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I prosecute child support cases for the State of North Carolina freelance. I have posted on this subject before and have gotten rants and praises in return. When I read this article something that should have been obvious, but was not to me, clicked. The article discusses divorced and divorcing parents. After reading this it occurs to me that the major premise is wrong. It implies that the term "deadbeat dad" is used in relation to divorced fathers. In general, that has not been my experience. There are exceptions, but for the most part, the deadbeats are the parents of illegitimate kids. It has been my experience that kids who have the good fortune to be born to parents who at one time thought enough of each other to get married do a tolerably good job of financially supporting their kids.

Where the problem comes is with people who think enough of each other (or more probably their own eroginous (sp?) zones) to copulate, but not enough of each other or of their offspring to get married. It is these bastard parents who create almost all of the financial problems. I get damned sick of women who have 5 kids by 4 men in 7 years complaining that this guy (who also has 4 other kids by 2 or 3 other women) will not pay child support regularly.

All the while, these kids are learning what a true and loving relationship means from morons who refuse to take any responsibility for where they put their genitals or to take responsibility for what they let in their genitals.

Divorcing couples rarely are problems. When there is a problem with divorced couples my rough estimate that about 25% of the time it is the father; about 25% of the time it is the mother; and, about 50% of the time there is some blame to go around.

Well said. I have a question. What would you think about the idea of implementing a national policy of favoring paternal custody in divorce cases? It seems to me that the scales have been way, way out of balance for a very long time now, and the only way to swing those scales back is to start favoring fathers over mothers with regards to child custory.

Of course, in cases where the father is unfit to have the children then you would give the mother custody, but in most cases the father would end up with custody. The reasons that I propose this are as follows:

First, mothers have been more or less automatically awarded custody for something like fourty or fifty years now, and it is long past time to swing the scales of justice back towards paternal rights. Since things have been so very much out of balance for so very long it is necessary to tilt the balance the other way for a generation or two.

Second, most divorces are initiated by women, who (quite reasonably) expect to have the cards stacked in their favor in court. If women did not have this expectation they would be much less likely to initiate a divorce.

Third, as I understand it the evidence is that children raised by single fathers do better than children raised by single mothers. I do believe there are studies that support this conclusion, although I don't have any links handy.

I know from my own experiences that I would have been much, much better off if my father had been awarded custody of me when I was a little kid going through a very nasty divorce.