Marriages that end in divorce fall into two main categories. One, marriages that have temporary problems, perceived as permanent problems, that are never fixed or are acknowledged only after they have escalated to crisis level. Two, marriages that never should have happened in the first place. This book is aimed at both categories. If you wouldn’t build a house on an unstable foundation, why build a family on one? Divorce inflicts permanent damage on children to solve temporary problems between the parents.
A successful Child-Centered Pre-Nup requires the husband and wife, or the prospective husband and wife, or the divorced husband and wife, to come to an understanding of shared values. It is the first step in defining how you will be as parents, regardless of whether or how you have been parents in the past. If you are future-focused, as you should be, you will understand that a Child-Centered Pre-Nup is but the first step toward being successful co-parents. A Child-Centered Pre-Nup is not a panacea.
A Child-Centered Pre-Nup is a type of “insurance policy” that acknowledges the possibility of divorce, just as an auto insurance policy recognizes the possibility of a wreck. It may seem suffocating to make binding decisions now, but consider the alternative. What if you don’t agree on important issues and just leave them to chance? I would rather you look back in ten years and think you had been paranoid now instead of lamenting that you didn’t put more time into considering all the issues. Why put your kids through a war zone when there’s an easy way not to?
With a Child-Centered Pre-Nup, you have a cost-effective, civil, and quick way to eliminate many of the problems you may experience or are already going through. A Child-Centered Pre-Nup is not like a traditional pre-nup or a traditional divorce agreement because it doesn’t require a lawyer. Family matters should be love-based, not law-based. Even people who don’t have children can relate to loving those future children unconditionally. Just the same, even those who have already passed through a divorce can be grateful to their ex-spouses for bringing them the children who have graced their lives. Taking a law approach to family (whether prospective, existing, or already divorced) converts a loving unit into a competitive contest. A lawyer who shows you how to get the most for yourself probably is not prioritizing your children’s interests above all else, which a Child-Centered Pre-Nup does.
Like it or not, marriages and divorces are legal relationships even as they are also personal. You are involved with the legal system at the front end of a marriage, and you will also face legal realities at the end of a marriage and even in its aftermath, especially with children. As long as you have children, you have to play by certain rules, and the judicial system is there to enforce the obligations that you should be honoring even without anyone prompting you. Most large counties in the United States have dedicated Family Law departments within their court systems because many people, especially people in troubled or broken marriages. No matter how specialized, though, the court system doesn’t want to make your parenting decisions for you. Even two mediocre parents probably decide better for their own family than a judge could.
States generally require divorced people to formulate a parenting plan before a divorce can be finalized. The problem is that the parenting plans provided by states are woefully inadequate. The overworked child welfare system and the harried court systems pretend that the only relevant issues to promote children’s stability are financial support and parenting time. Anyone who is a successful parent, and even those who aren’t parents, can probably agree that raising thriving children is a much more complicated undertaking. Because the courts are, and should be, nothing more than “parents of last resort,” We can end the epidemics of bitter divorce, parental absenteeism, and dysfunctional marriage with clear understandings in advance.
A Child-Centered Pre-Nup aims to prevent divorce. Even when divorce cannot be avoided, having the terms agreed beforehand makes the process easier, leaving civility in your hearts and money in your pockets. The alternative is to turn that same harmony and cash over to a pack of lawyers who will probably sap you of both. One of the “collaborative law” firms in Portland that tries to steal my business (more of a “collaborative flaw,” if you ask me) by pretending to care about families remarks that they are “transforming divorce.” As much as I detest them, that statement is accurate. They are transforming divorce into a complex, expensive, adult-centered nightmare. Are there longer, costlier, and meaner processes? Sure. But I think very few people need the active and ongoing services of a lawyer during a divorce, collaborative or not.
Think of a Child-Centered Pre-Nup like you might consider a will. The reason a will is called a “Last Will and Testament” is that a person may rewrite his or her will infinitely many times until death. Your Child-Centered Pre-Nup works the same way. You don’t have to know all the answers now, and even if you think you’re dead-set on what you want to do, you can change your Child-Centered Pre-Nup whenever you and your spouse change your minds.
According to the Center for Resolution, a mediation firm in Illinois, a fully-litigated divorce that includes contested custody and serious financial issues can cost upwards of $200,000. That amount could buy four years of tuition, room and board, and books for three children at even the most expensive state university in Oregon, as would also be true in most other states. In many housing markets, that sum could purchase a suitable family home. What’s more, even a low-conflict divorce with only moderate negotiation can run $15,000 when attorneys are involved. If you do not plan with a Child-Centered Pre-Nup, you take the chance that you will have to settle those same issues at a much higher financial and emotional cost. Money and sanity that could stay within your family goes right out the window when you turn to lawyers before you’ve fully tried self-help or mediation. How can parents say with a straight face that a custody fight is in the children’s best interests when it robes them of their financial future for the sake of the parents’ competing egos?
Marriages stay strong and divorces stay friendly when children come before adults. If you would like equal parenting time with your children, but you’re a man and you can’t breastfeed, the child-centered thing to do is to recognize that your wife can do something you can’t, and that may mean she spends more time with the children during their infancy. If you have teenage sons who would rather live with their father while they are learning to shave and getting interested in girls, you focus on their best interests rather than your own. In Oregon, as in most other states, parenting time is a right that belongs to the child
Family law uses the same general, child-centered principle. The state bar puts out desk manuals for practitioners and the public to have information about the different branches of the law. They are loose-leaf sheets in a three-ring binder for each specialty. A practice area such as Energy Law, with all its changing regulations and reported cases, has 27 volumes in the desk reference. Family Law has two volumes. The law on domestic relations is relatively vague, which makes it hard to tell clients straight answers to direct questions. However, when it comes to a Child-Centered Pre-Nup, having relatively little family law means that you can craft a solution that makes sense for you, and it will likely be upheld by a court because there’s not much law to risk violating. You, the parents, know best how to put your kids first.
A Child-Centered Pre-Nup, therefore, is about solutions. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. When it comes to divorce, very few people are part of the solution. We all know about the epidemic of divorce in the world, particularly in the United States. Are we doing anything about it? And if we are, are our efforts actually making the problem worse? People who don’t plan because they think they’ll be forecasting doom if they do will actually cause more problems by being so careless.
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