Getting the Court in Your Business: Parenting Time, Legal Distrust, and Family Court Involvement

• In Event: 2173 - Parenting and Inequality

Abstract

Although new proposals would make parenting time (visitation) part of all new child support orders, limited research has examined unmarried parents’ views of engaging the family court system to set up these legal orders. Individual and group interviews with disadvantaged mothers and fathers in New York showed that many parents framed family court involvement as intrusive, opting to stay out of court to avoid unwanted scrutiny or involvement by the child welfare and criminal justice systems. By contrast, other parents framed family courts as being protective of them or their children, and chose to engage the legal system when their child’s custody was ambiguous, their child’s safety was threatened, or their status in other public programs was at stake. New efforts around parenting time have the potential to affect large numbers of disadvantaged families, since about half of poor children participate in the child support program. By investigating how low-income men and women view decisions around parenting time, this study adds to our understanding of how disadvantaged parents use multiple frames to solve everyday problems associated with poverty. The study also contributes to the literature on trust in low-income families and communities, by shedding light on a key institutional arena where distrust may influence poor men and women’s decisions and be strategically employed to protect their families. Finally, it provides insight into how distrust may lead to “institutional avoidance” of family courts, potentially closing off important opportunities and protections for some disadvantaged families.

Author

• Maureen Waller, Cornell University