When a baby is born in Texas and the parents are not married, the law does not automatically recognize the biological father as the child’s legal father. That is where the term “paternity” comes into the matter, and luckily, the Texas Family Code provides the framework to establish it.
The term “military divorce” is used when talking about a divorce where one or both spouses are active-duty military personnel or service members, including those in the national guard or reservists. As compared to a civilian divorce, there are additional requirements in a military divorce and, while this may add to the complexity and duration of the divorce process, those additional requirements are designed to help protect those serving our country who are facing a military divorce.
Divorce is often cited as one of the most stressful events an individual will ever experience. A parent experiencing a divorce is understandably preoccupied with the event, may harbor animosity toward the other parent, and is experiencing a significant amount of distress. Children are without question significantly impacted by the separation of their family and the end of their atomic family unit.
Until recently, Oklahoma courts have not addressed the issue of whether a multiunit horizontal well that is commenced off-unit can perpetuate a lease on the adjacent unit into its secondary term, if the lateral for the well fails to penetrate the unit in which the leased premises was located until after the primary term of the lease has expired.
“Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” The Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, 44:1.
Domestic abuse is real and its impact on families is not limited to those who find themselves in family law courts. Family law courts deal with the issue on a regular basis though, whether legitimate or contrived as a strategy. Violence between parents poses a considerable psychological and physical risk to the well-being and development of children, however, the development of each child is unique based on the child’s experiences before and after the witnessed abuse as well as the environment in which they find themselves.
As the rate of marriage has decreased, childbearing and coupling have not. The unwed birthrate has dramatically increased in recent years, and by 2010 it was at 40.3%.[1] Many parents who are living outside a marriage relationship may not share child-rearing responsibilities comparable to a married couple, therefore domestic courts are left to structure a parenting plan which may not have any familial precedence to look to for guidance, and in other cases the parenting plan may be created at the birth of the child leaving the creation of the parenting plan to the biases, whims, and judgments of the court without any evidence to support the parenting style of either parent.
Only 34 percent of children born in the United States in 2000 will be living with both parents in the same house by age 18, according to some projections. Further projections estimate only fourteen percent of fathers winning custody of their children, and only twenty-five percent of children of divorce seeing their father weekly or more.
Few issues within the domestic courts are as fraught with emotion and lead to prolonged litigation like those of disagreements over custody and parenting time. Good parents are often blinded by the emotions of the moment and fail to recognize the need to jointly parent their children. This leaves the courts to protect the parents’ equal rights to the children, but without a proper statutory framework, too many parents find parental equality an illusion when they step into a family law courtroom. This is in spite of the fact that recent studies and reports such as The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC), the “Warshak Consensus” paper,1 and others have concluded that children are best served when parenting plans facilitate shared parenting and time between parents.
by Stephanie Moser Goins[1]
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