It’s long been said that the court is a blunt instrument, but how blunt? Are we seeing swords being drawn yet? More than ever before parents are fighting over equal parenting time, particularly with fathers seeking a fifty-fifty parenting arrangement over the mother’s preference that the children be in her care a disproportionate amount of time.

Whether this is to address child support issues - which in many jurisdictions the amount of child support is directly connected to the percentage of parenting time - or whether it's an outcome of the women’s rights movement that men are catching up to and applying to themselves in the name of equality, courts are abusing the concept of cutting a child in two.

In 2015, Judge Jaime R. Román told the magazine, Family Law News, that he, "counted seventeen attempted suicides of children 
embroiled in family law matters over the course of his three-and-a-half-year tenure as a family court judge."

Although each parent blamed the other for the distress of their child, wondering what transpired in the others’ home, the real culprit is a court order that is detrimental to the child. While this will not kill the child in infancy, toddler-hood or as a preschooler,

imagine that child as an adolescent: Early onset sexual behavior, drugs, alcohol, truancy, delinquency, and suicide are the teenager’s solution to life’s relentless distress. The seeds of this destruction are planted from as young as infancy.

Given that the court fashions itself as a blunt instrument, and as parents continue to engage in the win/lose cycle - with each trying to info the perceived wrongs of the other - the child is subjected to the unrelenting parental distress and turmoil. As we're witnessing, without the sacrificial intervention of either parent, the fate of our future will result in the inevitable fate of the infant in King Solomon's story - death.