Preserving Family Ties

Preserving Family Ties is an important book for professionals and their client parents who are separated, divorced or never married and seeking child custody arrangements. Indeed, graduate students in the fields of social work, family law, public policy, education, counseling and the clergy will need to be prepared to work with these families and this book provides that background. For all parents and their advocates will endure a most unnatural experience when they face a family court and a judge who will rule on their parenting ability and a schedule for timesharing with their children.

One third of these parents will endure great conflict in settling their child custody issues. Old conflicts, present anger issues, and domestic violence experience can detract from a more amenable child custody solution. These parents will now attend courtrooms and face judges now charged with making decisions about child residency and child support, and appointing primary and non-custodial parents.

A major focus of this book is how parents and children cope with these and related changes. The how and why of such challenges – historically - across culture, across gender, across socio economic dynamics - all may further impede the process of custody agreements. Your strength in the courtroom, as an advisor, as a policy maker will be your understanding of these complex components. They will assist you, your clients, and your children in a more favorable transition allowing for more comfortable adaptive lifestyle changes.

Let us consider when parents decide to separate, many changes occur. Among the most notable are changed households and frequent court hearings to resolve matters of child custody, access (visitation), and child support. Then, it will be most valuable for the parties to step back, and reflect on these three questions:

1. How have these changes occurred?

2. To what degree do they affect the children?

3. What might parents do to mitigate negative consequences of parental separation and divorce?

Preserving Family Ties was written for parents and family professionals to answer these questions. It was written so they might all gain a broader understanding of the causes and effects of parent separation today. Furthermore, this book gives you the context for assisting parents in determining appropriate choices once the decision for family change is made.

Especially important, however, is the role of society and family courts that further affect outcomes for parents and children that result when parents choose to separate and divorce. Courts too need to reflect on their roles in determining child outcomes by considering these questions:

1. How did the courts evolve to today’s structure and function?

2. What are the strengths and impediments to family court processes in states today?

3. How might family court services, mediation, litigation, and family law be adapted to:

a) Reduce the rate of divorce;

b) Improve child outcomes when parents separate.

The text identifies the historic context of divorce and child custody by examining both the trajectory of parenting behaviors and child custody awards over the last hundred years. It brings us along to understand the complicated, sometimes convoluted aspect of today’s intimate relationships in order to isolate the features of marital and prior individual traumas. Furthermore, the text is organized so that these elements can be explored in detail, in their own characteristics and in their own context so that divorce today can be seen as process and not a single event.

It is important for us to understand this. Divorce rates are far more significant than as individual occurrences in one’s marital life. They are not static observations. Though the divorce rate has appeared to stabilize nationally, it hovers at a huge, nearly unimaginable fifty percent of the marriage rate. Divorce has become an acceptable social norm though not the necessarily expected outcome for newlyweds ten years hence. An increasing subject of jokes, TV stories and dating sites, divorce is not, however, a fracture which suddenly occurs in a marital or other relationship.

Consider now the effects on families when parents separate. The children will enter a new reality, a more current Disney world with all too consuming fears of the unknown, unknown safety, unknown loyalty. Nearly 300,000 children annually will leave their world of two parent households where they will have played ball with dad, cooked with mom, vacationed with both, visited grandparents and cousins, and gone to church or synagogue together, as a family. Suddenly, they will be thrust into a new home environment with one parent absent from the dinner table. Perhaps they will have to move in with grandparents, or maybe a parent’s boyfriend or girlfriend’s home. Sometimes, without a support system, and with limited financial resources, families need to move to a homeless shelter where family privacy is no longer a reality either.

Over 200,000 parents will enter their changed world of new responsibilities, perhaps changed conflicting priorities, suspicion, self-doubt, fear, anger, and hatred. Single and shared parenting, child custody, visitation, forensic evaluations, parental alienation will likely become new vocabulary and haunting experiences.

The single most significant reality is that once parents file formal motions for separation, divorce, and child custody, once they enter the courtroom, they will now have changed their lives and their children’s lives most dramatically. It will be the court that now defines the parenting role. It is the court which will now determine the parents' emotional fitness and judge the parenting skills and capability of one parent versus the other. It will be the court which now defines who is more responsible, who is more ‘right’ to be the custodial or residential parent. It will be the court that now will evaluate, hear argument for, and otherwise award custody of the children.

The anxiety, which unfolds upon each family member, the hatred, and animosity, now cut loose through aggressive litigation, and the intrusion by court and court ordered supervisors upon the lives of all through specified and delineated responsibilities act now as the proverbial Sword of Damocles raised above the heads of each parent and each child.

This is a terrifying time that must also be seen in social context.

Preserving Family Ties provides that context. It examines the current interdisciplinary and historical understandings of the sociological consequences when parents separate and divorce. It is crucial for each of us – parents, family attorneys and judges, court administration, Guardian Ad Litems, therapists, educators and guidance counselors, case managers, domestic violence advocates, physicians, clergy and policy makers – to examine the interrelationships of human-behavior outcomes and the various roles that society play when parents separate and divorce. This understanding is vital if we are to also find new ways of approaching family transitions and the litigation process so that we may reduce negative outcomes for all family members when parents choose to separate.

Preserving Family Ties can help you or your client cope with parental separation by providing the reader the significant research on divorce and the issues—psychological, social, and financial—that families face before, during, and after parents separate. This research can be referenced at child custody hearings and used to refute and contextualize allegations.