Topic : 03/23 Nasty Custody Battles

  Unless there is real abuse, not games. 

Until the age of the kids, can make up there own mind.13-15.Most of the time  Men  want custody to hurt the ex. 

Ideally it would take both parents, 

BS............just plain BS    !!!!! 

Child Abuse.......Child sexual abuse.......child rape.......child murders.....the perpetrators are MEN. 

I'll try to look up and give the stats on that in the next couple of days. 

Where are all the fathers out there that abandon their children only to move on and make more with someone else?  

Where are all the fathers who don't pay child support? 

Where are all the fathers who live in the same house with their children and don't participate in their lives? 

A batterer, abuser........should not be in any form of marriage counseling with his wife......this does not work.......in fact the abuser, batterer punishes the woman for what ever is said......and the woman does not have a safe place to discuss anything with the counselor with the batterer, abuser there. 

Chris needs counseling on his own. 

Counseling for his anger and hatred. 

Counseling for his Drug addictions. 

Counseling for his alcohol addiction. 

Batterers, Abusers could watch that tape a zillion times and still come away from it without insight or change...........they don't take responsibility for what they do.  

and when they pretend to........its to manipulate anyone they feel they need to. 

                I hope you all can understand this message.  Sometimes there are no solutions and your child just has to grow up too fast anyway.  Mine has.  My son is eight years old.  His father and I were not getting along when we were married and we fought all the time.  I have two older children as well from a pryor marriage.  All my children had to endure the fighting.  So I divorced my exhusband with the idea that my children and myself would be better off.  I could get into detail the indignant things that went back and forth between the two of us for the last few years.  But we haven't got that kind of time.  But I was the one who had to watch what this all did to my son.  He hates it every bit of it.  To the point he has a script of what to say to each of us.  I realized  this a couple of years ago.  I have tried in every way to get along with my ex husband.  MY reward for this was a custody battle last year of where my son was taken away.  Did my son want to leave? NO!  Did he know why he was not being allowed back to mommys house. NO! When he did come to visit he told me he was being a very very good boy now and could he come home.  When I explained to him it was not about his behavior.  That it was mommy and daddys' behavior that would have to change you would have thought I kicked him.  The last visit he had was over Christmas break of where he counted down the days and when I asked him why he broke down and cried that he wanted to know how many days he had left because he did not want to go back. 

At this I tried to arrange a meeting between my exhusband, myself and our son.  He said he would get back to me on that.  When I called the next day, He was unavailable the rest of the day.  Now my son had to go back to his fathers.  Of course, My exhusband is perfectly satified to keep our son and I know the reason why.  M-O-N-E-Y.  My exhusband was over 2000.00 behind in child support before all this now he is not having to pay anyone.  But most of all he has not gotten our child a checkup physically or a dental checkup.  He is really not taking care of our son nor does he see what this is doing to our child.  I love my son so much.  And though I can not hardly bear to see him suffering this way I refuse to remove myself from this situation.  I feel like if I left this he would be lost.  I am the only one he truly talks to.  He says he is afraid to talk to his dad.  I can understand why.  He says he does not fit in with his stepsiblings.  Well here at my home he actually has siblings.  The treatment is different.   He is more comfortable with them because he has known them longer.  So what is my solution.  I can not fight this man monetarily because I don't have it.  I mean it costs a lot of money to keep going in and out of court and I have been yanked into court by this man on bogus charges just to get his child support lowered every year since our separation.  Mind you I have never once disagreed with lowering child support I do not believe in breaking anyone over money.  But I did not realize that these court visits were to diminish and humiliate me so that he could come with the doozy which was acquiring custody.  By this time all of my abilities of sustaining a court battle were gone.    Well to make a long story short  what solution do I have? 

NONE, other then help my son and support him when he is here after all God made me his mother for a reason.  The reason was to support him and see my son through this.  If I had a choice in this I could go back and do things very differantly from the gitgo.  But I have to deal with this now and so does my son.  And mind y'all out there if you are expecting answers from lawyers or sympathy in your case this will be your answer "YOU married the guy!"  well I know for now I will be wearing that around my neck for the next 10 years. Thanx for the relief.   

                                                                                Sad and Frustrated 

about your thought process.......attitude toward women........and lack of understanding with regard to Domestic Violence.......Abuse.  

His anger does NOT come from  Angela..........his violence doesn't either. 

His anger does NOT come from the fact that he isn't seeing his daughter either. 

Those are NOT the reasons that he is abusive, violent, and very, very dangerous. 

Its damn well good that  Angela always  has someone around her.   Too bad she doesn't have a body guard , too. 

Why are you asking why she would be afraid on television....? 

 Think about his past actions. 

It doesn't seem that...... 

You have any  understanding of Domestic Abuse or Domestic Violence..........the dynamics. 

All right I posted about my situation with my ex.  Now I will tell you about the other side of the coin.  My husband has two daughters by his first wife.  Those two girls have gone through pure hell. Why? Their mother.  All those who say mothers are altruistic and holy need to know that there are those who are not.  This women kept my husband from seeing his girls for seven years.  How?  By traveling state to state.  Was this because  of my husband? no.  Everytime a government agency or local police department would catch wind of how she was treating her children she would up and leave.  My husband in divorce court tried to show the kind of person she was to a judge and the judge saw it as irrelevant.    Well, his oldest  child (who he adopted at the age of 3months) has been subjected to neglect, drug abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse.  She has a bare grasp of values and is essentially a wild child.  She ran away from her mother, which took a lot of courage on her part considering the threats she heard growing up, then turned her mother in to the local authorities.  With that her and her sister were removed from their mothers "care" at that time.  This is where my husband steps in.  After years of wondering if he would ever have an opportunity to show his children what a good parent can be, he was finally believing he would have a chance to show his daughters the love they needed.  Well,  the mothers family decided different.  They fought for custody and won it.  What cost him custody? A state line.  Basically because he live 20miles into the next state well He was not qualified.  Now mind you the girls were also part of this as well.  They have been so convinced by their mother that he was a bad person, violent, crazy, so on and so forth,  that they were truly afraid of him.  Of course all the officials found that all the allegations the mother made were totally bogus.  But because the girls were teenagers and had a choice given them they chose to stay in what was comfortable which was the mothers family which I might add are not much better.  The oldest has since run away from her grandmothers 6 times in the last year.  The youngest has been put on 9 or more medications by several differant doctors.  Lets just say the court might as well have put them back with their mother.  After all where did she learn her behavior from?  The day after Christmas is when my husbands oldest daughter ran last and with a 19 year old man and she is only 14.  The mothers family did not inform him of this.  In fact it was not until he talked to his youngest daughter today that he found out.  Everyone wants to blame dads well it is just not that easy is it.  If you do not let a father be a participant in a childs life you are asking for your child to be lost.  There are real occasions for parents to be removed from a childs life.  But lets all be realistic in this country you can pretty much say anything about anyone and its true until  that person proves it is not and even then it will be held against them.  Dads sometimes don't have a chance.  My husband pays his child support regularly and has even when he did not see his girls for seven years.  The price he has paid, lack of self esteem, depression, hurt and anger.  I live with this person everyday and we now have a daughter of our own.  He puts all of his love that he has not been able to share with his other two daughters into her.  Mind you they see this but she is the one he truly feels he is allowed to love.  Is it fair? NO! Is it gonna get better? NO!  His daughters family will always continue to call and ask for money and then disappear all he is to them is a paycheck.  As a step mom  I love these girls,  I would love to give them a place in our home and some stability in their lives.  I want to give them what my two older children have.  My oldest children are products of what divorced parents should be.  My first ex husband and I are friends.  And we discuss the children quite often.  His wife is a wonderful person and they feel the same about my husband.  My older children feel secure that there is not only mom and dad but stepmom and stepdad and in this case makes their safety net a bit wider.  Believe me I have seen and lived all sides of this situation with what makes healthy children of divorce and what does not.  It takes two to argue just like it takes two or more to get along.  Its not just the parents it is the stepparents as well.  The benefits of letting go of the past and moving forward for the children and being the grown up in the situation are well worth the rewards!!!!  For all those parents argueing over who said what on what day and month and year discussing petty small indifferances that in the longrun don't mean a doggone bit of differance to their child.  Wake up!!  Its your childs life you are ruining by fighting not your ex.!!!!!  After all we all as parents decided to have children one way or another and the upshot of that decision was to be the adult for them because they do not have the abilities yet .  And our responsibility to them is to raise them to be adults in the proper time.   Just because we divorce does not give us a "lifetime pass" to  be a big baby and suck our thumbs.  Our children need us and it is time as a nation of people, Judges, authorities, parents and the like see that.  I sincerely hope that one day  our children can stop picking up the pieces of our lives and can stop having to carry them.  Dr.  Phil does a great job at showing this whenever he has couples who are idiots in front of their kids.  I have learned a lot from him.  I applaud his work.   Keep up the good work Dr. Phil.  I think that you have just barely scratched the surface on this issue though and I am afraid that some people will never get it! 

                                                                                        Sincerely, 

                                                                                        Stella 

Look people, you gotta be real careful with this one. I'll show you two of the problems in the dataset, there are many more than two problems.

First off, lone fathers abuse their children at a much lower rate than lone mothers. By "lone" I mean the classical single parent situation with no other adult in the family. It is true that there is a lot less child abuse in lone father families. That said, the group lone fathers does not in any way match up with the group lone mothers. It is much much harder to become a lone father. That creates a partial filter.

The group lone mothers includes drug addicted young women who have a very high incidence of child abuse: These particular women change their boyfriends like they change their underwear. Unrelated males who have no attachment to the child, the child's mother or to child rearing itself have an atrocious rate of child abuse. There are almost no lone fathers who fall into that pattern and unrelated females with no attachments have a lower (still dangerously high) rate of child abuse.

The group lone fathers and the group lone mothers are too different to compare directly!

Next, the group "fathers" as used in studies often includes the mother's boyfriend. This artificially raises the rate of child abuse in the group fathers. We must be extremely careful to see exactly what is being measured when reading these studies!

Note: the feminist "women spend more time with the children" is a red herring. When time with the child is the prime factor there is no child abuse difference between the sexes. Fulltime stay-at-home dads do every bit as well as fulltime stay-at-home moms.

The reason there is more maternal child abuse than paternal child abuse has to do with the factors I discussed above when speaking of lone parent families.