Law Blog

In my opinion (IMO, to you all people who can’t pry yourself away from the interwebz) a person goes through a number of stages in their life: childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle-aged, then old dude or dudette.  That’s generally how most people see life, too.  But within these stages, there are a bunch of sub-stages that occur, most interestingly between young adult to middle-aged.  I’m in an odd/interesting/sad stage right now.  I’m right around the age where everyone is starting to get married, but also I’m getting closer to the age where I’m starting to know people who are getting divorced.  It’s weird – whatever happened to the stage where we’d all play around in the sandbox and make mudpies?  Oh, childhood, why did we have to leave you?

Anyway… recently, I ran into an old friend, Joey, from high school and we ended up talking about his life since I last saw him.  Joey was a pretty popular kid when we were in school together.  Despite the fact that our school didn’t have very strong sports teams, Joey was a star-player on our school’s basketball team nonetheless, which is why he was also popular among a lot of the female students.  And in our senior year, Joey hooked up with Deborah, a shy, yet nice girl from our school.  Everyone thought they were the cutest couple and that they were headed to good successful places.  So when Joey told me that he was getting divorced, I was shocked.  Even more surprising was when he told me how things between he and Deborah had soured to the point where they were no longer talking and that he was locked in a bitter custody battle with her.

I was shocked, even more shocked than when I discovered the drying power of ShamWow!

Joey wanted to have primary custody of the children.  He told me how other divorced guys he knew all either lost complete custody of their children or were limited only to visitations rights.  Joey didn’t want to keep Deborah from seeing their children.  In fact, he wanted her to be a very active part in their lives.  But what he didn’t want was to become like all the other divorced dads he knew.  He didn’t want to be limited to only visiting his children because he was worried that it’d make his children distant.  He wanted to know what his options were.

Well, I didn’t know what to tell him since anyone in or heading toward a career in lawyering knows that the answer to every legal question is that “it all depends.”  Laws can be ambiguous and outcomes vary all the time and are dependent on a number of things as facts can always be distinguished to appear different from other cases tried before it.

Generally, in California and most states, courts usually award custody to the primary caregiver, meaning the person who spends the most time with the child.  Usually that translates to the person who doesn’t hold paid employment and raises the child, but when both parents work, like in Joey’s case, it comes down to fitness and a calculation of time spent with the child.

Joey isn’t alone in his predicament.  A vast majority of family law cases received by LegalMatch are about child custody battles.

The best advice I could give to my friend was to seek the counsel of a qualified family law lawyer.  Because regardless of the legal situation, case outcomes are not always predictable.

The Orlando Sentinel is reporting what appears to be a sad case of religious conflict within a family ending with one of the worst possible outcomes. A 17-year-old girl, who, along with her parents, is a native of Sri Lanka, has fled her home in Ohio, and ended up in Florida. She claimed that her father threatened to kill her because she converted from Islam to Christianity.  She is now in a Florida court, which is trying to decide whether or not to return her to her family.

This case raises quite a few interesting legal issues, not the least of which being whether a Florida court even has the jurisdiction to rule on the parental rights of a family in Ohio.

However, it also raises other legal and practical issues: there does not appear to be much evidence supporting this girl’s claims. On the other hand, the allegations are extremely serious. What weight should be given to such allegations? In cases such as this, should there be some sort of sliding scale that decreases the standard of proof as the severity of the harm alleged increases? This may make logical sense, but raises many practical issues, as well.

This girl is 17 years old, meaning she will be 18 in less than a year, at which point she’ll be legally able to sever any relationship she has with her parents. Whatever the merits of her allegations (again, there does not appear to be any concrete evidence supporting them at this point), it is clear that her relationship with her parents is less than perfect. Would anybody’s interests be served if she were forced to return to her family, when she could legally move out in a matter of months? Given what we currently know about the facts of this case (not much, at this point), it seems that, whatever her reasons, she will probably choose to leave her family when she is legally free to do so.

On the other hand, if her testimony lacks any credibility, and she cannot articulate any other reasons that a court should terminate her parents’ custody over her, a court might reasonably conclude that this is simply a case of teenage angst taken to extremes.

If this girl is telling the truth, the sad fact is that her story would not be a new one, though the particular facts are unique. According to LegalMatch case data, the majority of recent cases with issues of child abuse involved alleged abuse by a parent or stepparent. While we don’t know if this girl’s allegations are true, if they do turn out to be true, it wouldn’t be the first nor the last time, unfortunately.

The Orlando Sentinel is reporting what appears to be a sad case of religious conflict within a family ending with one of the worst possible outcomes. A 17-year-old girl, who, along with her parents, is a native of Sri Lanka, has fled her home in Ohio, and ended up in Florida. She claimed that her father threatened to kill her because she converted from Islam to Christianity.  She is now in a Florida court, which is trying to decide whether or not to return her to her family.

This case raises quite a few interesting legal issues, not the least of which being whether a Florida court even has the jurisdiction to rule on the parental rights of a family in Ohio.

However, it also raises other legal and practical issues: there does not appear to be much evidence supporting this girl’s claims. On the other hand, the allegations are extremely serious. What weight should be given to such allegations? In cases such as this, should there be some sort of sliding scale that decreases the standard of proof as the severity of the harm alleged increases? This may make logical sense, but raises many practical issues, as well.

This girl is 17 years old, meaning she will be 18 in less than a year, at which point she’ll be legally able to sever any relationship she has with her parents. Whatever the merits of her allegations (again, there does not appear to be any concrete evidence supporting them at this point), it is clear that her relationship with her parents is less than perfect. Would anybody’s interests be served if she were forced to return to her family, when she could legally move out in a matter of months? Given what we currently know about the facts of this case (not much, at this point), it seems that, whatever her reasons, she will probably choose to leave her family when she is legally free to do so.

On the other hand, if her testimony lacks any credibility, and she cannot articulate any other reasons that a court should terminate her parents’ custody over her, a court might reasonably conclude that this is simply a case of teenage angst taken to extremes.

If this girl is telling the truth, the sad fact is that her story would not be a new one, though the particular facts are unique. According to LegalMatch case data, the majority of recent cases with issues of child abuse involved alleged abuse by a parent or stepparent. While we don’t know if this girl’s allegations are true, if they do turn out to be true, it wouldn’t be the first nor the last time, unfortunately.

In the past 12 months LegalMatch.com has received tens of thousands of customers seeking child custody attorneys. I was curious how the majority of these customers were related to the children involved in these custody disputes. After looking into our database, this is what I found:

• 48% were the child’s mother 
• 44% were their father
• 5% were grandparents
• 2% listed themselves as “other”
• Less than 1% were step-parents

Not too much of a surprise there: the vast majority of these people are the child’s parents.

These statistics also closely match a Census data footnote reporting that as of 2007, more than 6% of children were living with their grandparents. Hopefully the courts hearing these child custody cases from grandparents are not unfairly giving them less benefit of the doubt due to preconceptions of what a family is “supposed” to be. The rise in “grandfamilies” and grandparents contesting child custody may be based on the modern realities of single parent households according to the Wall Street Journal.

But wait a minute… are the WSJ’s terribly lit pictures and ominous statistics supposed to indicate that grandparents raising kids is some kind of bad development? (Not necessarily; the point instead seems to be bemoaning the economic hardships facing senior parents.) I would welcome more involvement of grandparents in child rearing. Half of my family is one generation removed from a non-western social model where this kind of family was the norm. The household was mom, dad, their mom and dad, maybe even their mom and dad, and the kids.

In my view it is unfortunate that the American nuclear family is a one generation family.  Will times like this make Americans reevaluate our own social engineering? Probably not, but it can’t hurt to establish a dialogue about it. Although the nuclear family encourages mobility and individualism, (and thus buying more stuff) creating cohesive family units and support structures may be more important now than it has been in a while. I’m not peddling some cryptically hidden “family values” social agenda, but if you’re a young professional or a young newly married couple thinking of making the big move away from mom and dad, give it a second thought. Extended family networks, rather than things like day care and babysitters, could come in handy.

Traditionally, it was assumed that teens accounted for most out-of-wedlock births.  However, the National Center for Health Statistics reports that the teen birth rate in the U.S. has declined to an all-time low, while unwed women in their 20s are increasingly having children.  These figures reflect the fact that more people in America marry later in life or cohabitate with their significant other without taking marriage vows at all.

Out-of-wedlock births have been on the rise since the late 1990s.  There were over 1.7 million households consisting of unmarried couples with children in 2004, compared with just 200,000 in 1970.  According to a report conducted by the Pew Research Center, almost 37% of children in the U.S. are born to unmarried women, and 47% of adults between the ages of 30-50 have cohabitated with a significant other at some point in their lives.  Currently, approximately 50% of children are born to unmarried, cohabitating couples, while in 1993, only about 33% were.

LegalMatch statistics, compiled from online intake reports completed by respondents across the nation, support these numbers.  According to 2008 LegalMatch case data, 40% of couples involved in child custody disputes are living together and have never been married to one another.  About 12% of respondents (comprised of men and women) chose “other” to describe their relationship status; a significant number of these “other” respondents stated that they are cohabitating or have cohabitated with their child’s other parent in the past, but never married him or her.  About 9.5% of respondents answered that they are separated and haven’t yet filed for divorce, while 7% stated that they are divorced and now married to someone else.  Finally, 6.7% stated that they are divorced and they, as well as their spouse, are living alone. 

Notably, fathers aren’t necessarily absent from the homes of unwed mothers.  A 2002 report conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that about 20% of new mothers under age 20 were unmarried yet cohabitating with the father of their child at the time of birth. 

While younger adults have expressed less moral concern over out-of-wedlock children and cohabitation, many older adults have expressed significant concern over these trends.  Perhaps as part of a backlash, Arkansas and Utah have expressly barred unmarried couples from adopting, but these statutes may reflect a prejudice toward homosexual parents rather than any bias against unmarried couples in general.