Brytani, you are preaching to the choir! I saw this first hand with my current hubby. What has happened is that all those “good intentioned” laws of the late eighties to make “dead beat dads” pay instead of the women landing on welfare have backfired.
Government has officially relegated the father obsolete. First with the minority population through Welfare and now with the “middle class” by incentivizing divorce/ditching the father while turning dad into a walking wallet and nothing else.
In other news, with all these gay marriages happening and the subsequent adoption of children or one of the “partners” having children from a surrogate, the NOW gang will no longer be able to deny Parental Alienation as a tool of the “abusive father to gain custody” (TM). Once these “partners” get divorced, the judges won’t know WHO to legally bankrupt AND when the inevitable parental alienation ensues, there will be proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that, yes, parental alienation DOES exists!!
I didn’t even get into parental alienation and its endorsement by our courts or the affect on the children. That’s another huge topic!
I too went through hell, with my husband, over child support, visitation etc. He didn’t see his daughter from the time she was 2 years old until she turned 18 and he contacted her. They are now so close it is unbelievable, but her mother did everything she could, including lying, fabricating addresses, schools etc to keep hubby our of his daughters life.
Today, my step-daughter is closer to her father than her own mother; so in the end everything turned out for the best. Still, it was painful for 16 years with both my husband and his daughter carrying scares from it.