Comments, teaching & HuffPo Divorce

My most recent post on the Huffington Post has gotten the most comments to date.  (about 290 in 3 days).  Most of my other posts generally only got less than 50 comments.

The comments vary widely.  On the one hand, you now get to hear what the students in the back of your class are whispering to each other during the lecture.  For example, in response to the title of my post "Are the courts biased in favor of mothers, one commenter, wrote,  "When someone tells you there are no dumb questions, refer them to this headline."  Funny and snarky.

Overall, this post got some very thoughtful and interesting commenters.  [These are probably like the students who sit in the front of the class.]  For example, 715W posted the following,

The solution is to put divorce into an administra­­tive system rather than the judicial system.

To each divorce case, assign an administra­­tor trained in mediation/­­conflict resolution­­.

The commenter goes on the explain more about how this system of managing custody issues would work with this system.  

There were also a number of commenter who cited specific research and/or other scholarship that enriched the discussion.  Chris Sirhc writes, 

"The court's ability to determine the best interest of the child is limited. See Robert Emery's review of custody evaluators­. He is particular­ly daming: 'There is essentiall­y no psychologi­cal science to support the measures and constructs designed specifical­ly for the assessment of child custody arrangemen­ts for individual children.' "

http://psi­.sagepub.c­om/content­/6/1/1.ful­l

 In many cases these publications we new to me or added significant new perspectives to the discussion.  This is the type of discussion that I would hope my work fosters.

The third type of postings are the personal stories.  In many of the cases in this particular post the stories are by men who appear to have had particularly challenging, perhaps unfair treatment by the court system.  Michael Morrison wrote,

"I'm one of those odd-ball men who was awarded custody of his daughters. A couple of years later, Mom landed in jail, and decided that she wanted custody of the kids...Rem­ember, she was in jail.

Every few weeks, I'd be subpoenaed to appear in court. The experience was absolutely surreal: She would appear in her finest orange jail garb, and explain to the judge why she thought she should have custody. I would then have to explain why I thought custody shouldn't be awarded to an inmate.

This went on for months. It was absurd, and the court would never have countenanc­ed this sort of lunacy had the genders been reversed."

Overall, I think this was a good discussion.