Divorce and unmarried mothers cost the taxpayers of America $112 billion dollars every year. No financial tab can be put on the great damage these two things do to children. If there were more mothers like Stephanie Ramage there would be a marked reduction in both cost and damage to children.

Here are a few quotes from the article she wrote for The Sunday Paper on 15th June 2008:

“My ex-husband and I divorced when our son was a toddler, and we got what my
attorney called Georgia’s “standard boilerplate custody agreement.” It gave
me custody of our son 70 percent of the time. My son’s father basically got
to see him on weekends.
But as I looked around at other divorced moms, I became almost panicked by
what I saw: sons who seethed with resentment against their mothers, whom
they felt sure had driven away their fathers, and daughters who so
desperately wanted a dad in their lives that they would latch on to just
about any male authority figure who came along. Though in some cases the
now-departed dads were truly bad news, in others, moms merely cooked up
tales of atrocities committed by their former hubbies as part of a
propaganda campaign designed to justify Daddy’s exile to their children. 

By the time our son was 4, we were already phasing him into shared equal
joint custody – not a legally hammered-out agreement, mind you, but our own
arrangement, based on a mutual desire that our child not be deprived of
either of us, no matter our personal grievances against each another. Such
informal arrangements are not a matter of public record, so when the courts
look at the number of shared equal joint custody agreements, they draw the
conclusion that it’s a rare thing. It’s not, but most of the people who
eventually do it have no interest in going back to an adversarial legal
system where only the attorneys win to make it official.

Our arrangement has worked beautifully for our son. It has also, quite
frankly, required substantial sacrifice by my ex-husband and I. I have
turned down half a dozen job offers that would have required me to move out
of state – taking my son away from the man who means more to him than anything.

As my son has grown with both his dad and I as equal partners in his life -
spending one week with Dad and the next with me (and seeing each of us
sometimes when it’s not “our week”) – I have reaped more joy in his
well-being than any paycheck could have given me. I know it’s not for
everyone, but this arrangement has certainly worked for my son.

When I consider Georgia’s family law policies and that “boilerplate”
agreement, I am struck by the idea that even in our criminal courts, a
person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, but in our family courts,
a father is usually presumed to be guilty of not being as good a parent as
a mother, of not being worthy of equal time with his children. It is
strange to me that women are treated only as if they have divorced their
spouses, but men are treated as if they have divorced their children as
well. 

If ours is an egalitarian society, then why do we allow an ideology of
female supremacy in the decisions of our family courts?”

Attitudes to fathers are similar in the UK but there are some mothers who would agree with Stephanie Ramage and who refuse to collude with judges and lawyers to damage their own children and separate them from the love of their fathers. The Labour government think “it would be unhelpful to assume equal parenting”. Thank goodness they have only a couple of years left in power and that there is every indication that they will unceremoniously be thrown out in a humiliating defeat at the next election. Perhaps then we will get a government who will realize that both parents are essential for all children.