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Proposal To Repair Visitation

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By TOM JACKSON tjackson@tampatrib.com

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 18, 2009

In discussions inspired by the misadventures of David Earley, the apparent poster chap for so-called "deadbeat dads," anonymous commentators on TBO.com repeatedly strayed into the nightmare arena of parental visitation and shared custody, where the skirmishes are prolonged and brutal, and all the participants get bloodied.

When neither parent is an abuser, addict, cheat or felon, battles over sharing the kids rates as the worst aspect of our modern divorce culture. Already infused with feelings of inadequacy and guilt, youngsters at the center of custody/visitation wars add a sensation of dislocation, with a side order of intruder.

Eager to cast their estranged spouse as something lower than snail excrement, emotionally charged adults sacrifice the welfare of their children on the altar of self-justification. They duel over ghastly visitation schedules that produce endless shuttling, casting the children of divorce as itinerants, scarcely more than visitors in their parents' new homes and new realities.

The Kids Aren't Budging

Every second and fourth Thursday and on alternate weekends, plus summer vacation before Independence Day, and every other Labor Day and New Year's Day, the kids go with Dad. Otherwise they're with Mom, unless she has a conflicting business trip or skiing vacation with her new beau. Head hurting yet?

We offer, then, a modest proposal, one that, while unlikely to remedy all that ails the free world, nonetheless has the benefit of being simple and certain to focus adult minds in conflict: When parents divorce, neither one gets the family home. The kids do.

Oh, yes. Sally and Johnny stay put. No being ferried back and forth; no being torn from their neighborhood networks and their pet hamster; no spending half their lives feeling like overnight guests; no stumbling across perplexing evidence that Mom or Dad has had other (ahem) overnight company in their absence.

Alternate Reality

Visitation and/or joint custody is accomplished, instead, by Mom and Dad alternating life in a suitcase. That's right. The kids don't budge. Mom, you're in Saturday night through Tuesday night. Dad, you show up Wednesday morning and check out Saturday at 5 p.m., except on alternating weekends, when you stay through Sunday breakfast.

Don't like that arrangement? Sorry. It's not only our best offer, it's the only one we have, short of drawing up a domestic armistice that establishes a cohabitation arrangement at least until the offspring are up and successfully out.

Either way, we put an end to the sort of parental sword-clanging in the commentary appended to the David Earley story that suggests countless thousands of children double as pawns in the bruising legal gamesmanship too often marking the end of too many marriages.

It is beside the point whether any soured partnerships would be salvaged if otherwise respectable adults knew they couldn't treat their children as community property. Our interest simply is in treating innocent minors as precious and fragile cargo, best cherished in one location.

If the adults involved decide that making peace is the best way to carry out the mandate of immovable offspring, This Space can live with that.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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