father should take time to appreciate what kind of examples they are. Sometimes there is little choice, because of the location of his house and the availability of other children nearby. In such situations, communication with the child is essential, in commenting on the behavior that a child might imitate from others. Of course, a non-custodial mother also might be used by the child as a role model if there is some contact. For the child's sake, in discussing his or her mother, emphasize the positive, good qualities she has as these may be ones that the child tries to imitate. Attacking a child's mother has many bad effects, and not the least of them is that the child may decide to imitate those traits that a father emphasizes and repeats. No father should inadvertently create an imitation of the woman he divorced. Lastly, adult examples do not have to be only from those adults the child has contact with. A child who is read to or who is told stories by his father has another rich lode of examples to pattern himself or herself after. Successful relatives can serve as one source of examples for a father to portray. Historical figures such as Edison or Washington can serve as others. Even the heroes and heroines of fairy tales can playa part in teaching a child how to pattern his or her life. The best role models might be those who exemplify the traits that help a child be successful in life. Examples of people who work hard, who persevere in accomplishing their chosen goals, who value others as well as themselves, who seek ways of solving problems instead of surrendering to fate, who live lives untainted by excessive selfindulgence, and whose lives are of major benefit to society would be the obvious choices. It is probably not necessary to be realistic, i.e., to concentrate on the character flaws of chosen role models. A child hears enough about how to fail in our society already. If a father paints a picture of a person as an ideal, especially with younger, less sophisticated children, he is probably doing better for his child than to balance the person's good features with his bad ones. Unfortunately, there is no certain prescription for the task of helping a child choose role models, even though it is of critical importance in a child's life. We are forced to just do the best we can.

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Defensive Moves

It is little use to gain custody if you are just going to lose it after a while. You need to think all the time about what you need to do to keep it. Fortunately, the answer usually is: Be a good father.

When you got custody, did your ex-wife take it well? If not, you had better plan on how to keep it. Custody awards, especially to fathers, can be overturned in an instant. You need to get into the bunker and prepare for incoming enemy fire. The battle for custody is never over for a father as long as bigots inhabit our courts. You cannot count on continuing custody because you know that the judge who gave it to you is an honorable and fair gentleman. Judges come and go. The next one you get may be from hell. The worst of all situations is when your ex voluntarily relinquished custody for some temporary reason, and the judge you are blessed with would rather see a father as road kill than as a custodial parent. When your ex gets her act together, she can come back with some excuse, and there goes the kids. One day they are with you, and the next day they are gone. There are judges with attitudes like this, and there are documented cases with decisions like this. Children are ping pong balls in the view of some judges, as long as the bounce is from father to mother. This is one reason why selection of a judge to hear your case is most important, but, judges change and new judges come to court with no record of their custody preferences. You have to wait and find out. Fortunately most judges require some level of reasonable excuse to take children out of a father's home, if they have been there a substantial time, and give them to an ex-wife's custody. Unless you think it is in the children's best interests to change the custody situation, you need to eliminate those excuses. If you made a smart or lucky choice of wife, and sharing custody with your ex would not be hard on your children, perhaps even beneficial, you do not need any advice. You only need to work with her to achieve an efficient way of doing joint custody, set up a custody plan, get the court to approve it, and you are on your way. If your ex is not reasonable about sharing custody, can not be trusted to live up to agreements, is not a particularly good mother or role model for your children, or is simply out to get back to living on child support because her other plans didn't work out, you need to prepare for conflict. To take over custody, either sole or joint, your ex needs to succeed on two steps. The first is to get the court to agree to reconsider its custody award. Some judges regard anything that happens in the children's or parents' lives as justification for another round of blasting away at fathers' rights. Did your ex move closer to the children's school? Custody change time! Did she change jobs so she has more time free? Custody change time! Since many judges regard male custody as unnatural, they are simply looking for these excuses. An aware lawyer on your ex's side will know this and will be back in court as soon as one of these excuses happens. You can argue against rehearing the custody question, and in many cases, all you will get is a strange look from the judge. You are a weird person, and why should you be listened to? "Let's check out the facts, first, Mr.

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Custodial Father, and just see how you are doing." Other judges are well aware of the need for stability in children's lives, or know that their custody evaluation staff knows that, and won't open up the custody decision unless something substantial occurs that is going to undermine that stability. The second step, if you get to it, is the custody review itself. You need to defend against your ex's moves in any review of a custody decision, as doing nothing but relying on good luck is like surrender. Anticipation is the key. What strategies will your vengeful ex-wife use to regain custody of your children? List them and prepare for them. If your children are over the age of 12, or 10 or 14 depending on the court, one way is to work through the children directly. They can be asked to express their preferences during the process of custody evaluation. How children make such choices depends on many factors, including how the questions are asked for children who are too young to have clear ideas of their preferences or who are too afraid to speak out or who are too depressed or lacking in self-esteem to ask for what they want. Such children may see what the custody evaluation official wants them to say, and such preferences can be easily conveyed. "Wouldn't you like to live with your mother now?" coming from the mouth of a bigoted custody evaluator can be enough to ruin the custody situation of an unprepared father. The first step in preparation is to be assigned an evaluator who does not hold men responsible for all the troubles of the world or otherwise hold a grudge against them. Good advice, from lawyers or other divorced fathers, is essential here. Learning as much about the evaluator in the first round of custody decision, even though your ex defaulted, is good strategy, as evaluators often remain on a case through hearing and rehearing. With a good evaluator, you can use reasonable arguments and information that you have collected. With a bad one, you need to get outside experts involved. That does not mean friends or relatives, but trained psychological evaluators. And you need to know if the outside evaluators are as tipped toward females as the court staff In either case, your arguments would center around the children being too young or immature to be given much voice in the custody decision. If the children are older, 14 or more, it is hard to force them to stay in a custody situation they do not want. Sometimes, if one child is mature and a sibling is not, they will be kept together for a year or two more so that the younger child can do some more growing up before being asked about his or her preferences. However, other situations can happen. The older child can pressure or threaten the younger one to go along with him or her or to remain neutral. The court can split the children if they make opposing choices. In any case, you need to make your custodial home preferable for them. If you are being a good father and have had enough time with your children so that they can realize it, chances are your children will not disappoint you. Mature children can recognize when one parent loves them and cares for them, and the other does not, but, for example, wants a life support system. If one parent provides a calm and peaceful environment, and the other can not control her outbursts and remain rational, most
children will opt for the calm home. But problems can arise, both with presents and with

freedom. If your ex dangles promises of material goods before the children, talks about how much she misses them and all the fun they could have if they were together, you need to

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prepare them. Your children may not to be sophisticated enough to recognize such pitches for what they are, especially if the court asks them for their preference when they are too immature to make one based on their own best interests. Children today compete with their peers, starting as young as elementary school age, on the basis of what they own and what they wear. If your ex-wife has the wherewithal to provide more material advantages than you do, then you have to make a choice of seeking child support from her, which could set off the court from allowing you to keep custody as courts often . dislike making women pay anything to their ex-husbands, or trying to overcome the material disadvantages with emotional or developmental advantages. The resolution depends on your children and on the court personnel. I Competing for your children's allegiance is a minefield, both for you and for them. Both emotional and logical arguments may be used. If you have been able to help them get through school and do well there, and they are old enough and mature enough to appreciate the value of this, then they may make the decision to stay with you based on their own future plans. If they have a strong emotional connection with you, with love flowing strongly in both directions, they may not want to leave you on that basis alone. You should warn them in advance of some of the arguments that their mother might make, not in a tone of ordering them to answer them in a certain way, but in the tone of preparing them to be able to resist your ex-wife's cunning. She may appeal to their pity, if she complains about how lonely she is without them. She can appeal to their sense of fairness, and ask them to tell the court that they want an even split, or to live with her for as many years as they have lived with you, or some other plan to balance your time with them. She can appeal to their ego, and tell them how important they are to her life and how big a role they will play in it. All of these sales pitches need to be discussed, if your children are likely to have to hear them and not be overwhelmed by them. This is good preparation, but real preparation should be done as early as possible, starting with the day after you get custody. You need to not give your children any reason to want to leave. Your children must be aware that they are not a burden to you, but a joy. You simply tell them this, and express yourself clearly so they understand you mean it. Your interaction with your children should be positive almost all of the time. If it is not, you are slipping up on child-rearing. If, before the divorce action started, you reared them to be totally materialistic, i.e., their values were allowed to become centered on what they own or wear or experience, you have already made a fundamental mistake. You have set yourself up to be bought out unless the judge somehow missed sending you to the cleaners and you have some resources left. Start immediately correcting such impressions. Center your own values on something more substantial, like family time together, joint activities, assistance and tutoring, development of responsibility in the children, community activity or something else. You may need help in overcoming this. If your ex had custody of the children for a period before you got them, they may have picked up her values. Values do not change rapidly, but they change gradually with steady pressure. The pressure you exert is not in, the form of exhortation, but occurs with good example and gentle reason. Talk about self-respect. Talk about enjoying each other's time. Talk about your own goals and interests. Ordering around children at this age is too much, too late.

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Freedom is a second carrot that your ex can dangle in front of your children. Freedom from chores, freedom from discipline, freedom from concentrating on schoolwork, freedom to watch whatever they want to on television or in the movies, freedom to associate with whomever they prefer, in essence, freedom to escape from the guidance that you have been providing and sheltering them with. If your children feel that you are making restrictions on their lives with no good reason, they may choose the custody change route to rebel and escape them. The obvious solution is to communicate with them, over and over, until you both understand the other's viewpoints. Don't assume that, just because you are an adult, that your decisions will always be best for your children. The best decisions for children, except very young ones, are made after you communicate with them, listening to their thoughts and adapting your restrictions to their needs. Tell them your reasons and listen to their objections. Children do not necessarily want to live without restrictions, unless something has gone seriously wrong in their upbringing. They want to live by rules, but they want to have rules that are practical and sensible, and ones that are imposed with love and consideration for their feelings and their needs. Ignoring this, and trying to insist on copying rules from your own childhood, or ones that worked for some other family, may be a recipe for the loss of your children. Treat your children as intelligent little people, worth listening to, and worth thinking about. Come up with solutions after you have thought about it, rather than trying to vainly impose them without argument. Furthermore, start early to establish rules to follow. You cannot suddenly impose rules on children who have grown up for several years without them. Make gradual changes if you need to make any changes. With younger children, your ex will probably want to have evidence that you are doing something wrong. Do not allow one or more of your children to fail in school. This is an excuse for removal. Take care that they are not injured through lack of care and thoughtfulness on your part. Is there serious conflict between two of your children? Some judges will split up the children in a family, while others will not. Don't take the chance by allowing the children to grow to dislike each other, although normal sibling rivalry is clearly going to be present. Start early to reinforce anti-drug education, and to help them associate with other well-rounded and well-balanced children, either in sports or some other youth organizations. Help them appreciate the values and the dangers of sex, and make sure you understand what they are hearing from their peers. Monitor their television viewing, or, possibly even better, eliminate it and replace that time with something that will help them learn and grow better. Choose gifts that teach rather than ones that distract. And explain why you did what you did, in terms your children can understand. Let them know that you think about their future in every decision concerning them that you make. Another ex-wife ploy is for her to show that she can provide them with advantages that you can not. Perhaps she has a new husband or friend who wishes to help in their care. If you have not found a mate yourself, it is two against one. Surprisingly enough, this is rarely enough to cause the court to Brant a change of custody by itself. However, it is additional weight if anything else should go wrong. This does not mean that, if any aspect of your children's lives takes a turn for the worse, then you will lose custody. It may mean that you must attend to any problem

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immediately, as if something continues for a period of time, the court can think that you are not giving the children the attention they deserve. Since you are a father, it is to be expected that your attention will not be devoted to children, but to other aspects of life. Don't confirm their prejudices. Do not let problems go unattended, and document all the ways you work to fix them. If children have school problems, be in to see the teachers, tutor at home or send them to a tutoring service. Keep good notes of what you have done, and why. If there is a problem with bad friends, leading a child of yours to mischief, vandalism, or other deviant behavior, break off the friendship if at all possible, and explain to your child why you are doing so. Do it with love, rather than as a dictator. Love works with children when orders do not. If you take all these steps and still worry about custody decisions, talk to other parents about how they solved similar problems with their children. Single parent groups often provide workshops or other get-togethers to discuss parent-child problems. And do not wait until your ex has filed court papers requesting a change in custody to get started on your children's problems. Children should have first priority in your life. That's why you have custody, isn't it?

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Legal Custody

Legal custody gives a non-custodial mother the opportunity to go on fishing expeditions to find out justification for changing custody back to her. A father needs to know how to deal with it, the earlier the better.

If you receive custody, it is likely to be listed as primary physical custody. Legal custody will remain joint between the two parents in almost every divorce. Only if one of the parents has criminal tendencies or is in another extreme situation such as default, i.e., where a parent does not show up for a hearing, is legal custody not parceled out. In normal circumstances, there seems to be no way that a custodial parent can deny the other one joint legal custody. There is little benefit that can be gained from having half oflegal custody, but there is a potential for nuisance. It gives your ex the right to inspect your children's school records, medical records, and police records, if any. It gives her the right to poke around and attempt to find something that is not perfect in your rearing of a child, and then to use it to harass you or, at the worst, be used in a hearing to reverse the custody situation. Of course, it gives you, the father, the same rights in the reverse situation. But to have rights is not to have cooperation. Non-custodial mothers are such pathetic figures in our society that most people, especially males in positions of authority, act to assist them as much as possible. They are imagined to lie awake, night after night, dreaming of their lost children and the day that they will be reunited. Non-custodial fathers wear the opprobrium of "deadbeat dad". Ifa father seeks information, it may be assumed that he is using it to seek to cause trouble to his ex-wife. He is thought to be seeking to deny her support by getting some dirt on her. Get help under these circumstances. Damage limitation is in order here. If you have established your credentials as a concerned father at your children's schools, by attending all the conferences, working with your children on projects, monitoring their homework, and getting them to school in presentable condition, you can expect some help. Simply ask the teachers to not volunteer any information, and let them know, in advance, that your ex likes going on fishing expeditions. Let them know why you are worried that she might gain custody and the ill effects that would happen to the children, especially their self-esteem. With luck, your ex will be restricted to the legally mandated grade reports. She will have a harder time making up a catalog of the times you couldn't get your child's school supplies on time, or when your child hit another in class. These are irrelevant in the larger picture, but the teachers might not know what a lawyer can do with simple statements like this. A little classroom pushing incident can be turned into an indication of the violent tendencies that the child learns at home. A logbook of such events gains weight all out of proportion to the actual meaning of the incidents. Don't forget that the court is looking for justification to return custody to the parent who naturally deserves it (the mother!). Anything that looks good on paper can be used. Your claims that the incidents in your ex's logbook are trivialities that occur in every child's life are not supported by evidence. The logbook is evidence. Your claims

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are simply excuses. Therefore you need to forestall such hostile data collection at the source. Shortly after the divorce, or a change in custody, your children are going to be disoriented and may behave in ways that they would not have normally. If the police are involved, you need to demonstrate that your response is immediate and appropriate. Otherwise your ex may use the police report or reports to discredit you. Evaluators and judges know that kids act up in new situations and that divorce is traumatic and produces' misbehavior. However, that doesn't mean that they won't respond to claims that your custody is producing irresponsibility in the children. It may be that their mother is much more responsible for your children's misbehavior, by diminishing the children's interests in pleasant diversions like sports by demeaning them. But you will never be able to prove that. Better to spend time talking to your children in advance of any problems. Use the good relationship between you and your children to work on these problems, and above all, give your child the love and trust he or she needs to get over these problems.

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Temptation

A non-custodial mother's last chance for custody can occur when her child reaches adolescence. If the father has not prepared him or her to resist the offer of an easier life, the child may choose to leave and lose some of the benefits of Dad's teaching.

With a sweet, sweet smile on her face, mother says, "If you come to live with me, I won't make you work so hard in school. You've been through a lot, and you deserve to take it easy. You can drop out if you want to. And I won't make you come home in the evening until you want to. You can stay out with your friends all you want." For a custodial father who has struggled mightily in helping his children recover from a divorce, nurtured them through their early years, or worked with them to help them do well in school, a mother's temptation to a child to throw his or her future away and take it easy represents one of the greatest challenges. It may be a vindictive mother's last attempt to destroy all her husband has worked for with their children. It may be the final attempt of a mother with no career achievements to bring her children down to her own level. It may be an unemployed mother's last chance to gain a big block of child support to support her own indolence. When a child reaches an age where he or she has a big say in which parent he or she lives with, a non-custodial mother can work on him or her to bring him or her back to his mother's care by promising ease instead of discipline. If the child were capable of adult reasoning, he or she would be able to see this temptation as a siren song, leading to nothing more than his or her own loss. It is nothing more than the temptation to depart from the path leading to a life of achievement and take up the path leading to failure. Yet this temptation can appeal to children in some situations. One of the more vulnerable groups are those with low self-esteem. A child who has been assaulted during childhood by a psychologically abusive mother may have his or her self-esteem catastrophically reduced. A father who works hard to restore the child's feeling of worth can achieve some measure of progress, depending on how long and how severe the psychological abuse was. Yet the mind is not erasable like a blackboard; what the mother Wrote in the child's early memories will always remain there. Therapy by a sensitive psychologist or counselor can also aid the child in rebuilding self-esteem. But the mother's early damage will wait there, lurking until something comes along to call it into action. The resumption of the mother's attempt to gain custody when a child reaches adolescence may be such a call. Children who have been physically abused also often develop a low sense of selfesteem. It is as if the child blames himself for the mother abusing him by assuming he or she is a bad or unworthy child. A young child does not have the reasoning ability to deduce if there is any real justification for the mother's beating or abuse, and simply assumes it is his or her own fault. Children who have been witnesses to battling between the parents also can develop a low sense of self-esteem, as can children who have been in difficult economic problems or who have been nomadic. Many other causes can lead to low self-esteem. If the child has never had any opportunity to develop a sense of worth in any part of his or her life,

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e.g., with peers, with school or other social arrangements, to make up for being given a message of a lack of worth that he or she receives from his or her mother, the resulting level of self-esteem can be rock-bottom. Such children feel that they are failures, and an invitation by a mother to change custody and come to live with her may be almost irresistible. Their feelings of failure will be matched by the lack of pressure their mother may offer. Instead of having to struggle in their father's custody against the self-esteem problem, the problem can be put aside and life can be simpler. What should a custodial father do in such a situation? First, he must work to maintain his option to have custody. If the child's preferences are given great weight in court, some countervailing testimony, perhaps by a professional evaluator or psychologist who knows the whole family, could be used. However, in today's overbusy courts, or before a prejudiced judge, a child saying he wants to go live with mom will be listened to. On the other hand, fathers are often denied custody of children who want to live with them for reasons of stability or whatever other excuse suits the judge or court evaluator. The real solution is to establish the correct bond with the child for the period before the custody change decision comes up. A father should make sure that his children are not in doubt about his love and affection for them, not by him telling them so, but by the amount of time he devotes to them. Time spent earning money for them simply does not count; it has little emotional effect. Physically providing for them, putting their interests first, giving them time for communication, being appreciative of their achievements and helping them with their difficulties are needed. If a bond like this is established, so that the child can appreciate the real love that his or her father provides, then the blandishments of a mother offering ease will not seem so attractive. If a mother offers advantages that the father denies, there may be a great conflict in the child's mind. Perhaps the father realizes that the child is not ready for a car, for example because he or she is already too lackadaisical about schooling or because of a lack of maturity or even for economic reasons. Perhaps also the mother is willing to provide the car. Perhaps the child's peers have cars. Should the father go against his own better judgment in order to keep the child home with him rather than with a mother who would undermine the child's possible achievements and lower his or her possible successes through life. If the child is able to comprehend that, and desires to make a success out of himself or herself, he or she can withstand the offer of a car. There really is not a universal solution to problems like this, other than to make use of the advantage of a father's love and to reason with the child. If the courts are going to provide the passageway to a mother's custody, or if the child himself or herself is going to insist on leaving, there is nothing that a father can do other than to hope that his lessons have already sunk deep enough that they will remain valid despite the mother's abrasions of them.

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Collecting Child Support

Women who do not have custody often benefit by pro-female biases in child support awards. These awards are often delayed for extended job searches and other excuses, and live-in girlfriends avoid it completely.

Everyone has talked or written about deadbeat dads, fathers who are behind in paying child support. Despite the lack of alliteration, non-custodial mothers have an even worse child support compliance record. Their deadbeat ratio would be even higher than it already is except for a saving fact. Women have ways of avoiding being ordered to pay child support that men cannot use. It's very simple. You can't get blood out of a stone. If you have a leisure wife, one who doesn't work, stays home and keeps the house for you, and she decides to run off with someone else, leaving you the children, you don't get any child support. If it were a man, even a historically unemployed man, who runs off and lives with a new girl friend, he would find himself instantly and immediately ordered by the court to find work and to report back on his progress. He would be put on a short fuse. The woman is let off. Even if she is capable of working, she may not be ordered to do so. Who knows .what goes through judges' minds when they make these decisions? Perhaps they feel the woman wouldn't have left her mate ifhe had been a good husband. This ignores the fact that child support is supposed to be for rearing the children, not for the husband's benefit. Certainly his costs of child-rearing are going up, without a wife to assist. No matter, no problem. No support .: Perhaps she worked before, and is physically and mentally capable of doing it again. Perhaps her ex-husband makes a row in court about unfairness and all that boring stuff. She might be given a stern admonishment to find something she would like to do to support her children. A time limit? Hardly. Prescribed consequences of continuing as a leisure wife (rather, a leisure girlfriend)? None. Perhaps further, even more severe admonishment might be given. What if she is working, making a good income, and a month before her husband's court date comes up to decide child support, she quits. She simply out and out resigns, not for cause, not in anticipation of a layoff, not for health reasons. What happens? She says she needs to find a better job, but none has materialized. Oh, well, no support. Come back in three months. Ex-wife is instructed to look for gainful employment. Three months later: no work. More admonishment. "How much time do you think you need to find suitable work?" asks the judge. "I can't tell, your Honor," she replies in a sad tone. "I'm doing my best." A man deliberately quitting to avoid support would probably be incarcerated, unless he had assets that the court could take. Suppose she is working, making a good income, and reports to the court she is not. According to her sworn statement, she is making barely enough to survive. Zero support ordered. Back you go to court in a few months, after subpoenaing her employment records. Her income was off by a factor of 3! What happens? A juicy perjury charge? Not quite. Instead you hear from the bench, "We can't keep coming back to these same issues over and over. This has all been decided. Dismissed" You may not

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have been able to get her employment data by the court date, or even suspected the dodge, but your children do without part of their support by their mother because you didn't have it earlier. Or so the excuse goes. The circumstances are different, the details vary, but the general result is that in some courts, with some judges, women using the incompetence ploy do not have to pay child support. The fact that they spend their time on the beach or in the mountains matters nothing at all. After all, even the judge needs a break from time to time. What recourse does a man with custody have to obtain child support? From a woman with a good, verifiable job that she is not willing to quit and for which you have evidence about her income in advance of a hearing, support can probably be obtained if the ratio of your incomes is within a range that is set by the state. From a more creative type, who would be just as happy to take off a few years to get over the stress of the bad marriage and the divorce, who is depressed over the loss of her children, who can't seem to get it together, there is little chance. From a woman with substantially less income than you have, it is very chancy. Some judges might give it, other will sidestep the issue and allow excuses to delay and prolong any award, even for years. There are even more advanced excuses that can be given resulting in delays. One fairly unique one is when, on the date that the father's child support request is scheduled to be heard in court, the mother's lawyer asks to withdraw, that is, to quit as her lawyer. If the judge allows it, then she is given plenty of time to find another one and prepare for another round of evasion. If he doesn't, he is led to believe that there is a conflict between lawyer and client, and client is not being well served. Perhaps a continuance is in order so that the two can work out their differences. When dad comes back, many months later, the withdrawal finally goes through and he is back on square one. Time to wait while she looks for a lawyer. If she has trouble finding one, another continuance. What happens to dad and the kids? By law at least in California, a child support award can be made retroactive to the date of the request. But it doesn't have to be. Guess what often happens. One year of no support. The sum of this is simply that, in some courts, child support payments by women are treated lightly, compared to those from men, which are almost compelled with armed force. And it is the children who suffer from this attitude. The same sort of prejudice can be seen in some treatments by the media on "deadbeat dads". The very label is sexist, and ignores the real problem custodial fathers have in getting support. The media bias probably arises because of the same prejudices that court bias does. To many men and women, women are not supposed to be the equals of men when it comes to paying bills, either for their children or for themselves. The perpetuation of that bias does everyone a disservice, especially women who have worked hard to establish their own equality in various formerly-male professions. They should continue the struggle for female equality by denouncing the divorce court judges who patronize or subsidize women.

KiDDS Notes

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Before the ma.rria.ge:

Number Title Date Version

Picking your goals. 01/03/94 Before starting a relationship, a man should spend enough time thinking through what he wants to wind up with, whether it be a marriage lasting forever, or just a short relationship. His goals for children need to be defined and verified as well. 67. Psychological needs in marriage. 01/02/94 One factor which determines if a potential marriage or relationship is likely to break up is the psychological needs of the partners. Figuring out one's own and one's partner's needs can help a man make a wise marriage decision. 43. Fear of starting children. 12/30/93 Two sources of fear of starting a family come from rational worries about the possibility of divorce and the ensuing unhappiness and irrational ones stemming from bad childhood experiences. Preparation cures one; therapy the other. 35. Short marriage. 12/30/93 So many marriages end after a few years that it might make sense to plan on having a short one if it meets your goals for a relationship. Figuring out if it does has to take into account both money and options for children. 73. ' Women to avoid.
01/03/94

72.

Women who are likely to cause a divorce to become a long-drawn out disaster of epic proportions are sometimes identifiable. These, and women whose goal is to be a burden on a man, should be avoided.

Doing the ma.rria.ge:

Number Title Date Version

Test driving your relationship. 01/12/94 Living together is a good way to verify that a relationship is stable. Before starting it, considerations of safety and security, mutual goals, and financial agreements need to be thought out. 4. Alternative marriage. 12/27/93 Alternative marriage, i.e. marriage by contract rather than by state license, avoids many of the problems of divorce courts. This note describes how alternative marriage can be the right choice for couples who are open and honest with each other.
29.

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Pre-nuptial agreements. 12/30/93 Writing a pre-nuptial agreement can solve some disputes in case of divorce, but not others. Breaking the sharing of income rule is one of the most successful areas, and child custody the absolutely least successful. It is still better to have a one.

33.

During
Number Title Date

the mc:Lrric:Lge:
Version

The second kind of love. 12/16/93 Loving and caring for your child is the most important, most satisfying and most rewarding thing that any father can do. A new father needs to get ready to do his part in raising his child and he has to learn to reprioritize his time. 21. The seventy percent solution. 12/28/93 One thing which destroys the happiness a marriage can bring is a feeling of exploitation. These feelings are usually unfounded, and there are some thinking exercises which can' be done to more carefully evaluate the balance of contributions. 23. Giving children top priority. 12/28/93 The consumer culture we are immersed in devalues children and parenting, much to the detriment of both. Young people especially need to be aware of the waste of time and money on consumer fads, which could have been better spent on their children. 46. The anti-child rut. 12/31/93 Here is a prescription for any man who suffers from a reluctance to spend time with his children, feeling it is not the thing for a man to do. He needs to understand where such feelings come from and why they are wrong. 62. Children are never boring. 01/02/94 There is no challenge as ambiguous and as difficult as helping a child reach his or her full potential. So many factors come into play that there is no limit to the useful effort that can be applied. It is too bad many men cannot see that and miss out.
5.

Precc:Lutions
Number Title Date

for ciivorce:
Version

Buying property. 12/30/93 Some of the biggest hassles in divorce court revolve around competing claims for property. There is no excuse for not getting this straight at the time of purchase as otherwise the perjury playground is open for business. 53. Do your own books. 12/31/93
42.

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A husband who gives total financial control during his marriage to his wife may be setting himself up for a tremendous financial surprise, should his wife decide to take the money and run. Avoid losses by staying informed. 22. Personal credit. 12/28/93 When the going gets rough, those with substantial individual credit resources may be able to get through the battles better than those who didn't prepare themselves for it. Get as much as you can afford. 77. Family debts. 01108/94 Money borrowed from a friend or relative can be repudiated in divorce court by an exwife. The loan needs to be made legally tight before any divorce action is taken. 78. Protecting your records. 01108/94 It may be useful in a divorce to possess good records of your financial affairs. Be careful to keep good records as the emotional turmoil may prevent your remembering some things, which will slow down court exactions.

During m.arriage crisis:

Number Date Title Version

Salvaging your marriage. 01108/94 The least you should do in a possibly savable marriage is to correctly diagnose the cause of the breakup, be it an initial misunderstanding, a desire for change, betrayal or boredom. Then you can figure the cost of marriage repair. 82. Marital counseling. 01108/94 There are many theories of marital counseling, and nothing beats going to several counselors to find one who works for you and your spouse. Even if counseling fails, you may understand each other better and have an easier divorce. 83. Trial separation. 01108/94 Trial separation is when your wife leaves you and you have the chance to take care of your children. Don't you leave without them or let her take them. If she won't go, spend more time alone with your kids, they'll like it and you III improve your attitude.

80.

On the popularity of divorce:

Number Date Title Version

74.

The Great American Divorce Profits Machine.

01103/94
The profits created by divorce in America are enormous, and drive lawyers to maintain the mystique that divorce law is complicated and has to be very costly. Dividing up possessions and figuring out custody is not that hard.

KiDDS Notes

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89.

The next generation.

01108/94
America's next generation has a large number of children who were raised in motherheaded households. These have high rates of social problems of every kind. Fathers must get back their rights to raise their children properly. 7l. No education is a bad education. 01103/94 The great social disaster of divorce could be reduced if young people were required to learn something about how to maintain a marriage before they graduated from high school. There are few obstacles to creating such a course. 15. Humane divorce. 12/26/93 There is no intrinsic reason why divorce has to be the nightmare it is now for parents and children. The exploitation of divorce as a cash cow for the legal profession does not have to continue if the citizens of the United States don't want it to.

Before c:livorce:
Number Title Date Version

40.

The divorce process. 12/30/93 There are four stages to the court processes for a divorce. They are explained here, along with the places where bias can be introduced. Simplicity covered over by lots of formal rules describes the process. 68. Separation shock. 01103/94 If a man is unprepared for the possibility that his marriage might suddenly fall apart, he may go into shock when served with divorce papers. He needs to think about it and to keep in contact with others who have gone through it. 85. When to run and when to hide.

01108/94
A father considering taking his children elsewhere because of the divorce prejudice facing him has to think carefully and come up with a workable plan. The Underground Railroad did work, however, and men shouldn't neglect this option.

Beginning c:livorce:
Number Title Date Version

98.

Cooperative parenting.

01114/94
Wouldn't it be nice to bypass all the legal hassles that divorce entails and just figure out how to live your lives apart and how to care for your children? If your ex is an agreeable person, this may make divorced life pleasant. Mediated divorce.

54.

01102/94

KiDDS Notes

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Doing a divorce without two lawyers arguing, custody evaluators deciding on your children's future, courts imposing their biases and much money being wasted sounds like a dream come true. It is, for some people. 41. Preemption in filing. 12/30/93 Filing first has some advantages, which depend on where you live, if both spouses are still living together, on how many pro-male lawyers there are, and several other factors. It can make a tremendous difference or none at all. 1. Should you seek custody? 01102194 Many children would be better off if their father took custody of them. This note describes how to make the decision to try for custody and how to overcome the real fear of becoming a custodial parent. 11. Searching for a lawyer. 12/19/93 Fairness, justice and equity have little role in divorce court. A father must be prepared to do whatever is necessary to get custody. Choosing a lawyer is most important, but full of pitfalls. Here are some guidelines. 16. Why lawyers hate kids. 12/27/93 People who go through law school have some personality traits directly opposed to those of sensitive, caring parents. This explains why lawyers have a hard time appreciating that a father wants custody for the children's sake. 38. Where do judges come from? 12/30/93 Judges are appointed by the governor after having been recommended by local bar committees, based on service or contacts. Since there is no practical way of dealing with a biased judge, it is imperative to find out beforehand and try to avoid him or her. 87. Jealous judges. 01/08/94 Are judges above human emotions like jealousy? If you are a candidate for making the judge feel bad, you should think about finding out the judge's attitudes and feelings and adjusting your case accordingly.

The pro per option:

Nwnber Date Title Version

Going pro per. 12/30/93 There are very many considerations to think about before deciding to go pro per and represent yourself in court. Some of these are the prejudice against pro pers; another is the time involved. Here are some guidelines to the benefits and the hazards. 63. Learning the law. 01102/94

39.

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There are a multitude of guide books for learning the law related to your specific case. You can choose the level according to your interests and the amount of time you have available. Most of it is interesting, as well, provided you like to read. 65. Learning legal process. 01102/94 It is easier to learn how to do the process of law than to learn the law itself. Process involves preparing and filing papers, serving them, and other jobs of a legal secretary. More complicated situations may require you to consult a textbook. 101. Tips for pro per fathers. 01130/94 Being a pro per is hard work, if you plan to do it well enough to win in court. Here are a series of tips that can help a pro per to get organized at the start of his case, where some of the worst losses come in.

Doing divorce:
Number Title Date Version

Structural bias. 12/16/93 Courts are built around a system of 'equity', which means Dad has the bigger income so Mom gets the children. Other factors make it almost impossible for a judge to give custody to a father. 34. Defining fairness. 12/30/93 What is fair to one person at one time is unfair to another person at another time. The only thing that can be said about fairness and divorce is that they are not related to each other. There is a better way, however. 69. Why women must have custody. 01103/94 The financial take for a middle class mother to use the court's biases to gain sole custody is enormous. Even if she is an incompetent mother, she probably cannot afford to let the children go to her husband. 17. Unheard arguments. 12/27/93 Fathers often like to collect data on their ex-wives' financial blundering, their blatant promiscuity or their ill-treatment of their children as arguments for paternal custody. The court ignores these arguments and presenting them can be damaging. 48. Relative arguments. 12/31193 Having relatives around to help is of little use in the initial custody hearing, but they have some very important roles to play in the drama which unfolds after that. Some examples are listed here. 105. How to complain effectively. 02/10/94

6.

KiDDS Notes

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There are many instances during the course of a divorce action that -a father might want to complain. There are some clear rules for complaining which need to be followed for each person in the system: judges, clerks, lawyers, referees and everyone else. 106. When to call a judge's blutT. 02110/94 Not every order a judge gives is correctly given or worth enforcing. Ifone is particularly unreasonable, you need to check to see if it is a bluff or an error on the judge's part. If so, there are ways to avoid having it enforced. 60. Reconciliation. 01/02/94 Getting back together again is always a possibility if both people agree to it. The problem is figuring out if you want it. You need to understand your almost-ex-wife's motivations and character as much as you didn't before the marriage.

Ba.d news during divorce:

Nwnber Title Date Version

A catalog of crazy ex-wives. 12/19/93 Dealing with an ex-wife out of touch with reality adds to the troubles of divorce. Means of recognizing such a situation and means of dealing with it are discussed. 9. Dirty tricks. 12/17/93 The ways in which a vindictive ex-wife can hurt her husband, financially and domestically, are numerous and significant. The husband can even be ordered to pay for most of the cost of doing them through the vise oflegal fees. 13. Rotten tricks. 12/26/93 A man who is accused by his wife of violence against her can expect to be railroaded in court and lose almost all access to his family and his assets immediately. There is some possibility of defense, but the real solution to this is public awareness. 57. Abominable tricks. 01/02/94 Getting put in jail is not a good way to win at divorce court or to help your children. There are several ways that men can be set up by ex-wives, and several ways to protect against it. Be prepared. 76. Sleazy tricks. 01/08/94 Falsely charging a father with molestation of his child is a new and despicable tactic in divorce court. It is often successful, as every card in the deck is stacked against a father in this situation. Prevention is hard to do. The system must change. 58. Police actions. 01/02/94
12.

KiDDS Notes

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Police play multiple roles in divorce cases. You need to know when to involve them and if they get involved at your ex's instigation, you need to know how to react. Never ever provide a pretext for further charges.

Pa.ying for it a.ll:

Number Title Date Version

Divorce welfare. 12/16/93 A middle-class divorce may result in the ex-wife living on a form of welfare. The debilitating effect of that on the woman and the cruelty of imposing it on the man imply the custom should be terminated immediately. 25. Hard time. 12/29/93 Men go to jail when they remain adamant about refusing orders of prejudiced judges such as for exorbitant support payments. No defense, no attention and no public support is the usual result of such imprisonment. And worse can happen. 26. Your scholarship fund. 12/29/93 Would you like to be a donor to a private scholarship fund where you can provide someone with a free college education? You can do this in some divorce courtrooms if a judge decides that you need to be taught a little about charity and humility. 44. The pension hatchet. 12/30/93 Your pension does not belong to you unless you protected it before marriage. You need to understand how an expert calculates its value and how to argue over its value. Lastly, you need to decide on a buyout. 45. The art of giving. 12/30/93 Support awards to women sometimes leave men in desperate financial condition. Even in situations where a woman is capable of living without it, support continues. We have an entire culture to change in order to put an end to these practices. 59. House, house, house! 01/02/94 In many marriages, a house is the major asset that a couple entering divorce has. Figuring out how to keep this from being a major liability to a father is very important in his financial future. It may depend on custody and, surprisingly, legal fees. 102. How to lower your legal costs. 02/02/94 There are many ways to cut legal costs. Since they often interfere with a father being able to support himself and his children adequately, all possibilities should be looked at. Some require the cooperation of a father-oriented lawyer. Others don't. 104. Do you have to pay your lawyer's bills? 02/04/94
7.

KiDDS Notes

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Legal bills take a huge bite out of many fathers' assets and incomes, even for years after the divorce is finished. But it might not be necessary to be absolutely scrupulous about paying every last cent a lawyer bills.

Doing visita.tion:
Number Title Date Version

Weekend Dad. 01108/94 A father who is restricted to weekend contact with his child needs to do a lot with a little time, while fighting for more custody. What he should do depends on how much recovery from divorce the child has done. 103. How to squeeze out more visitation time. 02/03/94 Most men are allotted a small fraction of their child's time to be with them. One response to this is to try and gradually increase visitation time, bit by bit, until something more satisfactory is reached. There are two routes to take to this. 10. He doesn't want to see you. 12/19/93 Doing visitation well is one of the most common responsibilities of a divorced father. There are certain guidelines that should be followed with a child, especially involving interference with his activities and friends. 66. Staying close. 01102/94 I Staying in the neighborhood of his children is the best move that a father can make. He then can be there when they need him, monitor their care, stay in touch with schools and friends, and be ready to seek custody if his ex decides to leave the area. 8. Little spies. 12/17/93 If volunteers and private investigators can not resolve your suspicions about abuse or neglect of your children, can you ask them? Young children, even abused ones, are not reliable. You need to go slowly. 94. Reporting abuse. 01108/94 Knowing who to report to and how to document abuse is important for any father to learn. The realities of abuse reporting and response is also important to know, as it helps a father know what he must do to end it. 31. Psychological abuse -- the invisible crime. 12/30/93 Physical abuse can be directly stopped by a father who monitors his children. But psychological abuse is too subtle to be thwarted using the usual legal methods. Only seeking sole custody, and taking the child away from the abuser ends it. 100. Preventing child sexual abuse. 01117/94
92.

KiDDS Notes

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Fathers need to understand that child sexual abuse is common and that it can be devastating for a child and lead to a whole host of problems for the child which will last into adult life. He needs to learn how to protect his children from it. 95. Running away. 01108/94 For some men, the assault of the courthouse gang is too much to stand; they have to get away and recover. Here's how to return when motivation and enthusiasm have built back up. 70. Resuming custody or visitation. 01103/94 A father who comes back into his children's life after an extended period away can expect to have to spend a long time and a lot of effort rebuilding trust between himself and his children.

Getting custociy:
Number Title Date Version

Evaluator bias. 12/14/93 In California and many other states, custody decisions are effectively made not by judges but by custody evaluators. This note describes the prevalent bias they have and how to deal with it. 14. Kids for sale. 12/26/93 Paying your ex-wife to let you have custody is one way of solving your custody problem. You have to do it a certain way to make it legal, and to do a lot of work figuring out how to make the deal watertight. 79. Joint or sole? 01108/94 Many people advocate joint custody. There are advantages, and also disadvantages. Here are some guidelines for making the decision, both at the initial hearing and later. Don't be afraid to try for sole custody after you have proved yourself. 81. Long-term pressure. 01108/94 To gain custody, it is useful to determine a strategy for keeping up the pressure on your ex-spouse to allow the children to be in your custody for their own best interests, and for her interests as well. There are many options available to most fathers. 99. The unicorn, the mermaid and the better parent. 01115/94 There is no credible way to pick the better parent from two fit parents unless we decide what constitutes a better child and a better adult. Custody has to be decided on other grounds.
2.

Protecting your custociy:

KiDDS Notes

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49
Version

Number

Title

Date 28.

Defensive moves. 12/29/93 It is little use to gain custody if you are just going to lose it after a while. You need to think all the time about what you need to do to keep it. Fortunately, the answer usually is: Be a good father. 37. Legal custody. 12/30/93 Legal custody gives a non-custodial mother the opportunity to go on fishing expeditions to find out justification for changing custody back to her. A father needs to know how to deal with it, the earlier the better. 90. Temptation. 01/08194 A non-custodial mother's last chance for custody can occur when her child reaches adolescence. If the father has not prepared him or her to resist the offer of an easier life, the child may choose to leave and lose some of the benefits of Dad's teaching. 30. How women avoid paying child support. 12/30/93 Women who do not have custody often benefit by pro-female biases in child support awards. These awards are often delayed for extended job searches and other excuses, and live-in girlfriends avoid it completely.

Doing custody:
Number Date Title Version

Pampering the victims. 12/27/93 A custodial father has to plan on spending plenty of time helping his children recover from divorce. Learning how children develop and then applying this knowledge daily is the best way. There is no substitute for quantity time. 56. Blocking visitation. 01/02194 If a mother is bent on destroying the psychological stability of her children during visitation, and the court will give them no help at all, a father might try simply blocking visitation. It's not easy, but neither is helping the children to recover. 2. Playing Mom and Dad. 12/30/93 Any man can learn to communicate with his children and give them both the love and the discipline they need. Fear of not being able to deal with children is no reason to avoid seeking custody, or to do it poorly. Human brains are designed for this task. 20. Their mother's image. 12/28/93
19.

KiDDS Notes

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Never use your children as a battleground for your divorce problems. Instead, be as good a father as possible and as reassuring and positive about their future as you can be. Children deserve to be shielded from parental disputes as much as possible. 18. Maternal grandparents. 12/27/93 A custodial father has to decide how to deal with his children's maternal grandparents. They can be a very positive feature of the children's lives. Some caution is necessary, both in setting ground rules and in monitoring how the contact goes. 27. Sitting with the mothers. 12/29/93 A custodial father might often wonder why so few men show up to take part in their children's activities, sports excepted. It may be because of the hypnotic effect of television, which may be the worst thing that ever happened to children. 47. Good example. 12/31/93 Just being a loving, caring single father provides many good examples to children. It is not necessary to worry about the little habits of life, if the big ones, of caring for others, of sacrifice, and of perseverance are there for children to see. 50. Budgeting time. 12/31/93 A new custodial father has to figure out how to manage time better than he ever had to before. Some hints for planning time and money together are listed here. 64. Child care. 01/02/94 A major headache for custodial fathers is child care, which is very diverse in America. Here a description of the major categories is listed, along with some tips for evaluating them. 91. The role model job. 01/08/94 .Next to providing necessities of life and love and caring, the most important thing a custodial father can do for his children is to provide them with good role models. Here are some guidelines.

Doing
Date

c:a. rema.rnc:a.ge:
Version

Number Title

Another of the same. 12/31/93 Divorce usually means a mistake was made in understanding the person you married. To avoid making a second mistake, a lot of time need to be spent probing the personality of any prospective spouse. S 1. Protecting your children in remarriage. 12/31/93

52.

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The most important thing for a custodial father to do when courting a new wife is to determine if she will be abusive to his children. If he makes a mistake, there has to be a second divorce, as children can not be sacrificed for any purpose.

49.

Blended families.

12/31/93 Remarriage for a custodial father involves figuring out, in advance, how a new mother and her children, if any, will be able to integrate into the lives of him and his children. Several items of concern are listed here.

61.

Fair while unfair prenuptials. 01102/94

Anyone seeking to write a prenuptial needs to think in advance of the result of it for his children and grandchildren. If he does not, and instead follows the advice of his bride's lawyer or financial advisor, he is likely to be taken advantage of

Fa.thers' rights groups:

Number Title Date Version

3.

Strength in numbers. 12/14/93

Men in divorce court are simply cannon-fodder. Only by banding together into groups and fighting for equality and justice will our children be rescued from this tyranny. This note describes how to join or organize a group and what to do with one.

24.

Get out and take names. 12/29/93

One project a non-political men's rights group could do would be to take data on what one prejudiced judge does in the area of custody awards. A single extensive history of his decisions might spur our legislatures to investigate the problem everywhere.

55.

Shining a spotlight on bigots. 01102/94

One man against the divorce court system is like one bee against a bear stealing honey. It necessary to get all the bees out of the hive and stinging mad in order to get the bear's attention.

88.

Top tasks for fathers' rights groups. 01108/94

A fathers' rights group can specialize in one of these tasks: counseling new victims of divorce, referrals to lawyers and others, maintaining a judge and evaluator data base, establishing connections with state/national groups, lobbying the legislature.

97.

Get off the floor and start punching.

01112/94 Put the anger and frustration that you feel every time you are deprived of your children and the fruits of your hard work to good use. Join a fathers' rights group and work to cure the system that treated you so badly. You'll feel better for it.

The big picture:

KiDDS Notes

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Version

Number Title

Date 36.

An end to social prejudice. 12/30/93 Young fathers are ignoring the fact that men aren't supposed to take care of babies and small children. They are the vanguard of a revolution which is going to turn the judicial world of maternal custody prejudice upside down. 75. A history of marital property.
01103/94

The rules by which property is divided up in a marriage vary greatly from state to state, but they usually have a strong component of sharing marital earnings. Learning the law before acquiring property would be a good idea. 84. Father's rights.
01108/94

Since the dawn of civilization, fathers have had the right to determine the care of their children, except ifthey were slaves. In mid-twentieth century America, men became slaves. It's time to throw off the chains and take back men's natural rights. 86. Dumber than Marxism. 12/30/94 Depriving the majority of divorced fathers of custody is a foolish experiment and our nation's equivalent of Marxism. Demotivating large numbers of men drags our economy down and makes us all suffer, that is, all except for the vultures of divorce court. 93. Examples from elsewhere.
01108/94

Other nations have figured out how to do divorce, and not all of them follow the American model. We can learn how to simply eliminate most of the antagonism between ex-spouses, which lets them cooperate on child-rearing. 96. Fair custody laws.
01108/94

If there were no prejudice against fathers in divorce court, and custody went to both genders equally, most of the problems of deadbeat dads, the mommy track, child care limitations and others hindering children and parents would go away. Judges are the key.