Charles Bruce and debtors prison

[lumberjack_jeff]

9. Responsibility for ones kids? Absolutely.

But the only people who don't have a choice about how to fulfill that responsibility are non custodial parents. You are expected to not meddle in parenting, you are allowed visitation, at the real parent's suffrage.

The parent who works 70 hours a week to support the family isn't necessarily worse-suited to caregiving in event of divorce, and there are a lot of good reasons to give the kids the benefit of spending half their time in his or her household.

In fact, that binding responsibility for one's kids is the core of my problem with this.

I've been criticized in the past for respect for my dad which admittedly borders on idolatry. I need to explain. When I was about 4 mom and dad divorced. My mom's drug and alcohol problems, financed with child support, led us to California where we lived with her sisters for awhile, and then to a string of live-in housekeeping jobs. By age 5, I regularly cooked my own meals (hamburgers, generally). I never attended kindergarten, and attended 6 or 7 schools in first grade. At age 6 and 7, I was very streetwise about which apartment blocks in the projects to avoid. Redheaded and blue eyed, I stuck out like a sore thumb. It was very unsafe and there was no parental supervision.

Mom's brother-in-law called dad in Washington. "You have to come get Jeffy". He arrived with my uncle one afternoon a couple of days later. As my uncle led me out to the car, dad woke mom, told her what he was doing, gathered my things and left. That week he was charged with kidnapping. Life would have turned out very differently for me had mom not shown up for court drunk and wearing a fur coat.

Dad was a former golden gloves boxer, a depression-era kid who ran away at age 10, and a battle of the bulge veteran with a metal plate in his skull, a purple heart and a bronze star to show for it. He could work all day carrying 100# sacks of cement on each shoulder. He was not the archetype of a primary caregiver parent, but he knew what his responsibilities REALLY are, and not necessarily the ones the court decided.

Shared custody encourages better parenting because both parents are involved and have some degree of oversight of the other.