316 - What If Family Court Still Thinks Moms Matter More

Family court rarely says “dad is unfit” anymore, but it can still sideline you fast, especially when your child is under five. The most common move is the polished, pseudo-scientific claim that overnights with dad will disrupt attachment, cause emotional regression, or create long-term harm. I break down why that argument is often a tactical rebrand of the tender years doctrine, and how it turns the starting line of your custody case into a permanent defensive position if you don’t counter it early.

We walk through the history: how maternal preference became law, how it was formally abolished as unconstitutional, and how the “ghost” still shows up through phrases like attachment theory and the primary caregiver presumption. Then we get specific about woozling, the flawed studies that get cited in briefs, and why the broader mainstream research base does not support blanket bans on overnight parenting time for infants and toddlers.

Most importantly, I give you the tools to fight back with real consensus science, including the Warshak Consensus Report and Linda Nielsen’s meta-analysis on shared parenting outcomes. We also map out step-by-step counters to the three courtroom scripts you’re likely to face: the suitcase kid myth, breastfeeding as a barrier, and the conflict veto. You’ll leave with a practical checklist for an evidentiary packet, plus parenting plan features like 2-2-3 or 5-2-2-5 schedules, parallel parenting structure, and communication tools like OurFamilyWizard or TalkingParents.

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

Why The Starting Line Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Hello, dads, and welcome to this week's show and this week's briefing. And if you're listening, we're going to talk today about a serious, strategic, and very highly focused conversation about the starting line of your custody case. And so to get things rolling, I want you to take just one brief second and think about the, firstly, the exact moment you realized your marriage was over. And then I want you to think about when you decided to advocate for your right to be an active participant and a parental authority and advocate for 50 50-50 parenting time. You assumed, like I did, that the days of maternal bias were a relic of the past, and that modern family courts operated on a completely uh level playing field. And if you've listened to more than just this episode, you know that that is not in fact true. And I've given you much documentation around that. But then unfortunately, you or your attorney requested an equal joint physical custody schedule. And then the proverbial poop crap shit, whatever, hit the fan, and her attorney came back with something that wasn't an allegation of abuse, which is which is good, right? Because that's a nightmare. And they didn't claim that you were unfit. Instead, what they may have been doing, or what they may have done, is looked, looked at the judge, or said to you, or said to your attorney, we aren't saying he's a bad father, but the child's only X years old, months old, years old. It's usually somewhere before five, six years old. And at this tender stage of development, the child is simply too young to be away from the mother overnight. It will disrupt their attachment, it will cause emotional regression and behavior issues. We need to start with short daytime only visits, and we can discuss overnights when the child turns five or six or seven or whatever age they they come up with. And so, guys, I I'm bringing this up today because just this week I've had a couple of a couple of dads in coaching that have had to mitigate this uh in in court, and it keeps coming up, which is just actually mind-boggling, right? Because while what I just described sounds somewhat reasonable, it sounds very scientific, right? And you may have heard it before. It sounds because I get lots of guys that are like, well, I understand that. It sounds like it's entirely focused on the child's developmental well-being, but I need you to understand something. This is a tactical trap. It is a modern, highly sophisticated rebrand of a 19th-century gender bias designed to put you on a permanent defensive. And if you don't understand the science behind it, as well as the law required to dismantle it, you'll get processed right out of your child's early history. Now, dads, I know some of you that are listening that have older kids, I still want you to listen into all this because we're going to go into some strategies at the end of how to mitigate this that will also apply to some of the other biased stuff that is going on in the court system. So it's really good from a strategic standpoint. If you're creating your own strategy and you're working on this and in coaching your attorney what to do to hear and understand one of the biases. Now, this is early years, but it can still apply to the biases that are in general in court and the strategy that you can utilize to mitigate those. So we're going to expose the legal ghost that is currently haunting family courtrooms still to this day, amazingly. Uh, and and what that is, what that doctrine is, it's called the tender years doctrine. And we're gonna look at the history of how this gender bias presumption was was outlawed, how the opposition has quietly resurrected it, as they do, right, under the guise of attachment theory and the primary caregiver presumption. And then we're gonna talk about the exact step-by-step arguments they'll use to reduce your fatherhood to the weekend visitor status. And then most importantly, we're gonna arm you with the peer-reviewed consensus science of the world's leading child development experts, including the Warshack Consensus Report and uh and a meta-analysis by uh Dr. Linda Nielsen, so that you can completely 100% destroy this playbook with your attorney, hopefully before you get to court, but in front of a judge, if you get in front of a judge, like my client last week did. Uh, and we were prepared for this. So it actually like it was less than 10 minutes they took on this, and the judge didn't even buy it. So it was absolutely beautiful. So let's get into this. This is the state of the tactical defense for your children's future and to maintain your parental authority. So to beat this weapon, we have to first look at the history of where it came from. So bear with me on this because it's good to know. You can't dismantle a machine if you don't understand how the gears were originally engineered, right? So under early and or under early English and American common law, fathers actually held an absolute proprietary right to the custody of their minor children. Their children were legally viewed essentially as property or assets of the of the household. And because the father was the sole economic provider, he was considered the only parent fit to provide for their maintenance and education. So, what happened to the mother, whose legal identity was largely merged

Where The Tender Years Doctrine Came From

SPEAKER_00 7:23

with her husband's upon marriage, had virtually no legal standing to seek custody after separation. This harsh, absolute paternal preference began to shift in the early 19th century, which was a good thing, right? Due to the social activism of a prominent British reformer named Caroline Norton. After she underwent a bitter divorce and was completely deprived of any contact with her three young children, Norton lobbied British politicians to protect maternal rights. Again, a good thing. Her advocacy led to the passage of what was called the Custody of Infants Act of 1839, which established a legal presumption of maternal custody for children under the age of seven. Well, as most things did, particularly back then in our early uh development of our country, this presumption crossed the Atlantic, took root, and took root in American common law, and then became known as the Tender Years Doctrine. And what this doctrine rested on was two distinct Victorian premises. I know you're thinking, good grief, are we seriously in 2026 still dealing with Victorian premises that are permeating through the court system? And the answer is absolutely positively yes. That is how ingrained it is. And the two premises are the first one is that a mother possesses a natural, biologically driven nurturing instinct that makes her uniquely suited to care for young children. Okay, that's the first one. The second, that a father's role is strictly limited to economic provision and physical protection. Under this framework, if both parents were fit, the law presumed that the best interests of the child, which is what the court works off, which is very vague and not defined, were served by awarding primary physical custody of any child of quote unquote tender years, right? Under five, basically, I think four or five, typically defined, yeah, four or five or under to the mother, leaving the father with a support bill and occasional visitation, weekend visitor, right? However, by the late 20th century, as gender roles equalized, women entered the workforce in massive numbers, the legal community began to recognize that a state-sanctioned maternal preference was a direct violation of constitutional law, right? So that then becomes a problem. And then there was a landmark constitutional turning point that arrived in 1981 with the Alabama Supreme Court case called Ex parte Devine. And in this, uh, a gentleman named Christopher Devine, who was a a guidance counselor department head, was denied custody of his two young sons based solely on the trial court's application of the tender years presumption. And what happened then is the Alabama Supreme Court reversed the decision, declaring that the tender years doctrine represented an unconstitutional gender-based classification that discriminated between fathers and mothers solely on the basis of sex, which, like we know, is a no-no, right? And it directly violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. And the court ruled that by imposing a heavy evidentiary burden on fathers to affirmatively prove the mother's unfitness before they could obtain custody, the doctrine deprived loving, fit fathers of their constitutional rights to be with their have parenting time with their children. So following ex parte divine and subsequent challenges, every single state in the union formally abolished the tender years doctrine. So, like done, supposedly. Statutes were written to be explicit explicitly gender neutral, mandating that custody decisions be made without regard to sex of the parent,

How Courts Abolished Maternal Preference

SPEAKER_00 11:32

and based entirely and solely on an individualized analysis of this best interest of the child, which was never really defined but cast loosely, which is a whole nother problem that you've heard me talk about. But here's the structural tragedy of all of this is while the law on the books is explicitly gender blind, the system in practice remains deeply haunted by the ghost of maternal preference. Because our legal and psychological communities still carry the unconscious, the unconscious social bias that mothers are inherently more nurturing. Many judges, mediators, custody evaluators, everybody in the system still defaults to the unwritten belief that very young children belong with their mothers. And now what happens is the other side's attorneys have learned how to exploit this unconscious bias. And how they've done this is very crafty. It's given a very fresh coat uh of modern psychological paint. They don't, what they don't do is they don't walk into court and cite tender years doctrine anymore because they know that this is well, actually they do sometimes because my clients just did this here. So I mean at least tells us where you know the quality of the counsel that his wife has is. But they most don't anymore because they know that that would get their motion thrown out on equal protection grounds, which is why probably it took 10 minutes or less for this judge to decide in my client's favor. Instead, they've gone to graduate school, they know uh better, most of them, and they've repackaged this Victorian maternal preference and rebranded it as attachment theory and the primary caregiver presumption. So you guys need to know those two phrases attachment theory and the primary caregiver presumption. They're gonna, and and and now I'm gonna teach you a new word. And this was a new word for until I started researching on this as well. They call, they will see, so they will use a process called woozling to manipulate the court's perception of your fitness. Woozling, okay? And it's an actual word coined by sociologist Richard Gellis. And what a woozle is, is a belief, claim, or pseudoscientific theory that is not

Attachment Theory As A Legal Rebrand

SPEAKER_00 14:03

supported or is only partially supported by empirical evidence. But because it has been repeatedly cited, it has been exaggerated, and it's been misrepresented in legal briefs and parenting blogs, the family core community comes to accept it as absolute scientific truth. That's what a woozle is. In custody disputes involving infants, toddlers, preschoolers, the most common woozle is that very young children form an exclusive singular attachment bond with only one parent, the mother, and that any overnight separation from this primary attachment figure will cause what they're what they call quote unquote attachment insecurity, or they'll cite emotional dysregulation and permanent department developmental harm, all three of which are not true. And and they base this entire argument on a narrow bandwidth of highly flawed, unscientific studies. Most notoriously, uh a 2010 Australian study led by a child psychologist by the name of Jennifer McIntosh. And this study concluded that babies who spent even one night, so you need to be why you need to be why I'm citing this is you need to be aware if you see this come up, because these studies have been debunked, and I'm going to tell you how they've been debunked after this. But this 2010 Australian study by Jennifer McIntosh concluded that babies who spent even one night in a one night a week in their father's care were more irritable, more physically stressed, and less securely attached to their mothers. Now, naturally, you know what happened when this study came out. It was blasted across the media with headlines like shared custody, a mistake for under twos, etc. And you know, the other, so then that's one. The other is uh a 2013 study by Samantha Tornello and Robert Emery, uh, which claimed frequent overnights were associated with attachment insecurity among infants. So these are the you know, the the the footprints next quote unquote footprints next to poos that the other side is using to terrify the the judge, right? The the this the two studies that are supposed to scare the judges that they're doing irreparable harm to children and it's not in their best interest, right? However, if you peel back the layers of these studies, and they have been and been debunked, you'll find that their methodologies are so deeply flawed that they have been completely rejected by mainstream scientific community, the mainstream scientific community. The Macintosh study was heavily criticized by internationally renowned researchers for its tiny sample sizes, uh, its reliance on subjective mother ratings. So they used subjective mother ratings. They didn't use trained observers to measure the irritability. So it was just subjective by the mothers. Uh, and then also the fact that nearly half of the mothers in the sample were living in deep poverty with high rates of substance use and domestic violence. Like, really, like, where's the control for that, right? The Tornello study relied on some similar flawed maternal self-reports and admittedly, in its own conclusion, said certainly that the data certainly does not resolve debates about frequent overnight. So it even said that it doesn't do it. So this is where you need to know and you need to execute your scientific counteroffensive on these. And you're not fighting their theory with your feelings or your passion, right? So this has nothing to do with how you feel. It has nothing to do with your passion for being a dad. It has nothing to do with the example that you've had in the past. You fight their woozles with the actual peer-reviewed consensus science of child development. Now, let's get into your primary shield against against these modern rebrands of the Tender Years doctrine doctrine. And in the first one is a landmark document published in the American Psychological Association's prestigious journal, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. Listen up. It is called Social Science and Parenting Plans for Young Children, a Consensus Report. And it was written and prepared by Dr. Richard Warshak. It's the one I mentioned at the beginning, beginning of the show. It's called, I'll repeat that again. It's called Social Science and Parenting Plans for Young Children, a Consensus Report by Dr. Richard Warshak. And what it was, it's not a single isolated isolated study. What Dr. Warsha did is he spent two years reviewing and analyzing more than four decades of research on infant development and post-separation parenting plans. And he didn't publish it alone. The report that he, this report that I referenced, wasn't published alone. It was

The Warshak Consensus Science Shield

SPEAKER_00 19:23

reviewed, it was vetted, and then on top of that, it was formally endorsed by 110 of the world's leading child development researchers and practitioners from 15 different countries. So those of you, I know we've got a ton of listenership outside of the United States here. This works for you as well because this particular uh report was it crossed all boundaries everywhere. And these included the most prominent representatives in early childhood development, uh clinical and forensic psychology, psychiatry and social work. So it completely, like across the board, is absolutely tremendous. And the consensus report completely debunks the very foundation of maternal preference and the primary caregiver myth. And so let's talk about how it does that. The first way is the 110 experts formally rejected the concept of monot monoc monotropy, monotropy. Okay, these are some of these things are new words for me, too, guys. Monotropy. Now, this is an outdated idea that infants form an attachment relationship with a single caregiver before all other relationships, and that this first relationship serves as a template for all subsequent bonds. The consensus sides proves that infants normally form strong secure attachments to both parents at roughly the same time, and that having a relationship with two, two active, two active parents actually doubles the child's chances of developing at least one secure attachment, right? So you double the attachment, you give the child the opportunity, a high probability of learning at least one secure attachment. Okay. So that's one way that it debunked all of this. The second, the report concluded that there is absolutely no scientific support for the idea that children under the age of four need to spend nearly all of their time with only one parent, or that overnight separations from the mother are harmful. In fact, the experts found the opposite. Amazing, huh? Depriving young children of overnights with their fathers is what actually compromises the quality of the development, the developing father-child relationship. So I think I mentioned it last week. The boring times, right? The bedtime and waking routines, soothing and crying a child at 3 a.m. Uh, and the morning routines are the exact windows where maternal and paternal bonding actually happen. The Disneyland dad thing, the Disney weekends that that doesn't allow that to happen. So postponing overnights until age four or five is actually a recipe for paternal dropout and long-term emotional detachment from the father. That's how critical this is, dads. And that's why I'm always I'm always facilitating with the dads to to to fight for this, especially with the the the young children. All the time, but especially with the young children, because this is one of the ones that that gets screwed up in court all the time. Okay, thirdly and lastly, how it debunks the consensus report specifically analyzed. High conflict families, okay, which is a lot of you dads that I'm talking to right now that are listening to this. The cases where parents are litigating custody and have high interparental tension. The 110 experts agreed that even in high conflict cases, the evidence still supports shared parenting and overnight care for young children because the benefits of maintaining a close relationship with both parents far outweigh any exposure to parental conflict, except in cases in violating actual, actual, documented, actual undocumented guys, not false allegations, actual documented physical abuse or violence. Okay. So that argument that you get about, and we're going to go through the arguments that they're going to give, is false. That you know, let's lower the temperature or blah, blah, blah. Does is it's complete BS, right? So so here's the, and and so now here's that's the first one. This is the the the second one to talk about. There's a consensus report also with extensive meta reviews. That's the the the big key from Dr. Linda Nielsen of uh Wake Forest University. And Dr. Nielsen analyzed over 60 empirical studies comparing joint physical custody, where kids live 35 to 50 percent of the time with each parent, to sole custody. So she she compared joint physical custody to soul physical to sole physical custody. And her findings are it's if the first one wasn't enough, this is a sledgehammer to the maternal preference playbook. Independent of family income, independent of parental conflict, children in shared parenting arrangements had significantly better outcomes across all measures of behavioral, emotional, physical, and academic well-being than children in sole custody. Not 50%, not 75%, absolutely across every measure of those. And specifically for infants and then this is the kicker. So if that wasn't enough, guys, and I'm arming you with a ton of stuff today, and I know it's a lot, but stay with me. And here's the kicker. And specifically for infants and toddlers under the age of five, sharing overnight parenting time did not weaken the child's bond with either parent, nor did it cause any increase in irritability or maladjustment.

Linda Nielsen Data On Shared Parenting

SPEAKER_00 26:09

So it actually took it one step further and said it was particularly better for kids under the age of five, right? So this is the data your attorney must put on the record. You do not let her lawyer get away with using outdated Victorian sentimentality dressed up as attachment theory. You have to show the judge that actual modern peer-reviewed science is unanimously on your side. And it's incumbent upon you to do it, guys. All attorneys do not know this. So let's dismantle now for the rest of this rest of this show the playbook of these false arguments and the exact step-by-step arguments her attorney will make and how you and your legal team must clinically neutralize each one. The first they're gonna throw at you is the child's too young to adjust to two households. Moving between homes is too disruptive for an infant or a toddler. This is the quote-unquote suitcase kid myth designed to make the judge feel that giving you overnights, because it's easier to sideline the dad, right, is physically taxing on the child. And your counteroffensive here is you show the court that children do not adjust to labels, they adjust to consistency and routine. I'll say that again. You present a detailed, developmentally appropriate parenting plan that minimizes long separations from either parent, right? We want that. And so for infants and toddlers, that that that looks like a two, two, three, or maybe even a five, two, two, five, depending on their age, uh, as opposed to a week on, week off, which is too long for a young child's time perception, right? They don't understand that mommy or daddy's not going away forever. So you propose the two, two, three or the five, two, two, five, where the transitions are frequent and the child never goes more than too many days without seeing their parents. So, and and and you can show the evaluator that your home, and now this is critical too. You got to show the evaluator that your home is configured with an identical crib, you know, the same things that you need at both households if they're young. Identical crib, same sleep trackers, same bedtime white noise machine, same morning routine. So, like now, hopefully you

Three Courtroom Arguments And Counters

SPEAKER_00 28:42

guys can collaborate on this and know what it is. You can't always do that, but you got to do your best that you have something that is structured so that you can prove that the disruption is an administrative hurdle, not a developmental one, and that the child's need for paternal bonding is a constitutional and psychological imperative that cannot be delayed. So that's number one. The second, most common argument is she's breastfeeding. I get this one all the time, right? So overnight parenting time is impossible. Well, he can see the child, yeah, and then the argument is he can see the child for two hours on Saturdays between feedings, right? Like totally limited to no time at all. This is a biological shield, and it's used to justify keeping you at daytime only visitation levels for like two years, three years sometimes of your child's life. And your counteroffensive here is you separate the biological act of lactation from the legal right of parental access, and that's huge. Court cannot argue that one, even in the best interest uh philosophy. You need to show the court that while breastfeeding is medically beneficial, there are millions of working mothers who pump freeze, who pump freeze expressed milk and use bottles every single day. It is absolutely acceptable. You prove that pumping is a perfectly adequate standard practice. You propose a structured, stepped-up schedule, if necessary, where she provides expressed milk for your overnights, which is not that difficult. Or you use developmentally appropriate formula during your parenting blocks, which, you know, maybe it's got to be a little bit sooner than you want it, but that's okay. You make it clear to the judge that the developmental and psychological benefit of an overnight bond with the father, which research shows is a protective factor against future alienation and paternal dropout, is exponentially, exponentially more valuable to the child's long-term well-being than the marginal difference between exclusive nursing and expressed bottle feeding, right? You're not fighting her desire to breastfeed. You invite her to cooperate with you to facilitate it. That's different. Let me say that. You're not fighting against her desire to breastfeed, right? You are simply inviting her to cooperate with you to facilitate it. And then if she refuses uh to pump or share the schedule, she's the one exposing her lack of co-parenting willingness, which again is a major best interest factor uh that the court is going to note. Again, you are the most reasonable one. You are you are proposing reasonable solutions to this challenging, difficult time, right? Okay, the third argument, and stay with me. I know I talk, I talk fast, especially when I'm excited and we have so much information to give you. Uh, and on that note, you know, you can always get the transcripts of this and read through it on whatever platform you are you are on. So if you want to go back, you can go back and I highly recommend you take this and copy the transcripts and give it to your attorney if necessary, because it gives them the exact playbook. And this is the exact playbook that, like I said, I walked my my client with last week through and and his hearing that we work and we put together in in coaching so that you are informed and able to guide your uh guard your attorney in mitigating some of these arguments. So the last and final one is there's simply too much conflict between these parents for a shared 50-50 parenting plan to work. We need one primary home to keep the kids safe, right? Safe from the tension. This is the what what's uh called the conflict veto, where she intentionally generates drama during exchanges or communication, so she can point to that drama as the reason why 50-50 is unworkable. Very similar to that coercive control idea stuff that now is going on that you know that is creating more and more problems for dads as well. So, what your your counteroffensive is, is you just simply introduced uh Dr. Nielsen's research proving that children in joint physical, this has been completely debunked, right? So all it takes is is that study that says children in joint physical custody families show superior outcomes compared to sole custody families, even in high conflict situations where parents do not cooperate. And you show the judge that conflict does not override the benefits of having two involved parents. You explain that the solution to interparental conflict is not to sideline the father, which is the easiest and which they want to do, and it's the easiest to do if you're not gonna if you're not gonna speak up. The solution is parallel parenting. Now, you don't want to say that directly, but that is the solution. You propose a parenting plan that isolates the specific conflict. And you do that by by suggesting exchanges take place at school, exchanges take place at daycare, or a neutral public location with cameras. Uh you do this through all communication is moved to a parenting app like Talking Parents or Our Family Wizard. You establish your house, your rules, her house, her rules boundaries, which is parenting, uh parallel parenting, which is fine. And then you show the judge that you have the emotional regulation, huge, right, guys? You gotta be you got to be the solid rock all the time. You have the emotional regulation and the tactical systems to run a peaceful, stable, parallel household. And that her and then this will demonstrate that her high conflict behavior is a pattern, right? Because you're gonna demonstrate these patterns. And it's probably if she's arguing about this, there are other behavioral patterns that are supporting this. But that her high conflict behavior is a pattern that can be managed without taking away the children's rights to their father. Okay. So let's take it home with what your evidentiary packet is for your attorney. To make sure your attorney actually executes this strategy instead of defaulting to the standard legal boilerplates or you or gives you, you know, let's just accept this and work on it later, right? It's really convenient because then you have to hire them to come back to get more parenting time. You've got to hand them an authenticated, pre-prepared evidentiary packet. Don't let them walk into court armed only with legal arguments. Hand them the science. Your packet should contain the copy of the Warshack Consensus Report from 2014 with the list of the 110 endorsing experts highlighted in yellow, a copy of Linda Nielsen's meta-analysis of the 60 shared parenting studies with the specific sections on infants, toddlers, and conflict highlighted, your contemporaneous parenting log showing every single day you have fed, bathed, put to bed, dressed, cared for your child during the marriage and since separation, your respective marital audit showing your historical involvement in pediatrician visits, daycare pickups, and daily caregiving. And then also, and and and importantly, your you want to be specific about what you want. And that is your proposed parenting plan with that 223 or 5225, what it is, with specific transition exchange times, the designated public exchange location, mandatory, you know, a mandatory, mandatory, mandatory co-parenting app that gets written into the order as a requirement.

Build The Evidentiary Packet

SPEAKER_00 36:40

So be very specific. And then you hand all this to your attorney and you say, This is our ammunition. If they raise the tender years or attachment argument, we aren't going to debate their feelings because all they're coming from is feelings. We're going to introduce the consensus science of the APA and force them to disprove it by clear and convincing evidence, which you don't actually have to do with clear and convincing evidence, but it's going to be hard for them to mitigate this, right? So this is how you bridge that lawyer gap. You do the high-level research in the organization and you direct your legal team to execute with clinical evidentiary precision. And that's why how my client did it this last week. He did it absolutely tremendously. I was unbelievably proud of how he did this. He had his he had his attorney ready. Uh, he had walked through this with her. Uh he had, because this was this was his wife's only argument, was this? And he had all the documentation and it literally like just blasted it, lasted it right out and got got settled immediately. All right. So let's let's be direct. Let's and let's finish this up. The court system's not going to award you 50-50 custody because you're a nice guy. And if you've not figured this out yet, strategy is so important in this process. It's not going to do it because you hoped for fairness. Now you hope you've heard my podcasts about hope is not a strategy. Hope is not a strategy, okay? And the other side is going to be utilizing whatever they can, even an outdated, highly effective playbook that relies on your compliance and your panic, literally, like literally to show to slowly nudge the the nudge you out of your children's lives, right? Because if you spend the window of time between your court dates hoping she'll eventually see the truth, what you're doing is you're allowing a negative restricted status quo, this tender years idea, to harden around your fatherhood. And every day that you allow this to happen, and it does happen, it gets harder and harder to mitigate. So you gotta stop and you've got to step into the posture of that stable anchor, calm, structured, and maybe most importantly, clinically document. So, you know, so that you're, you know, when she's when she because what she might do then, once she sees that this isn't gonna work in court, you then are prepared to be able to uh deal with the top, you know, deal with the f the silver bullets or the toxic messages. You stay uh you stay gray rock if she gatekeeps, you document it factually and and and file whatever temporary orders,

Strategy Mindset And Taking Responsibility

SPEAKER_00 39:31

contempts. You know, when they try to claim the baby's too young, sleep under your risk, you meet their outdated psychology with the consensus of the hundred to ten of the world's leading scientific experts, right? You are armed with with the skills and the information to do this. And you are the only person in that room is truly fighting for your children's legacy, guys. I can't emphasize this enough. As much and as goodwilled and as good-natured and caring as anybody is in this process, the attorneys, the mediators, the evaluators, they are all part of a self-sustaining niche industry that lives in the gray area of court discretion. None of them, and I'm telling you, none of them are going to risk their standing or their referral networks to save your bond with your kids. That responsibility sits squarely on your shoulders. So think about it this way. And and well, I'm not even I'm not even going to the to the deficit about because I keep harping on it, but I'm gonna I'm gonna skip that. You you you need to get up to speed and you need to get this ready and and you need to be prepared in how to fight this fight, guys. So that's part of what we do in this podcast. It's part of why we built the divorce davicate community for this, with the blog, with the with the group meetings, with all the meetings we have, and with the individual coaching. So utilize the resources that we have here at the Divorce Davicate. You know, if you need some direct help, schedule some time with me. TalkwithJude.com. It schedules directly into my calendar. At the very least, we spend a little bit of time talking and triaging about what your next steps are. You heard Dorian a couple of months ago who did that just with me once and was able to execute on just one conversation. Now, I would say he's he's very mixed the exception, but then he wrote a book about it because he was able to execute on that or engage in some coaching from somewhere so that we can create this strategy in order to mitigate what if your kids are in these these uh tender years, right? You've got a decade and a half, at least two decades plus that's if you get a hardened parenting plan that's that is hard to undo, then you're stuck with and that you're fighting with, and has actually a detrimental impact on your kiddos, which we do not want. We can deal with this upfront and mitigate it up front so that it's not an ongoing challenge and battle going forward. So, gentlemen, dads, thanks for listening to this. Again, I know a lot of information. Grab the transcript, get in touch with me, get into the community. If you found value, please leave us a star rating or make some comments, share it on social media. We're just trying to proliferate this more and more and more to get more dad's information. So I appreciate you listening. Stay strong. God bless,

Resources Coaching And Closing Requests

SPEAKER_00 42:35

and we'll talk next week.