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To
A Father
If you are
presently involved in a child custody
dispute (or might be involved in one
in the future) we have
identified information of
great
importance that you
should have.
THIS INFORMATION
WILL HELP YOU, AS A FATHER, MAKE YOUR
STRONGEST CASE FOR CUSTODY. It will
also directly
help protect
your
children now
and in
the future
. Your
children
will
thank you one day for taking
"their best interests"
seriously!
Over the 30-plus
years of our working in the child
custody field, we have become
increasingly involved in cases that
have frequently found their way into
court. We have acted as expert
witnesses, custody evaluators or
consultants for hundreds of parents
involved in custody disputes all over
the country.
Further, as editors
of a national publication on custody
matters, as responders to a 24-hour
"hotline" where we answer questions
from professionals about our tests,
and as directors of a national
organization of custody experts, we
continually hear from
judges, attorneys,
professional
experts and
parents
who in one
way or another have been caught up in
custody disputes, some of them
simple, but most longstanding,
complex and
bitter.
As a result of all
of these activities, we came to
gather a huge amount of
information on how
various psychological and
legal
strategies, different kinds
of evidence, and types of allegations
work (or fail to work), both in the
courtroom as well as in out-of-court
negotiations.
The following are
some of our thoughts on what we have
experienced.
Everything discussed here is covered in our
new Strategies
handbook.
We were shocked at
how many bright, wise,
loving---indeed even
"savvy"---fathers did not know
the single most
important
fact that must be
true if one is to prevail in a
custody dispute. And this must be the
best kept secret in the world,
because even extremely intelligent,
sophisticated professionals fail to
make use of it. Indeed, even
attorneys, who themselves as parents
are caught up in custody disputes,
frequently do not know how to make
his single most important factor work
for them.
We
identified fourteen "key
behaviors" that
differentiate between parents who do
well in custody disputes from those
who do not. We consider these
behaviors to
be extremely
critical.
We have identified
what we see as
the single biggest
mistake a father in a
custody dispute can make. And the
irony here is that our own legal
system actually encourages fathers to
make this huge
mistake.
If you are a father
in a child custody dispute, you must
learn to recognize (and deal
with) blatantly wrong and
immoral strategies
that will likely be used against you.
To add insult to injury, these
strategies can be effective. And in
our experience, many attorneys fail
to help their clients deal with
these tragically
effective
strategies, because they are
more psychological than legal
strategies, and attorneys are not
often trained either
to recognize or deal
with them.
Another exceedingly
important point is that too many
fathers do not fully understand all
the important things their attorneys
should be doing for them. Simply put,
many fathers do not know what
they should ask
for.
While on the topic
of attorneys, we also discovered two
important strategies that will
literally "force" an attorney to do
a better job for a
client.
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