Funny and from a female lawyer, no less.

http://www.karenselick.com/CL9607.html

=A9 1996 Karen Selick
Child Support--The View from Mars
An edited version of this article first appeared in the July, 1996
issue of Canadian Lawyer. If you wish to reproduce this article, click
here for copyright info.





Child Support--The View from Mars

Imagine for a moment that you've just come down from Mars and you're
trying to understand Canada's laws on child support and custody.

You read a famous case that says the children of a broken family have
the right to as high a standard of living as either of their parents.
You look at some statistics and you learn that on average, men earn
more than women. This gap is especially pronounced after marriage, and
even more so after divorce.

"This is simple," you think. "The obvious thing to do is to let most
children from broken families live with their fathers where they can
enjoy a higher standard of living."

You continue reading through more family law decisions, and you learn
that a common complaint of separated and divorced Canadian wives is
that they've been disadvantaged by their family responsibilities.
They've lost career opportunities, experience, contacts and seniority.


"This fits in perfectly," you think. "These long-suffering women
should be allowed the chance to make up for lost time in their careers.
Why not relieve them of the burden of child-rearing and let the
children go live with their fathers? That would also have the effect
of putting some of the men on the 'daddy track' at their jobs and
smoothing out the wage gap between the sexes that feminist groups are
always complaining about."

Then you read some studies about the problems suffered by children from
single-parent families. You learn that the girls are more than twice
as likely as the daughters of intact families to get pregnant during
their teens. Both girls and boys are more than twice as likely to drop
out of high school. You also learn that the overwhelming majority of
children in single-parent families over the past few decades have been
living with their mothers.

"Gee," you think, "mothers haven't been doing such a great job of
raising kids on their own. This seems like another reason to try
letting the children of broken marriages live with their fathers. They
couldn't do much worse."

You discuss your conclusions with an Earthling friend who happens to be
a family law practitioner. He chuckles at your naivet=E9.

"Maybe your Martian courts make practical, realistic decisions like
that," he says, "but when I tried making arguments like yours in the
early years of my practice, the judges looked at me--no offence
intended--as if I came from Mars. Most of them believe children belong
with their mothers, and that's all there is to it. I've even heard
some of them announce this openly in the courtroom. The bias is so
well-known that most men don't even attempt to get custody of their
kids. Why waste a huge chunk of the family wealth litigating a lost
cause? So mothers usually get custody of the kids, and we force
fathers to give money to the mothers."

"But does this system work well?" you ask.

"Not really," the lawyer admits. "If your kids need a three-bedroom
home to live in, it's a lot nicer to be the parent who gets to live
there with them than to be the parent who pays for the house while
living in a bachelor apartment. If you have to put food on the table
for your kids, it's more fun being there to eat it with them than it is
to supply grocery money to your ex-wife. Let's face it: a lot of
child support money gets spent in ways that are of considerable benefit
to the mothers.

"It's especially irritating for men if the wife was the one who decided
to leave the marriage in the first place, or if she moves away so that
dad hardly ever gets to see the kids. After the tax collector and the
ex-wife each take a slice off the top, there's not much incentive left
for a man to keep slugging away at a difficult job. So a lot of men
resent having to pay support, even though they love their kids and
would be glad to support them if they could get to live with them."

"Well, if the judges won't be practical," you suggest, "maybe the
mothers themselves will be. Maybe someone should point out to divorced
women the benefits to the kids and to themselves of letting the kids
live with dad."

"Are you joking?" the lawyer replies. "Most women fight like enraged
grizzly bears to keep their kids out of dad's hands. Once they're
through with a man, they think he's an irresponsible moron, even though
he was good enough to marry, good enough to live with for several years
and good enough to procreate with--not just once, but in many cases two
or three times. Then these women frequently go out and get
re-married-to some other woman's cast-off irresponsible moron. But
let the kids live with dad? Never."

You climb back into your space ship and return to Mars, disappointed
that you have once again failed to find intelligent life forms
elsewhere in the universe.
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