I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about shared parenting recently, but since we’re less than three weeks out from the election I figure it’s time for an update.

We shared parenting supporters have been very, very busy.  We’ve been putting up yard signs, collecting donations to get billboards up (you may have one in your community, or may have one soon) and going door-to-door to talk to people about the initiative.  If you don’t know what the North Dakota Shared Parenting Initiative is you can go to our website and educate yourself, but in a nutshell it’s law that would guarantee both divorced parents joint custody of their child(ren) unless the courts should find one or both parents to be unfit.  Currently, under North Dakota law, if custody of the children is disputed by one side in a divorce then the judge must one parent to be the “custodial parent” while the other parent gets visitation even if the other parent has done nothing wrong to be deemed unfit to have access to his/her children.

It is an inequitable way to solve custody disputes, no?  Seems to me that no parent should lose control of his/her child(ren) in the absence of any evidence to prove that parent unfit, and that’s exactly what North Dakota Shared Parenting does.

Unfortunately our initiative has met a lot of resistance.  Not so much from the people mind you (the petition to put the initiative on the ballot got several thousand more signatures than the minimum 12,000+ required and the majority of the people our volunteers talk to about it are supportive of the initiative) but from the government itself.  North Dakota Human Services bureaucrats have been actively campaigning against the initiative (using their tax-funded email addresses and computers, more on that later) and have convinced a number of state politicians and officials to back their opposition.

Why do the human services people oppose shared parenting?  They’d have you believe that it is because shared parenting would put us out of compliance with federal child support standards which in turn would lose the state millions in federal funding.  They’d also have you believe that shared parenting would force divorced parents and children to maintain contact with an abusive spouse/parent and that the initiative would clog the courts with massive divorce cases.

Unfortunately for the human services people and other opponents of shared parenting, only one of those claims are true.  The SPI would not put North Dakota out of compliance with federal standards as Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families pointed out in a letter to North Dakota Human Services Director Carol Olson.  He stated, clearly, that if shared parenting became law we would not automatically be out of compliance.  As for shared parenting forcing divorced parents and children to keep in touch with abusive spouses/parents, the Shared Parenting Initiative clearly states that if a parent is found unfit they can have their parenting rights removed.

The claim about the courts getting clogged with custody cases after shared parenting passes is true, but the way critics are making the claim is a bit misleading.  After shared parenting passes there will undoubtedly be a rush by divorced parents to have their custody situations reviewed by the court.  That will create a spike in the court’s case load, but it is not a spike that will last forever.  Once the backlog of divorce cases are reviewed things would go back to normal, and the case load would likely even decrease given that, in a situation where both parents get custody of their children by default, there is little left to quibble over in a custody dispute.

But all those are just the reasons human services people give publicly for opposing shared parenting.  The real reason they oppose it is money.

You see, the federal government distributes human services funding to the states based on the amount of child support a given state collects.  If, just as an example, North Dakota collects and distributes $1,000,000 in child support the federal government will provide 66% of that amount ($660,000 in our example) in funding to North Dakota.  The more child support that gets collected in North Dakota the more federal tax dollars the human services bureaucrats get.  So obviously the human services people, in order to maximize their funding, want to collect as much child support as possible.  And what family situation produces the most child support?  A single-parent situation where one parent is the custodial parent and the other parent is the “visiting parent” who pays child support.

It’s as simple as that.  North Dakota human services people don’t want equitable parenting laws because equitable parenting laws would be harmful for their funding.  Something to keep in mind the next time you hear a government official railing about how terrible shared parenting would be, no?

Anyway, if you’d like to help the North Dakota Shared Parenting Initiative visit our website and either donate or contact us to learn about what you can do as a volunteer.

Or do both.