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So parental responsibilties are "optional" then? If you don't feel like living in the same city, oh well, too bad. But if you do, dammit, you want joint custody.... or do you?

Maybe you just want the legal designation of "joint custody", without the hassle of actually having to have a hands-on role in child care and child reariing. Maybe you really don't want an equal role at all .... except if you feel like it for a few weeks, but then if you don't feel like it you can dump all the child care / child rearing on the other parent ... depends on how you feel.

Oh and if the court won't let you loose from your joint custody arrangement, you could just start acting like a "schmuck" and presto-chango you're all of a sudden Non Custocial Parent ... off the hook so to speak. Back to two weekends a month if that. Whew! No more helping with homework every night. No more driving the kid to ball games and boy scout meeting, no more school plays and parent/teacher conferences. No more making dinner every night ... time to RELAX.

Have your cake and eat it too. Nice deal if you can arrange it.

I didn't say parental responsibilities are optional. Don't stick words in people's mouths. I said that there are plenty of times when joint physical custody would be a very bad idea, and if it becomes mandatory then we're removing people's ability to make informed decisions on their own lives with a little help from the divorce judge.

What I want is a system that's flexible enough to say "gee, this couple is getting a divorce because person A's career is moving to one city and person B doesn't want to go there, meanwhile person A has expressed no interest in active parenting beyond visitation and child support checks; clearly this person is an idiot but it wouldn't be in the best interest of anyone, especially the child to force these people to live in the same city so that they can have a custody model none of them want." Or maybe "these people are getting divorced because person A is an unapologetic alcoholic that has admitted to having violent tendencies when drunk which is more often then not, maybe putting children in that environment even part time would be very wrong."

You see what I "want" isn't what's important. What's important is that each situation be handled individually and the people getting divorced have the flexibility to say "this is not a good way to raise kids", with the "this" in question
POSSIBLY being joint custody, or POSSIBLY being solo custody. Once you make joint custody mandatory you're removing a lot of potentially good options, you're also demanding that these people live in the same urban area until their kids are grown, and stacking up tons of other repercussions I haven't even begun to contemplate yet.

Don't be so hostile. Most of the time I actually agree with you. But if you're gonna jump down my throat like some psycho I'll be forced to reconsider those positions. And just soes you know I'm the product of not joint custody and I'm damn glad my father got to contribute so little in my raising. The only thing he had to teach me was how to be a cheap drunk and cheat on my wife. And had there been joint custody my mother would have had to continue to live in LA which she couldn't afford on her own instead of being able to move back in with her parents in Chicago while she got her life back in order. See, joint custody CAN be bad.