303 - If The System Is A Machine, What Are You Feeding It?

If you think family court works like a neutral machine that processes facts and outputs justice, I want you to pause and “lock in.” What wins in custody battles is rarely the tidy binder of receipts you brought to prove you’re a good dad. What wins is the narrative, the momentum, and the record the court can scan quickly while clearing a packed docket. That’s the dangerous myth we dismantle, because it lures well-meaning fathers into complacency and turns them into weekend visitors.

We walk through the cold math behind fathers' rights and child custody outcomes, including why custodial fathers remain a small minority and why parenting time often lands near a level that minimizes a dad’s real influence. Then we get blunt about the incentives driving the system: efficiency, risk management, and the lingering cultural assumptions that treat mothers as the default parent. I also share research and real-world observations that highlight the bias gap between what attorneys see and what judges believe about their own neutrality.

From there, we pivot to solutions you can execute. We talk about taking operational control, bridging the “decision gap” between hearings, and building a documented record so dense it becomes procedurally hard to ignore. That means moving communication into a court-approved parenting app, creating a forensic paper trail, and mastering emotional regulation so provocation doesn’t become “evidence” against you. If you’re trying to keep things amicable, we cover why “amicable until it’s not” is a real risk and how to prepare before the tone shifts.

Being unprepared is how great fathers become weekend visitors. Most ground is lost quietly through "drift" and decisions made under pressure. Stop the drift today at TheDivorcedDadvocate.com.

Access your tactical tools:

• Risk Assessment: Identify your "quiet loss" exposure in 10 minutes.
• Protection Session: Book a private triage to ensure mistakes don’t become permanent.

Your kids are counting on you.

Transcript

The Myth Of Fair Court

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Hello and welcome back to the show. I sincerely appreciate you being here this week. And if you are listening today, I need you to lock in. We are going to dismantle a dangerous myth that is currently being used to lure well-meaning fathers into a total state of complacency. So, what has prompted me to record this particular episode around this fallacy is a conversation I had with one of the dads in our community. Great guy, has been in the community for a couple of years. I remember when he first showed up in the community, he absolutely positively was just distraught about his situation and did not know what to do. He was already post-divorce, but his ex was not following the decree, was having issues with the kids, with getting the assets separated, etc. And basically showed up on one of the calls and then talked to me privately and said, I just don't know what to do. And I said, that's okay, because I do. So uh so let's let's let's work up this this protocol. And he has subsequently had some pretty pretty excellent success in in court and has had some victories. Not everything's perfect, but but it's definitely turned things completely around. And so when we were talking, he was he was commenting on the fact that all he needed to do and all he needed to know was exactly how to how to present the facts in court, and that the facts were uh enough for him to prevail in court. And I looked at him and and I'm gonna tell him I'm gonna tell you exactly what I told him, which is that mindset is and and was a tactical death sentence for you and it was for him. And then I went on to explain to him why that is naive and that why that wasn't the reason that that he that he won. It was more around the narrative, and I'm gonna talk about this in just a little bit. But here's the here's the problem with that naivety is that it assumes that the family court system is a neutral machine that processes facts and outputs justice, and that's just not true. It assumes that also that the scale is level. And I'm here to tell you the scale is not level. So, dads, whether you're in a an amical divorce or whether you're in a high conflict divorce, you just need to know that the scales are not level. It is tilted so heavily against you that if you walk into that courtroom relying on just fairness, quote unquote fairness, and just quote unquote organization alone, like like the guy in our community was alluding to, or felt like that was what got him over the hump, you are essentially walking into a buzzsaw with a smile on your face. You're operating on a meritocracy that does not exist. Being unprepared, or worse, being falsely prepared, in this case is the way I would describe it, falsely prepared with a sense of security is exactly how great dads are processed into visitors with just visitation. Now, here's the thing: you think your character is your shield, but in that courtroom, your character is just hearsay. The system does not have a heartbeat, the system has a protocol, it doesn't look for the quote unquote good man or good dad. It looks for the most efficient way to close out that file. While you're playing by the rules of a fair game, the machine is playing by the rules of a cold bureaucratic algorithm that favors the status quo and rewards the most aggressive narratives. So, guys, this is not law and order, this is not CSI. This is none of what you see on TV. Family court is not, you've heard us talk, you've heard me talk about over and over now, and you've heard Robert Garza talk about it, and you've heard I'm gonna share with you coming up here in a little bit uh some statistics around this. Family court is not clear and convincing evidence. It and while you do need to have evidence, that is not what's gonna get you through. It's a preponderance of evidence, and so with a preponderance of evidence, the narrative is what wins. Okay, so if you go in there thinking the truth will eventually float to the surface like a cork in water, you are absolutely delusional. The truth gets buried under a mountain of motions and delays and strategic character assassinations. This is just one of the task tactics that they use. They just throw and throw and throw and throw more stuff at you so that they just get that 1% more. And that's all they need. So that is one of the strategies when I'm working with dads and coaching dads is how do you mitigate that? And how do you make it look like that that is unreasonable, that that person is being unreasonable and that you're the reasonable one? That can be really hard sometimes. If you aren't ready to fight for those inches, you are going to lose the miles. I promise you, you'll find yourself standing in a parking lot on a Sunday evening, handing over your children like a delivery driver, wondering how a fair, quote unquote, fair system could have stripped you of your life's work and your parental authority with your children. Do not mistake a clean suit and a folder of receipts for a defense. That's window dressing. True preparation is the unfortunately cold realization that you're entering an adversarial arena where your absence is the path of least resistance for the state. And dads, I know dads that are listening to this that aren't in conflict, are in high conflict yet. This is still important information for you to know and to have because amicable, there's a there's a guy in our community who says, Amicable is amicable until it's not. And basically that means is until your soon-to-be ex decides it's not going to be amicable, it'll be amicable. But when she decides that she's not getting what she wants, it will become it will become high conflict. And that's all that it takes, guys. And if you are a high performing yes man, which a lot of guys are, look, I was, a lot of guys are, then as soon as that yes turns into the first no, you go into from amicable to high conflict. And if you don't walk in there ready to disrupt that path, you aren't just going to lose your case, you're losing your seat at the table of your children's lives. So the stakes are huge. And I cannot emphasize this enough. So we need you need you need to wake up because the system isn't broken. It's working exactly as intended, and you are the one on the menu. The attorneys have created the system, they adjudicated the they adjudicate the system, they are the judges. There is no accountability to them or for them or for the judges. So the system works exactly how it's supposed to be, how it's supposed to be working, and how they have designed it. You just need to know and understand how that system works so that you don't get sidelined. So let's look at the cold hard math of your fatherhood. And these are statistics I'm going to share with you. If the system were truly a neutral arbiter of facts, we would see a we would see a relatively even distribution of outcomes, right? That just makes sense. We would see we would see a relatively or we would see a mirror image of the effort and love parents pour into their into the into their children, basically, right? Like you're a good dad, she's a good mom, you've parented to together, you both love them unconditionally. So like that's 50-50, right? So you're you're both giving your full love to them. But the data from the US Census Bureau tells a completely different story. And that's a story written the in the ink of institutional bias. In 2018, custodial fathers, and so and and this, like even if this I know this is 2018, that's the the only number I've got for for these, and and maybe they got a little bit better, but I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you they haven't gotten that much better because I've got another statistic out for this. So 2018, custodial fathers accounted for only 20.1% of all custodial parents. That's one in five. If you think the other four dads just didn't quote unquote organize their evidence well enough or that they simply didn't care enough to show up, you're completely deluded. You're ignoring a mathematical impossibility. Because that number has only moved from 16% to 20.1% since 1994. Okay, that's 2032 years. In 32 years, that has changed 4%. That think about that stagnation, dads. This means that for nearly three decades, or more than three decades, like 26, yeah, yeah. For more than three decades, despite a massive so-called cultural shift in how we view fatherhood, despite the rise of stay-at-home dads, dual-income households, the system is still defaulting to the mother as the quote unquote essential parent 80% of the time. This is a 1950s worldview enforced by a 21st century gavel, is what it comes down to. And it gets it only gets worse. When you move past the who and look at the how much, the disparity becomes a chasm, becomes the Grand Canyon. On a national average, a female parent is granted approximately 65% of custody time or parenting time, while a male parent receives around 35%. That's a that's a 30-point gap. This isn't a fact-based discrepancy derived from the specific needs of a child, right? This is a systemic tilt. It is the thumb, this is it is the a thumb on the scale that weighs your worth as a father and finds it wanting to find it wanting by default. This isn't just an insult to you, dads. It is a documented detriment to your children. Extensive, and you hear me talk about this all the time, you hear me remind mostly reminding you of this in a positive manner because it is absolutely positively the truth, and you probably don't hear it every single day. But extensive development research, including meta-analysis of dozens of studies, reveals a critical threshold for parental impact. For a father's presence to move from visitor to meaningful influence, children need to spend at least 30% of their time with them. This 30% mark is the physiological and emotional tipping point. Below this, the quote unquote dosage of fatherhood is simply too low to provide the stability, cognitive development, and emotional regulation benefits that a pro that a father provides. Those are the things that I always remind you of and how and why you are so important to your children. When the system clips your time down to the bare minimum, 30%, remember, 35% is the average. It isn't just managing a schedule, it's effectively neutralizing your ability to parent. By hovering at or below this 30 or 35% line, the court is ensuring that your impact is minimized, ignoring decades of social science that proves children in shared parenting arrangements, specifically those exceeding the 30% threshold, show significantly better outcomes in academic achievement and behavioral health. I actually did an episode, it's been a while now, but I go through all the benefits that you provide as a dad statistically with all of your kids, and it is absolutely positively the truth. So, why is all of this happening? Why is it why is there this bias? It's because family court is not a venue for the adjudication of truth. I'm going to say this slowly again. I want you to, I want you to take this to heart. Again, even if you're in, even if you're not in high conflict, even if you are trying to do this amically, even if you're even if you both have a healthy mental emotional state and you're doing this, you still need to know the rules going into this, Dad. So you need to know that there's a bias because you need to know, we're going to talk about attorneys coming up here next, that there is a bent in the mindset of the entire system. Okay. It's because family court is not a venue for the adjudication of truth. It is an institution built on efficiency and risk management. I've talked about this over the past couple of uh couple of few weeks. It's governed by the ghost of the tender years doctrine. Now, this tender years doctrine is an outdated legal philosophy that assumes a child's best interest is always tied to the mother. It's been completely debunked. And while the law says the standard is supposedly gender blind, the people wearing the robes are human and they are susceptible to the same biases as everyone else, sometimes even more so. So when a judge looks down for the bench, they aren't seeing a unique family dynamic. They're seeing a crowded docket that needs to be cleared. Just think about it, guys. You get in some get two or three hours to go in front of a judge and determine the outcome for you and your children's life for some of you the next 20 years. That's insane. In that high pressure environment, risk management becomes the default setting. So to this bureaucrat, giving a father 50-50 custody feels like a risk to the established status quo. Whereas defaulting to the mother feels like safety. Does that make sense? So because of this conditioning, giving a father 50-50 custody feels like a risk to the status quo. Whereas defaulting to the mother feels like safety. That's why that happens all the time. This institutional inertia is the invisible hand that pushes you out of the picture. This tender years doctrine may have been officially struck from the books decades ago, but its ghost still haunts every hallway of the coursehouse of the courthouse. It's a psychological relic that suggests a father's role is purely financial or recreational, while the mother is the sole emotional bedrock. This bias transformed the transforms the best, the quote unquote, best interests of the child standard, a phrase that sounds noble on paper, into a weapon of subjectivity. That is, in essence, the biggest problem right there, guys, is the best interest of the child is subjective. When it's left up to subjectivity, then the people that are adjudicating that subjectivity who already have a bias are going to fall on one side or the other, and the statistics show which side that is. Because the best interest standard is so vague, is so vaguely defined, it grants judges nearly unlimited discretion. And that's the that's the issue that Robert Garza is trying to fight. We have a guy in our community that's working with Roberts in California, and we got guys in the community actually all around the country working on this. The biggest, the the two biggest people who are fighting Robert's uh shared parenting 50-50 and time taken, time given back are the bar associations and the domestic uh violence, whatever you want to call them, uh organizations, but they're they're they're more of like a huge lobby. Okay. Those are the two that are fighting this because judges have unlimited discretion on this and they can influence them. And where there is discretion, there is bias. These judges are products of a legal culture that has spent generations viewing fathers as secondary. I don't have to tell you this, guys. You see it every day. We watch it on TV, we see it in commercials, we see it in advertisements, the stupid dad, the you know, the dad that can't handle the kids, all this stuff. It is ingrained now in our culture. They do it with humor, they do it with all kinds of different things with the um with the Simpsons and with Fred Griffith, like everywhere. So that's that is what is ingrained. And even when, and so even when they claim, and and you're gonna love this next, even when judges and attorneys and everybody else in the system claims to be gender neutral, their rulings reflect a deep-seated belief that a father is an optional parent. They're not weighing the facts of your specific life. So that's what you got to understand. They are not the two or three hours you get, they're not weighing the facts of your specific life. They just can't because it's they don't have enough time. They're weighing you against a prehistoric stereotype. You aren't just fighting your ex-partner, you are fighting a century of legal tradition that decided you were expendable before you even walked through that courtroom door. So listen to this: a study from the University of Illinois proved everything I'm just saying. I'm just not making this up, guys. Researchers gave trial court judges identical case facts. The only thing they did is switch the gender of the parents. Guess what the results were? Judges who held traditional gender ideologies awarded mothers significantly more parenting time, averaging nearly a month of time per year than they gave to fathers in the exact same situation. These judges believed their training made them immune to the bias, but the data proved that their personal ideas about the proper male and female roles were actively shaping their rulings. And don't look to the rest of this niche industry of professionals for any kind of backup around this or support, which is what we're what you're doing with your with your attorney, right? If you're not strategizing on your own. In a survey of Illinois practitioners, over a third of the attorneys, 35.6%, felt that judges favored the mother always or usually when awarding child custody. So that's something that's something to be said. 35% of the attorneys felt that judges favored the mother always or usually when awarding custody. Now, contrast this with what the judges themselves felt. Only 4.4% of them perceived any bias. That is a huge gap. This is where, and this is the gap where your fatherhood disappears. The lawyers see the tilt, the dad's Feel the tilt, but the person making the decision is convinced they are being perfectly fair while they process you out of your child's life to keep that docket moving. I want to use an example. Just met with a guy this week. He selected a law firm. One of the things uh we work through is uh how to uh select uh uh an attorney, what's the best one for your situation? There are many variables that go into it. The one one of the firms I I looked up on their website, they had a uh webpage of father's rights and mother's rights, and and the difference between the two pages was remarkable. So the core presence, the core premise was that there is a difference between earned status and assumed status. So the most significant difference lies in how fitness is established. On the father's rights page, the language framed parental rights as something that must be actively demonstrated and earned. It's stated that rights are, quote, exercised through preparation, credibility, and demonstrated involvement. Right? Is that crazy? Your rights are exercised through you having to prepare credible and demonstrated involvement. Not that just you were. It doesn't have to be the opposite that they prove that you're not that. You have to prove that. It places the burden of proof on you to show a what they called a steady pattern of involvement in daily routines like bedtime and medical appointments to prove your value to the judge. Right? Insane, insane. Conversely, on the mother's rights page, they treated the parental fitness as the default starting position. Instead of telling the mother she must quote unquote demonstrate her involvement, the text focused on how to defend her status against outside attacks. It warned that, quote, one spouse may threaten to make the other seem unfit by raising questions about finances or work history. On the father's right page, fitness is a goal to be reached. On the mother's page, fitness is a right to be guarded, right? And this narrative then is tactical strategy versus legal protection. The language used for fathers is highly tactical and cautionary. The text uses words like we use here: strategy, leverage, credibility, and calculated. It explicitly warned fathers that their natural emotions like anger or frustration will backfire and be interpreted as instability. The father is coached to move from reacting to planning, implying that his natural state, like a natural state, like reacting or or whatever emotion you have is a disadvantage in the eyes of the court. And the mother's page uses completely different language centered on protection and rights. It defines legal concepts like physical and legal custody as existing structures that the mother simply needs to navigate. While the father's page focuses on the father's individual behavior and judgment, the mother's page focuses on the child's best interest as a shield to maintain the status quo. And so the framing of the system is outsider versus insider, right? Dads, you're the outsider. Mom, she's the insider. The father's rights page is built around a myth versus reality framework. This language addresses the user as an outsider who is likely to be misled by internet myths or a system they perceive as stacked against them, right? This was their exact language that you are perceiving this. It uses a coaching tone to help the fathers align himself with how a judge thinks. Insane, right? And the mother's rights page lacks this defensive myth, myth busting tone. It presents the law as a straightforward set of rules. It does not feel the need to reassure the mother that she has a right to be in the courtroom. It simply provides a checklist, right? One, two, three, they'll go through this of factors like the wishes of the child. Like we're hearing that all the time. Like it's not the wishes of the children. It gets younger and younger. Like I was this week, I can't remember who it was, but they had they had like an eight-year-old that appeared in front of the judge in the court expressing their their wishes to the court. An eight-year-old, like that's insane. A 13-year-old is insane. They don't have the ability to understand why and how a dad provides something that is invaluable to them in their in their life. And so they do this whole wishes of the child thing. Anyway, I'm I'm not going to get off on that. But uh it provides a checklist of factors like the wishes of the child and adjustment to the home, which are linguistically framed as supporting her continued role as the primary caregiver. So if presenting your case well isn't the answer, dads, what is? If the truth isn't enough to save you, what do you do? You have to move from a state of hope. We talked about this last week, right? Hope is not a strategy to a state of operational control. Hope is a psychological luxury you cannot afford. So dads that aren't in any conflict right now and are quote unquote hoping. I'm telling you right now, start strategizing because hope is a passive wait for a mercy that the system is not designed to give. And it can go bad in an instant. Show up on one of our calls, any any one of our calls, and talk to some of the dads that are in the community and hear some of the stories that happened of how quickly this happened. Operational control is the transition you need to make from being a spectator or just letting your attorney run the show in this legal battle to become your own legal strategist. You have to realize that you are the only person in that room who is actually fighting for your children's future with an uncompromising heart. Everyone else has a professional exit strategy. You do not. Your attorneys and officer of the court, while they represent you, they are part of the very fabric of the system you are challenging. They have to maintain relationships with those judges and opposing counsel because when your case is over, they're going to have to deal with them a long, long time after that. The investigators, the evaluators, the therapists, they are part of a self-sustaining ecosystem that rewards the path of least resistance. Their goal is often a quiet resolution, not necessarily a just one. I can't tell you the number of times. Like if I just had a dollar for every time I hear this, like just you know, go along with this. I wouldn't, I wouldn't have to I wouldn't have to work ever again. Just go along with this and then we'll work on this, or just go along with that, or just concede to this. You know, that quiet resolution is not necessarily a just one. And they'll and they'll often default to the easiest. Everybody's going to default to that easiest, even your attorney. It keeps the attorneys moving, it keeps the therapists going, it keeps the investigations going, etc. Okay? So if you want to combat this bias, you cannot rely on the truth to simply just come out because you are able to document or sort out and organize your information and your and and and your exhibits and your quote unquote facts, right? You have to drag it into the light. You have to provide the record of stability so dense and so objective that the court's default assumptions, which I just described what they are, become impossible to maintain. You must build a wall of evidence. Okay, so you do need the evidence, the logs, the receipts, the communications, the third parties, those are huge, and we talk about this a lot in coaching. And it's got to be so impenetrable, it leaves no room for the weekend visitor narrative that she's trying to create. You're forcing the court to choose between its outdated outdated bias of dad's part-time or visitation in a mountain of irrefutable facts, right? You're you aren't just presenting a case, you're making it procedurally impossible with your narrative for them to ignore your role as an essential parent. So, how do we do this? First move is you have to bridge the lawyer gap. Your attorney is trained to handle filings and courtroom procedure. They're a mechanic of the law. They're not a bodyguard for your life. They're built for the sterile environment of a hearing, of the courtroom, of the of the league of the legalese, but they're not designed to manage the high conflict interactions or any interactions, for that matter, of your daily life. They aren't in the car with you during handoffs when the tension is thick enough to cut with a knife. They aren't reading your text at 11 p.m. when you're being baited into an argument that will be screenshotted and used against you. This, as you've heard me describe, is what I call the decision gap. It's that time between court dates where you either win or lose your long-term influence. Your lawyer handles the big movements once every three months, maybe, maybe sooner, depending on the the flow of the divorce. You're in the trenches every single day. So they're not in, they're not thinking about you every single day. I tell, I tell the guys, they're only thinking about you when they're billing you. Okay, that's just the way it's not a slam on attorneys. It's just the way the system is made up. They're not at home, they're not spreading the papers uh around their uh dinner table uh to make sure that they can figure out the right strategy of how to present your case and make sure that you have the the parenting time that you should be having with your kids for whatever their best interest is, right? That's not happening, guys, okay? That's only on TV. So if you aren't managing that time in between all those hearings with tactical precision, your lawyer will have nothing but ashes to defend when you finally get in front of a judge. So you need to bridge this gap. You have to stop being the yes man who tries to buy peace with submission. Lots of us, again, like myself, we're very high-performing yes men. You think that by giving in, by being flexible, or by taking the high road, you are showing the court how reasonable you are. You aren't. Now, and and and don't get me wrong, like it that doesn't mean that you're fighting everything all of the time, right? It means that you need to be smart and you need to be strategic about how you're doing this. And most often, the whole path of least resistance for everybody is hey, you know, just do this or do that or give up this or do that. And that is not necessarily a good idea. All you're doing is training your opponent that your boundaries are negotiable. Amicability is a trap when you're dealing particularly with a high conflict opponent. They don't see your cooperation as a gesture of goodwill. They see it as a strategic weakness to be exploited. And that is in coaching what we determine and we look at and then we assess what your what your strategy needs to be. The second you stop saying yes to unreasonable demands, the second you start standing on the letter of the agreement and protecting your time, her amicable facade is going to vanish. And this is the pivot point. And this is, guys, where I where I alluded to earlier, where it can change in a heartbeat. When you stop being a pushover, the silver bullet of false allegations can oftentimes and will come out, especially, especially if they have mental emotional issues, even if you don't know it, they will come out. They'll shift from cooperative to combative the moment they lose control over you. You have to be prepared for that shift. So, guys that are trying to do this amicably, that's good, that's noble. Keep trying. You still have to be prepared for that shift because that is the moment the real war begins. And if you're still trying to buy peace, when this happens, you've already surrendered your children's future. Hands down. You must establish a center, a command center, if you will, for your life. This is the next thing. This means moving every single interaction to a court-approved parenting app immediately. No more phone calls that can be misquoted. No more he said, she said. That's the problem in court. The he said she said is fine. You need to have documentation about that. So you need to have the the backup of the he said she said. And in coaching, we go over how you're able to garner that and acquire that in a in an efficient way. And so there's no more he said, she said disputes over what was agreed upon during a verbal exchange. There's no more front porch chats where an emotional flare-up can be triggered and then weaponized against you. In the eyes of the court, the spoken word is invisible. Hearsay. That's what it's called. It's hearsay. If it isn't documented with a timestamp, it didn't happen. You're no longer communicating. You are building a legal archive. You need a forensic paper trail that makes your consistency undeniable, right? Go back to that father's right page. You know, you you need to demonstrate this consistency and then create the narrative supported with this documentation. The courtroom's not a place for vibes or general impressions. It's a ledger. When the system works on that 51% preponderance of evidence, you cannot afford to leave that 1% to a judge's gut feeling or a mediator's intuition. That 1% is the difference between being a parent and ending up being a visitor and visiting your kiddos. You cannot leave your fate to the whims of a stranger in a robe who is exhausted by a hundred other cases. You have to overwhelm that threshold with a narrative supported with objective data. You must become a meticulous curator of your own life. This means maintaining location logs that prove you are at every handoff on time, keeping receipts that prove you are providing for the children's needs, securing school involvement records that show you are an active participant in their education, documenting all of the difficulties that you're having with your soon-to-be acts, categorizing those and putting them into a chart, showing what the trends are and what her behavior is, so that your attorney can then utilize that in court and demonstrate what the the what the real life reality is and what that narrative is, opposing what hers is. It means ensuring your name is on every medical appointment, attendance sheet, every login. You're creating a wall of facts so high that no allegation, no false narrative, no anything that she can do can scale it. When you walk into that room with that mountain data, you aren't just telling them you're a father. You're proving that your presence is a mathematical certainty that the court cannot afford to ignore. Finally, you also have to master the high conflict emotional regulation. The system's looking for a reason to pathologize you. Just know that. Immediately, you need to know and understand that you are guilty until proven innocent. It is actively scanning for a red flag that justifies pushing you out of the picture. They're waiting for you to get angry, to send an aggressive text, to look unstable in a hearing so that they can document it as a character flaw and close the file with a clear conscience, and clear conscience. And it doesn't, it doesn't even have to be true, guys. It can just be an insinuation, and that happens all the time. You have to understand that your frustration is their evidence. So be aware. Your most lethal weapon is your restraint. You must be the calmest, most boring person in every room. When you're provoked, you respond with clinical detachment. When she is lying and making false allegations, you don't react with outrage, you don't send that text, you don't blow up, you point to the documentation, documentation without emotion, and you let that data do the screaming for you because that will completely dismantle her narrative. And then the narrative flips because you've created that narrative, you've destroyed her narrative, and the narrative then becomes you are the stable one. You are the one that is consistent and constant. So combine, you know, combating the bias of the family court requires you to stop if you are, but do not ever act like a victim and act like the primary strategist of your case. The victim waits for a savior. A strategist creates a path forward. You cannot outsource your role as a father to a law firm and hope they care as much as you do. They do not. You have to be the lead investigator of your own life, digging into the details that a busy attorney will overlook. You have to understand that the niche industry of lawyers, evaluators, therapists, investigators, like all of this, will not stick its neck out for you. They are comfortable within the system's status quo. They're not incentivized to disrupt this machine. That's why Robert Garza is having so much difficulty with bar associations fighting against these in all the literal in all the legislatures. They do not want the machine to change. It is working perfectly fine for them. However, you are working against that machine. You have to build a case that makes your presence in your children's lives the only logical, defensible outcome for the court. You must make it so that for a judge to rule against you, they have to ignore their own eyes and violate their own logic. You aren't just fighting for custody. You're engineering a reality where your removal is an impossibility. So this week, dads, I want you to take the weekend visitor, the weekend visitor risk assessments. Whether you're in high conflict, you're not in high conflict. I want you to go to the the the divorced advocate.com and take the quiz. It costs nothing, it takes less than 10 minutes. It's going to give you some immediate feedback and then give you an opportunity if you want to review it with me. We can talk about it. But you've got to stop guessing how much risk you're in and stop operating on a gut feeling that that has no standing in a courtroom. Get your score and understand what it is. You need a cold objective metric to look at so you can see exactly where you stand in the eyes of the machine. And if you don't get that or you don't understand it from taking Taking that from the the weekend visitor risk assessment, schedule some time with me, and I will spend half hour, 45 minutes, an hour, however long it takes us to go through it, and let you know exactly where your risk points are. We need what we'll identify your high-stakes exposure zones, communicate the patterns that can be twisted into harassment, where your temporary agreements are quietly hardening into permanent precedence, uh, what your emotional triggers are that are being mapped out by your opponent. These are the areas where that quiet loss of your authority is happening right now in the shadows while you're hoping for the best. And I want to help you, I want to help you be aware of those, okay? Because while you're waiting for a fair shake, the system is documenting your concessions and everything else you do as your new baseline. That decision gap that I talk about is closing every day. Every day you spend relying on fairness is a day you're conceding ground to the system designed to sideline you. So time and here's the last thing. Time is not a neutral factor in family law. It's a weapon used to establish that status quo, right? So as soon as it gets status, as soon as it gets established, then that's what the court likes. And then that that time frame then gets extended, and then it gets becomes status quo, and then it gets codified and calcified, and then it becomes concrete, and then that's your reality going forward. It's going to and and then that will be used to justify your marginal your marginalization. So stop looking, dads, for somebody else or a savior, an attorney. Uh, stop waiting for the judge. Definitely stop waiting for the judge to see the truth if that's what you're doing, or think that your attorney is going to save the day. You need to be the leader your kids need. You're the only person with the skin in the game necessary to win this. So reclaim your role. It's about moving from a passive participant to an active commander. Build you got to build that strategic defense blueprint, document every win, shore up every vulnerability, prepare for the long game. You're the primary stakeholder in your children's future, and you cannot afford a single tactical error born of laziness or optimism. And remember, your kids are counting on you to stay in this. They don't need a visitor or a guest, they need a father willing to do the hard, gritty work of fighting a biased system to remain at the center of their lives. So stop hoping, start executing, dads. Thanks so much for listening this week. I know, again, this has been another long, heavy week of a lot of information, and I appreciate you tuning in. If you found some value, please leave us a star rating, a comments, even better. Share this far and wide on social media, go to the website at divorced advocate.com and get the help you need and deserve. Thank you so much. God bless.