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Working moms say they’re facing their worst nightmare in today’s custody hearings. Are they getting a raw deal? Many lawyers and judges think so.
When we hear about custody battles, we pretty much take it for granted that the mother is going to wind up living with her kids, unless she’s glaringly unfit—a drug addict, a prostitute, a criminal. And if the mother is working to support her family, custody would seem to be a slam-dunk. We learned otherwise when we started researching our story on custody and working moms. To our surprise, we discovered that these days, when a judge sees a mother who’s working long hours at the office, the judge may have a difficult time awarding her primary custody. “If she’s working that hard, the presumption will be that she’s largely absent from her kids’ lives,” says Randy Kessler, a prominent divorce lawyer in Atlanta who is also vice chair of the American Bar Association’s Family Law Section.
As any working mother knows, having a career doesn’t mean that a woman is less devoted to her kids—or that she's spending less time with them. On the contrary, women frequently pile their career commitments on top of the hours spent caring for their children. Many of us know we work a "second shift" when we get home from the office: we cook dinner, help with homework, give baths and read bedtime stories. Working mothers are the quintessential can-do dynamos. We function as “traditional” moms as well as career women. What we know to be true is now being supported by research. Dr. Sampson Lee Blair of SUNY Buffalo found that today’s working mothers spend about the same number of hours caring for their children as stay-at-home moms did in the 1950s. That’s right-–Leave It to Beaver’s homemaker mom, with her coiffed hair, pressed apron and freshly baked pies, has nothing on today’s multitasking working moms.
Our story taught us that the courts haven’t fully grasped the many roles working mothers are able to juggle. And as a result, some women have paid the highest price imaginable for their careers—loss of the right to live with their children. I look forward to the American Bar Association’s symposium this June that will look at this very issue. Lawyers and judges in the family court system will gather to explore how to make the custody process less destructive to the families who appear before them. It’s a step in the right direction.
