(DOWNLOAD) "Saving Children Or Blaming Parents? Lessons from Mandated Parenting Classes." by Columbia Journal of Gender and Law ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Saving Children Or Blaming Parents? Lessons from Mandated Parenting Classes.
- Author : Columbia Journal of Gender and Law
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 378 KB
Description
What should family law do about divorcing parents? "Teach them a lesson," a legislative wave sweeping through the United States has answered. (1) As a result of the legislation, growing numbers of divorcing parents are required to attend "parent education programs," (2) turning these programs from a fad in family courts into an established and mandatory stop on parents' path to divorce. This legislation mandates informational classes that focus on the harm children suffer as a consequence of divorce and on behaviors parents should change in order to reduce the damage. This Article is the first to analyze the enactment discussions accompanying the legislation and to explore judges' extensive role in promoting and securing its passage. It demonstrates that despite its child-oriented goals, the legislation is preoccupied with casting a negative judgment on parents' decision to separate and with blaming parents for the negative effects of divorce. (3) This Article argues that this preoccupation with blaming parents has resulted in laws that do little to help children and much to belittle the tangible negative implications that divorce holds for parents, especially mothers. Doing so, the legislation downplays the role that legal, social and economic forces play in producing the undesired behaviors that classes currently try to eradicate. (4) Moreover, by laying the full responsibility for possible harm to children of divorce in individual parents' laps, states have also shirked their responsibility for these children. Parenting class mandates are of further interest because they embody two often conflicting trends in family law. (5) One is a shift to consider ties between parents and children, rather than relationships between adults, as the core sources of legal obligation. (6) The second is a lingering adherence to the autonomous nuclear family ideal] Unlike contemporaneous suggestions for anti-divorce measures, such as waiting periods and covenant marriage, parenting class mandates were not designed to create an impediment to divorce. Nevertheless, despite the legislation's focus on the parent-child relationship, it still reflects an underlying conviction that it is wrong for parents to break up the marital family unit. (8)