Divorce in the best of circumstances remains a painfully emotional ordeal. That only intensifies when the settlement involves the welfare of children involved in the breakup.
Traditionally, wives usually retain primary custody rights, relegating husbands to the role of occasional parent.
With few modifications, that’s still the guideline judges use when determining what’s in a child’s best interests. Perhaps that made sense back in the days of Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best, when television depicted the ideal family as the husband provider and the impeccable homemaker wife.
Those days, for the most part, no longer exist. In today’s economy, it usually takes a working couple to make ends meet.
And in the case of those families fortunate enough to live on one salary, that increasingly involves the wife as primary breadwinner. Stay-at-home-dads aren’t some sociological fad. They’re an acknowledged part of the modern family.
Times change, and so should our state’s outdated child-custody laws.
That would occur if Massachusetts Child-Centered Family Law, a bill currently wending its way through the Legislature, makes it on the books. It contains some symbolic and concrete remedies to the inequitable status quo.
According to Ned Holstein, founder of National Parents Organization, one provision of the bill substitutes the word “visitation” with “shared parenting” when discussing child custody.
That goes along with the law’s intent to have judges encourage parents to share the child-raising responsibilities, eliminating the adversarial relationship promoted by some divorce lawyers.
The law believes that rather than disrupting a child’s life, spending roughly the same amount of time with each parent fosters a loving bond with both, instead of favoring one parent over the other.
Though this specific bill came from the recommendations of an 18-member group commissioned by Gov. Deval Patrick, Massachusetts is just one of about 20 states considering shared-parenting legislation.
While long overdue, we also realize that attempting to level the child-custody playing field will be a difficult undertaking.
State Rep. Colleen Garry says she supports the bill, but the Dracut Democrat told The Sun it faces a difficult road because some detractors say it removes a judge’s discretion.
We believe the changes in this law simply reflect the current realities of 21st-century society, and we encourage our state lawmakers to get behind this bill.