I had a call from a potential client this past week, a mother who was very distraught because during his last week of summer parenting time, her ex-husband had taken their ten year old daughter for a haircut. He did not consult with the mother first, and she was furious about that. She called me determined to file a motion to have him held in contempt of court for violating the joint legal custody provision of their divorce judgment. She wanted the judge to teach him a lesson so that this would never happen again!
This call was identical to many I’ve had over the years. Sometimes its fathers, and sometimes its mothers but the theme is always the same – the offended parent feels that the other parent has co-opted his/her right to decide when and what type of haircut the child should receive.
Without detailing how I’ve handled these calls in the past, this time I decided to explore the issue in more detail with the caller before offering any advice. I explained that I wanted to have a full grasp of the problem and had a few questions. These included:
• Did the parties have an agreement about the child’s haircuts, that might include whether they were to consult with each other, who was supposed to take her for the haircut, what salon or beautician would cut her hair, and what input was the child permitted to have as to the style? They had no agreements of any kind in place, but the caller reminded me that she had initially mentioned the parties share joint legal custody, so she knew important decisions were to be made jointly.
• How did her daughter like her haircut? Was she happy with it, or was she upset? The child liked her haircut but that wasn’t the point, said the caller. The principle of joint legal custody did not permit him to get away with this!
• Did the caller interrogate the child about the circumstances surrounding the decision to get a haircut? No, she assured me, she would never do that! She only asked her daughter whose idea the haircut was (it was the father’s), and where was it done? When she talked to the father, he claimed that he asked the daughter if she would like a haircut before the start of school and that she had said “yes.” The caller assured me that certainly, those questions are not an interrogation and did not place the child in the middle between the parents.
I then re-capped for the caller what I understood the facts to be. The father of her ten year old daughter had a conversation with the child about a start-of-school-year haircut, determined that she would like the haircut, took her to a salon, where she received a cut and style that she really liked, and after questioning the child, the mother wanted to take the father to court over a haircut the child wanted and liked, so that he would never do such a thing again without her permission or consent. I had one more question:
What did the mother think would cause her daughter more distress? A haircut without her mother’s permission or her parents ending up in court fighting over who gets to decide about haircuts?
At that point the caller started crying a bit, but did not answer the question. I suggested to her that she might wish to consider some sage advice my late mother once gave me about a different subject entirely, which is Pick and Choose Your Battles. If she is going to hire a lawyer and run off to court to fight with the father of her child every time she disagrees with a parenting decision, she will (a) go broke, and (b) annoy the judge – never a good thing, and (c) – most importantly – likely inflict irreparable emotional harm on the child, who will inevitably view herself as the cause of all the conflict.
I gave her some examples of unilateral decision-making battles most likely worth fighting over, including subjecting the child to elective surgery, enrolling the child in a private school if she was always in public, or vice versa, or deciding to home school – or converting the child to a different religion when she had been raised with a strongly established religious identity. I then suggested a process to get her and the ex-husband into mediation to address decision-making issues for the future, as an alternative to going to court over a haircut.
Here is the main point: There is no question that, in the majority of cases, children are unable to understand that the parents are locked in endless strife because that is the nature of their relationship. From the child’s point of view, she is the cause of the strife. This is very damaging to a child’s emotional well-being. If only divorced parents would understand the detrimental impact the fighting has on the children! These are the at-risk kids who, by high school, will be doing drugs, skipping classes, suffering from a variety of mental health issues that require costly psycho-therapy, and even ending up before juvenile judges. If only a parent would ask this simple question: what is more disruptive to my child’s well-being: a haircut or her parents fighting over the haircut in court?
The call ended on a friendly note, but for all I know, the caller just went down a line of names of attorneys, until she found one willing to file a motion and spend thousands of her dollars seeking a court order which attempts to micro-manage the co-parenting of her daughter. While I hope for her child’s sake she did not make that decision, countless divorced parents make that very decision on a daily basis. Yes, some battles are worth fighting, but surely a haircut that a child likes, or an occasional late school night at the movies, or a fast-food dinner? Not every parenting decision (even ones of questionable wisdom) requires the filing of a motion and a court battle that is both financially and emotionally costly.
What do you think?