Divorce: The Battle Over “Good Parenthood”

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Divorce: The Battle Over “Good Parenthood”
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Divorce: The Battle Over “Good Parenthood”
I. Introduction
Family is central to society. Throughout human experience, parenthood has informed family formation and development. Just as central, offsprings inform family creation, development and, more, expansion. For millennia, parenting style has come to shape how children are born, raised and cared for. In modern days, parenting, increasingly a shared responsibility as opposed to a conventional stay-at-home mom role, has come to offer completely different challenges for parents – and children. Essentially, parents, fathers and mothers, are now working professionals whose collaboration at home is critical to make life go on. Integral to such collaboration is child care. By “child care” is meant, broadly, all responsibilities a married couple is expected to have and do in order to ensure children’s interests are maintained in most optimum possible ways. This “unity” a household provides for all family members in a “stable marriage” gives way, however, to escalating differences once disagreements harden into irreconcilable disputes. Quickly, harmony and peace give way to disruption and disorder and, in a good many cases, result in divorce. The once “good family” – and, by extension, “good parenthood” example – comes down, in short, to a systematic, aggressive accentuation of differences – and, more importantly, negative stereotypes – each parent has (or not) during a “lasting relationship” now unraveling.
Largely, (mis)informed by wider gender stereotypes, each party in a defunct marriage competes over children as “properties” each party is most entitled to owing to earlier “good parenting” history. The court order for child custody is, accordingly, a solid evidence of good parenthood made more stereotyped by wider (mis)conceptions of, ironically, family courts – and,
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in particular, “experts” – about a mother’s and a father’s parenthood (good) style prior to and after divorce. The current state of affairs at family courts exhibit, as shown in current report, a largely stereotyped conception in making child custody decisions. More specifically, in considering a wide range of factors, family court judges make child custody decisions informed less by complex situations at play after divorce and more by historically (stereotyped) understandings of mother’s and father’s rights and, more importantly, child’s best interest. In making a decision about primary, let alone shared, child custody, family courts continue to confirm conventional stereotypes men and women play as married couples and, after divorce, as primary child care providers. This approach to child custody is predominantly framed in a good vs. bad parent narrative in order to make a decision satisfactory.
To put matters into perspective, a closer examination of child custody informed by a gendered understanding of parenting style after divorc...