Most of the speakers at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017 were primarily ivory tower researchers. Pamela Ludolph, on the other hand, had gone into courtrooms countless times as a forensic psychologist and custody evaluator (recommending a parenting time schedule to the judge; what some states called “Guardian ad litem”). Her talk was on how the theory translates into practice.
Ludolph, based at the University of Michigan, described how Attachment Theory, a product of the 1960s mostly from a British psychologist named John Bowlby, had become “the big weapon against fathers” in Americans nominally-gender-neutral courts. Mom is a “secure base” and children are in a “sensitive period” for the first 2-3 years of life. If anything is done to interfere with their attachment to Mom, there will be bad outcomes.
Ludolph noted that this was plainly misapplied because children of divorce tended to turn out badly even when they had a strong and secure attachment to their (generally plaintiff) mother. Pushing away the father, the typical result of a divorce lawsuit in most U.S. jurisdictions, is “a huge loss” to a child from which full recovery is unlikely.
In any case, it turns out that the attachment to mothers and fathers operates independently and, even when mothers spend 3-4X more time with babies, at 18 months they will protest separation equally from both parents.
Another way that children lose fathers when psychologists come into court is when the psychologist finds that exchanges between the parents causes “stress” (crying baby). Ludolph noted that “stress isn’t trauma” and “temporary stress is better than the loss of a father.” Ludolph notes that parents in intact families stress babies all the time, e.g., by taking them on vacation or dropping them at day care. She asked rhetorically, “Why should the standard for stress be different in family court?” The answer turns out to be that the standard is different. It is okay for a baby to be stressed to go on a Carnival cruise, but if switching to the father’s house is stressful, the father has to be cut.
What’s her perception of the reality for a father who gets sued these days in Michigan? “Mothers are so preferred as primary caregivers that judges are reluctant to pick the father even when the mother is psychotic or so depressed postpartum that that child could be killed.” The likely schedule result? “Short visits with the father that are stupid. It isn’t worth the driving time and hassle to spend two hours with a child.”
Related:
The rule of thumb in NYC as explained to me by a leading matrimonial lawyer is that unless the woman is a prostitute, drug addict or alcoholic she is likely to get primary custody. Mental health problems probably won’t upset the rule because she will blame her “abusive” spouse and find some mental health professional to support that claim. The spouse will likely end up paying the fee for the mental health professional so even trying to fight it out regardless of the facts is kind of stupid.
Yes, psychologists will testify about how they have expertise in Bowlby attachment theory, as if the theory says something about which parent should get child custody. In fact the theory says almost nothing of use to the court.
I know of mothers who have been cheated out of child custody also. The sex bias is bad, but the junk science and the arbitrariness of the system are almost as bad.
In states such as California, where the family court system is under-resourced to process the flood of divorces, all of this twaddle about psychological theory is moot. It takes 6-9 months to get on the calendar in much of the state if you have a divorce-related dispute such as custody.
All the mother has to do is file abuse charges and then there is mandatory FCS assessment and mediation before you get back to a judge. BY the time you do- TA-DAAAA! – your kid has spent such a long time with his or her mom that the judge does not want to disrupt his or her routine, especially if he or she is back in school.
So much for all the expert theories and other twaddle. All finessed with a focus on a simple procedural solution to enhancing child support cash flow.
That last sentence poked me right between the eyes as this was a line of argument my ex and sometimes even my sons used to try to change the parenting-time arrangement we’d made. That arrangement was fine when we lived five minutes apart but became onerous after she remarried (very well) and moved 45 minutes away.
I absolutely refused to be scraped off. Sometimes I even had to get lawyers involved. But I kept the time with my sons. It was 100% worth it, as through the time we had we built very solid relationships.
The youngest boy graduated high school this month. While I miss seeing my sons all the time like I used to, I don’t miss all the driving.
1941-1945 Gitler was separated mother from children put on wagons and sended Germany! The same sistem for money doing Judge , Attorney and CPS making with family!