There’s a belief that during a divorce, the state will always assume that the mother is the superior parent. While that might once have been true, it is no longer the case. At least here in Florida.
In this episode, Orlando child custody lawyer A.J. Grossman will explain why the idea of mothers always being considered the superior parent is just another divorce myth.
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Show Transcript
Hi, everyone, welcome. Thank you for joining me today. My name is A.J. Grossman and I’m a divorce attorney with Leap Frog Divorce. I’m also a Florida Supreme Court certified family mediator, and a dispute resolution specialist.
You know, after doing divorces for over a decade now I’ve talked with a lot of potential clients and clients who are mothers. And they usually come into a divorce, believing that for whatever reason that the mom is a superior parent. And the reasons are varied. Some believe that it’s the mom that is a superior parent because they’re the ones who physically gave birth to the child, or historically, that’s the way it’s always been, or mothers are better mentally equipped to take care of children, to pay attention to children to nurture children. And that historically, or traditionally, a dad’s role was as a provider, you know, to go out in the fields, to hunt and kill game, or to you know, labor, doing whatever and then to bring money home to support the family.
And those really are outdated concepts, I can tell you that Florida has done a wonderful job over the years, trying to revise the language in their laws regarding, you know, typical stereotypes or biases, men versus women, dads versus moms. And I can tell you that our judges, for the most part, do a really good job of looking at a mom and dad as equal parents. Our Florida laws reflect that each parent should enjoy the time with children, raising children, and rearing children, they’re both equally important parents.
And so when it comes to things like visitation or custody, which is how most people think of it, you know, without getting too much into technical details in Florida, we don’t refer to visitation and custody, we call it time-sharing and parental responsibility. But to keep it simple, I’ll refer to visitation and custody. They just don’t consider or think about, well, Mom’s going to have the majority of the visitation or Mom’s going to have custody of all the children. Because dad is a lesser parent.
We don’t have any kind of primary parent. We don’t have any kind of like a primary residential parent, or secondary residential parent. Florida law looks at moms and dads as equal parents and after they’re divorced they are equal co-parents. And as a matter of fact, the default parenting arrangement or custody arrangement in Florida is called shared parental responsibility, which means mom and dads are going to cooperate when it comes to making decisions for their children and each parent has an equal right to contribute to the decision making process. So I hope that this video was helpful. I hope it helped to bust the myth that mothers are the superior parent when it comes to Florida law and divorces. They are not. If you found this video helpful please like and subscribe to my channel. I’m releasing new videos all the time with a lot of free information that I hope you will find very helpful. I hope you enjoy your holidays this season and be well.
