How much more can children be expected to take?

 It’s a sad fact that in the US, we have a broken family court system. It fails the children of divorced parents by essentially alienating them from one of their parents through unfair child custody arrangements. The good news is that there are several national organizations gaining serious traction in trying to change this.

One of these organizations is Leading Woman for Shared Parenting (LW4SP). Founded on Father’s Day in 2013, LW4SP is an ‘international child advocacy organization’ which supports ‘the implementation of a presumption of shared parenting as a standard in child custody determinations’. Boasting influential women from a range of disciplines, political parties and all walks of life (including the recently deceased Karen DeCrow, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the 1970s, and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly), LW4SP raises eyebrows because fighting for ‘shared parenting’ has, until now, mainly been a ‘father’s rights’ issue.

The essence of shared parenting can be gleaned fairly easily from its name: divorced parents should be able to ‘share’ the parenting of their children, specifically in the sense that they should have shared physical custody of the child as much as possible. The US arrangement of ‘joint custody’ is not good enough, since in this arrangement the child is assigned to live with one parent, while the other parent is consigned to a much lesser share of access to the child.

Source: The Conservative Woman | Post by Holly Hamilton-Bleakley Posted 10th August 2014