Quite often, parents who are separating or breaking up are pretty angry with one another and they let that anger spill over into their custody arrangements. It can be tough sometimes to separate your anger and the other person from your role and their role as parents to a child. This is one area where you just can't afford to be angry. The effects of a divorce or breakup simply cannot be allowed to spill over onto your children.

Divorce doesn't always mean you are going to end up in a courtroom, fighting to the bitter end over every nickel in the bank and every chair and end table in the house. In fact, that usually doesn't happen. More often than not, divorcing couples find a way to come to agreement on some or all of the issues related to dividing up their things and dealing with the children. Litigation is the last thing that happens, after everything else fails.

There are two things that I often hear from new clients when they come to talk to me about a child custody case: The Courts are biased against fathers. Mothers always win in custody cases. Neither of these things are true.

What it comes right down to is that stability and effective co-parenting wins custody cases, regardless of what your gender is. I can understand where misperceptions about how custody cases work and why more women seem to have custody of the children in a divorce--it's there in the statistics. But raw numbers don't really explain what's going on with all these cases.

Since my wife and I had our first child in March, I've had precious little time to sleep let alone post things to this blog. It's been a month and, while I still don't get much sleep, I need to get back into the swing of things. So here are some thoughts on the Fathers Rights movement.

At one point in North Carolina and plenty of other states, there was something called the "tender years" presumption in family law. It was a doctrine that said the law presumed that children of a young age should be placed with a mother unless a father could show enough evidence to rebut that presumption. The tender years presumption, along with plenty of other gender-biased parts of family law, were largely written out of statutes or overruled and replaced in case law in the 1960s and 1970s in North Carolina and elsewhere. So where does this more recent "fathers rights" movement come from?

It's been a hectic couple weeks, which has limited my time to post. But, I'm here now and April 15 is rapidly approaching so I'll offer a bit on what to do about your taxes.

Occasionally, I run across a situation in an equitable distribution case where one party decides that if he or she can't have it, no one will. That spouse then begins a vindictive campaign to hide money and assets, transferring things to other people, moving funds from bank accounts, cashing out retirement, and letting mortgages go unpaid. It's a tough situation to deal with and potentially very damaging to the financial future of the other spouse. Here's what you can do to prevent this from happening to you.

A problem that often crops up in child custody cases is information sharing when it comes to the kids. It is common, especially in cases where parties are in high conflict, that the parent who is the primary custodian doesn't let the other parent know about much of the day-to-day information about the children's education or healthcare. Here's what you should be doing to keep the other parent informed, and what you should be asking for if you are the non-custodial parent.

Now that I am slightly rested after a glorious victory by the Saints in the Superbowl, I'm back for another blog entry. Today, a word or two on what to do about getting someone to move out of the house.

I've already mentioned that separation begins when someone establishes a different residence. The concept is pretty simple, but getting to that point can be tricky. What if you both want to stay in the house?

The number of unrepresented people in family court who show up to try their own cases has risen dramatically over the last couple years. Most of this is because there are a lot of people who can't afford the $2000 or $3000 (or more) it usually costs to have an attorney represent them. If you are stuck with this situation, what should you do?

I have a contempt trial tomorrow morning. I do a lot of these. I am appointed by the domestic court judges to defend some and just as often I find myself trying to hold someone in contempt of an order. There are plenty of motions to hold someone in contempt of Court, usually filed by unrepresented people, that are basically just angry people trying to get back at the spouse who got custody of the children or won an alimony award or something of that nature. More often, however, these hearings are necessary because someone simply refuses to do what they were ordered to do.