Using Children Of Divorce As Weapons In Custody Battle Is Wrong But It Keeps Happening

Some parents going through a divorce use their children as weapons against each other. Experts have been pointing out how this is a wrong approach because it's the kids who will suffer the most.

Hundreds of custody cases, however, have ex-partners pitting against each other at the expense of the children. So, why does this still keep happening?

According to Andrea Peyser of the New York Post, something needs to be fixed in the divorce system in America. She cited three high-profile cases involving celebrity parents like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Uma Thurman and Arpad Busson, and Kelly Rutherford and Daniel Giersch, whose custody battles are open to public scrutiny.

Peter Bronstein, the lawyer for Busson, however, told the Post that he appreciates the open courts in America's divorce proceedings. "We have a system of justice in which one party can't deny a party who seeks something, whether it be custody or money, a fair hearing before an impartial judge," Busson said.

Such open court hearings, however, have bitter ex-partners dredging muck and filth against each other to discredit their parenting abilities, and in the process, it's affecting the children's emotional well-being. Peyser wrote the same thing is happening to custody battles involving non-celebrity parents as in the case of a New Yorker mom named Brenda.

Brenda's custody battle against her ex went on for three years. It did not go well for her children who "absorbed the garbage flowing between their father and me." What Brenda realized, in the end, was that it's only the lawyers who gained from the whole ordeal.

Peyser wrote there must be a better way to handle divorces and child developmental expert Penelope Leach wrote a similar sentiment in her book, "Family Breakdown," which was released in 2014. "We're not handling [divorce], or dealing with it, any more successfully at all," the author said, according to The Guardian.

Leach tells parents going through a divorce to keep in mind that while they are no longer each other's husband or wife, they remain dad and mom to the children forever. Thus, "mutual parenting" should be the goal of parents who don't like their ex-partners but have to agree to get along for the kids.