A comment on yesterday’s post sent me to a nicely designed blog called Women for Fathers Rights.  It is for a “wife, sister, mother, friend or any other woman looking to help a man in your life with his child custody and fathers’ rights issues.”

The blog plans to cover custody arrangements, tips and techniques to assist your man with his battle in the courtroom, and even common questions and answers that arise from being the woman in their lives battling for their rights to be a dad.

Here’s a quote from the blog: “A child with their father in their lives is the best possible outcome of any divorce.”

“The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.” – Katharine Whitehorn

LeBron James said last night that he asked his mother, Gloria James, for advice while he was making up his mind to play basketball for the Miami Heat.

In the meantime, Leicester Bryce Stovell, 55, was filing suit in the U.S. District Court in D.C., claiming that he is LeBron’s father.  Stovell is a lawyer in private practice, formerly with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The 22 page, 95 paragraph complaint alleges Stovell met Gloria in a Washington bar in 1984 and goes through the history of their relationship.  Stovel is suing both LeBron and Gloria for $4 million for fraud, defamation, misrepresentation, breach of oral contract and tortious interference with contract.

Robin Rivers has posted an interview on OurBigEarth.com with Calvin Sandborn, lawyer and author of The Kind Father.

Sandborn says that we learn to talk to ourselves in our heads with the same voice that we learned from our father.  In trying to teach children to be successful and assert control or power over others, the traditional father addresses his son from a height and treats him harshly.  (“Show him you’re boss!” “Suck it up!” “Don’t be a wuss!”)

The son uses the same voice that his father did when talking to himself.  As a result, the son’s inner life becomes a harsh place.  He tortures himself with cruel self-talk, has contempt for himself and then transfers that contempt to those around him.

The answer, says Sandborn, is to begin to treat yourself compassionately.  Banish the Harsh Father in your self-talk.  Speak daily to yourself with kind and encouraging words.  If you can do this, then you can become your own Kind Father and have more compassionate relationships with your children and others around you.

The legal standard in deciding who will get custody is what is in the best interest of the children. Every judge sees it differently.  If the judge’s father abandoned his family and the judge’s mother slaved day and night to help her son through law school, then the judge will have a hard time understanding why a father should have custody.  The mother does not have an automatic edge in litigation.  The fathers win in at least half of the litigated cases.

There are also certain doctrines and presumptions (but not inflexible rules or requirements) which aid the court in determining the best interest of the child:

Parental rights, Parents must be shown to be unfit before the children will be given to someone else, such as grandparents.

Continuity of placement. If children are doing well where they are, do not mess things up by moving them.

Children’s preference. A judge will consider who the children want to live with. The judge may talk to the child in private and may talk to a child younger than fourteen years of age. The judge is not bound by what the child wants.

Other. The court can consider the custodian’s age, health, wealth, religious beliefs, conduct, type of home, psychological evaluations; the location of the residences of the child’s siblings; the child’s school performance; or anything else the court considers important.

The Father Life, an e-magazine for dads, is giving away Iron Man books and a $100 Hanes gift certificate on April 1, 2010.  Enter here.

When her estranged husband Joseph Reyes had their 3-year-old daughter baptized in the Catholic Church without telling her, Rebecca Shapiro of Chicago filed for temporary restraining order.  She claimed that this could result in harm to the child.

A family law judge issued the order prohibiting Reyes from “exposing his daughter to any other religion other than the Jewish religion during his visitation” for 30 days.  Reyes defied the court order and took his daughter to a Chicago church with news cameras rolling.  Shapiro asked the court to find him in contempt and sentence him to jail for up to six months.

Father’s rights lawyers will be watching this case because the father contends that a court shouldn’t be deciding a child’s religious practices.

“I have found that the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.” – Harry S. Truman

Lisa Belkin of the New York Times Magazine writes that more fathers are getting custody in divorces.

“There are now 2.2 million divorced women in the United States who do not have primary physical custody of their children,” she says, “and an estimated 50 percent of fathers who seek such custody in a disputed divorce are granted it.”

She attributes some of this to the recession.  More men are being laid off than women, and for the first time in history, women are about to outnumber men in the American workforce.

She predicts that the percentage of fathers with primary custody will likely increase, as social views about parenting continue to change.

Does your ex alienate the children from you when they are with her?  Here’s an example of a provision that should be in your Parenting Plan to prevent that.

“Each parent (and any subsequent spouse) will refrain from exercising undue influence over the child with regard to the other parent, criticizing the other parent in the presence of the child, inducing the child to challenge the authority of the other parent, or encouraging the child to request a change of custody or to resist visitation. Neither parent will interrogate the child about the other parent.”