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March 21, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:28
How the Family Court System Is Fueling a Fatherless Society: Mark Ludwig
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The number one stability point a child needs is not where they live, but who they have a relationship with.
And the stability of the relationship with both parents is more important than what house they live in.
After experiencing the family court system firsthand, Mark Ludwig founded Americans for Equal Shared Parenting to make equal access to both parents the default in divorce proceedings.
Too often, judges relegate one parent, typically the father, to a lesser role in a child's life.
The opposition has done a great job of creating the narrative that this is just a bunch of angry dads who have anger management problems, conflict resolution problems.
Maybe they shouldn't even be a dad.
Ludwig travels the country advocating for what he calls a 50 /50 rebuttable presumption, legislation that makes 50 /50 equal custody in a divorce the norm, so long as both parents are fit, willing, and able.
Now, I'll fight just as hard for mothers as I do fathers, because I'm not fighting for the mother or the father.
I'm fighting for the child.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Mark Ludwig, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks for having me back.
I appreciate it.
So, Mark, when we interviewed five years ago, and this was actually one of the earliest American Thought Leaders interviews, I remember it very well.
You told me that...
I think 80% of the people that go through some sort of divorce cases, one of the parents basically becomes the main custodian.
And that's kind of what we expect, in a sense, to happen.
Like, why is that an issue?
Yeah, until it happened to me, I wouldn't have thought there was a problem either if somebody would have told me one parent.
Every other weekend, I would have thought, well, yeah, isn't that normal?
And then I went through a situation myself, and it's funny how it changes your perspective when it happens to you, and more importantly, when it happens to your child.
That's when I started realizing there was a serious problem.
Well, tell me about your situation.
Let's remind our viewers that might not have been watching five years ago.
Yeah, mine, without going into too many details, there was some question on paternity, and I ended up going 204 days without seeing my son.
He was moved without my knowledge, and I was told I'd never see him again.
And I did end up getting a DNA test, and he is mine, so I'm very glad.
It was worth everything that I went through.
But after that 204 days, I kind of expected the norm was going to be I would walk out of the courtroom with at least 50-50.
And I ended up getting relegated to even less than, you know, and every other weekend because my son was so young.
Matter of fact, the guardian ad litem literally made the statement, well, your son hasn't really seen you so much, and he went seven months without seeing you, so it might be traumatic for him to get too much time with you.
And I thought...
So if a kidnapper had kidnapped my son, would you say, well, you know, your son's kind of used to that kidnapper, so we're going to leave him with the kidnapper.
I'm like, he's my son.
He needs to be with me to get that bonding in.
And I was pretty well known in St. Louis.
A TV station did a story on what happened.
And I started getting message after message after message of people saying, hey, the same thing happened to me.
Same thing happened to me.
And that was when I realized this wasn't me.
This is a systemic problem within the family court system.
That needs to really be worked on.
So that was when I really started my deep dive into what I'm doing now.
Well, so, I mean, it was 83%, I think, where one of the parents was the main custodian, I think.
And 83% of that was...
The mother, right?
Yeah, in 83% of the cases, if there's a primary custodian, it's going to be the mother.
Now, I'll fight just as hard for mothers as I do fathers because I'm not fighting for the mother or the father.
I'm fighting for the child.
I truly believe in my heart a child needs both of their parents.
Okay, because this is the question.
Isn't the mother actually more important?
Isn't that the assumption?
I think that's what a lot of people might think, right?
A lot of people picture the mother as the more nurturing, and traditionally the mother does have a nurturing role, but that's because in a traditional family dynamic, traditionally one of the parents, usually the father, is the breadwinner.
They're the disciplinarian.
The mother is more the nurturer, the caregiver.
But when two people split, now you have to have both dynamics in each house.
Both parents have to be the nurturer and the provider in each house.
And so the child needs both because to remove and rip one parent out of a child's life, that's going to create a lot of confusion.
I believe that God designed opposites to attract for a reason.
Each have a strength and each has a weakness.
One parent may be a little more lenient, the other is a little more strict.
So it's sort of they pull each other together when they're raising a child.
You remove one parent out of the picture and you've got a very...
It spins in a circle instead of having that dynamic of the parents bouncing back and forth off each other.
There's research that's been done on this, right?
Yeah. Dr. Warren Farrell, who you know, is just a great guy.
He wrote a book called The Boy Crisis, where he covers a lot of that information in a lot of great detail of what happens to children who grew up without a father.
And like I said, I'll fight just as hard for the mother, but we've got the statistics that a child growing up without a father that doesn't have the disciplinarian, Doesn't have the person who sets the boundaries for the child, is so much more likely to grow up with behavioral problems, drug problems, be incarcerated,
high school dropout rates, teen pregnancy rates.
All those problems, the one common thread is they grew up without a dad.
Now, yes, there are some dads that walk away, but you don't punish the children of the other dads because some parents walked away.
The presumption should be that a parent is presumed to be fit, willing, and able unless proven otherwise.
I give the analogy, if someone gets a DWI, you don't take everyone's driver's license away.
The fact that you have a driver's license gives the presumption that you're a fit, willing, and able driver.
Unless proven otherwise.
Well, the fact that you have a child, you should be presumed to be a fit, willing, and able parent unless proven otherwise.
But you don't just rip a parent out of a child's life just because, well, this is the way we've always been doing it.
It's interesting.
There's a lot of research that I've seen, frankly, in a very bipartisan way, more conservative researchers, more liberal researchers, that children growing up in a nuclear family are set up for success, statistically, basically, right?
Does that still hold for children that are basically where the parents are separated, but both parents are in the home?
That's a question.
Do we know that?
Yeah, two great points about that.
One is, ironically, the research that's been done that shows either the nuclear family, the dad is the custodial parent, or the mother is the custodial parent.
The best is the nuclear family.
Believe it or not, very, very slim difference between a child raised by a single father, but a marginal difference where it declines raised by a single mother.
And I think that's because of those boundaries.
Now, in the research we do have, though, of parents who do have co-parenting arrangements where they're 50-50, there's been a lot of research, an organization called National Parents Organization on their website has a lot of research that they've done.
Dr. Bill Fabricius has done the best study that's out there from Arizona State.
Arizona passed a bill, it's not what we call a true 50-50, but in 2012 it was the closest thing to that at the time.
And he studied, I forget how many, either 300 or 600 kids for a six-year period of time before 2012 and then...
Until 2018.
And it was amazing.
It shows point by point.
So a child who had 36% did better than a child who had 31% time.
A child who had 40% did.
And it was literally a linear progression right up to 50-50.
And he studied academically, emotionally, socially, and behaviorally.
And on all four points, the children literally, it was a dramatic progression that the more time they got with both parents, the better they did on all.
So, your 50 /50 is not just...
Based on the idea of fairness, it's also based on the idea of...
Oh, the science is out there.
There have been 64 peer-reviewed studies that Linda Nielsen has reviewed, and they all come to the same conclusion, that children fare better with both parents.
That's amazing.
So this is really the answer, because this is my other question.
Like, why 50-50?
Like, why should we assume the default should be 50-50?
But you've kind of answered that here.
Yeah, if it takes two parents, the child needs...
I always try to think about it from my son's eyes.
Early on, I thought about, you know, this isn't fair to me as a dad.
My son's being taken away.
And I always encourage parents that are going through this, forget about yourself.
Think about your child.
But a child growing up where one parent is considered, in their mind, perceptually, the superior parent and one's the inferior parent.
And one parent has to beg to be able to change the schedule.
One parent has to beg for phone time.
One can be the gatekeeper.
One pretty much decides whether the child can do extracurricular activities or not.
From the child's perspective, this is my real parent.
And this one's kind of almost like an uncle or an aunt.
They're not really a parent in their mind.
And imagine the child then when they become a teenager and they need disciplinarian help.
How much are they going to respect this person?
They've been relegated to a visitor or you're not important.
It's going to be very hard.
But the child is very confused because they love both parents the same.
But they see it too.
They see the hurt of the one parent.
And the child internalizes that to where they feel like it's me.
I'm the cause of this.
I'm the cause of the fights between my parent.
I'm the reason this parent's hurting.
I try to not let Levi see when I'm hurting, but children pick up on that energy.
He can tell.
And from his perspective, I hope he never feels this way, but I know he has to at times, thinking, I'm the reason why Dad's hurting right now.
Children have enough pressure trying to grow up nowadays.
They don't need that extra pressure of they're the reason for the struggles between the two parents.
Mark, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Mark Ludwig, founder of Americans for Equal Shared Parenting.
When we met, you had just begun getting legislation passed that would make 50 /50 the default.
And so I want to explain that as well, because there's a lot of, for example, one of the criticisms I've heard is, well, you're going to put a kid into an abusive parent's home because of this obsession with 50-50.
So I want to get you to respond to that.
But also, how has this basically developed since then?
And why is it that the default hasn't naturally been 50-50, right?
Like, why is it that it ended up being 83% or whatever it is?
Yeah, it's been a fun ride.
I shouldn't necessarily say fun ride.
It wasn't the direction I thought my life would take.
But, yeah, I started becoming involved in the shared parenting community about nine years ago and then progressively getting more and more active.
Prior to that, what had happened was we had a lot of dads who meant well, but they fed right into the angry dad narrative.
The opposition has done a great job of creating the narrative that this is just a bunch of angry dads who have anger management problems, conflict resolution problems.
Maybe they shouldn't even be a dad.
And what used to happen is people would have protest.
And so they would stand at the courthouse and they would hold these signs, you know, my rights as a dad and corrupt judges.
I understand where they're coming from.
I've felt that, too.
The challenge is you get ten guys together that have been through a family court situation.
One tells their story, and it's emotional.
It's a form of PTSD.
I mean, you can feel all the emotions, the triggers.
You can feel your heart beating faster when you're recalling the worst part of your life.
And so they tell their story, and that riles up somebody else who tells their story that's even more impassioned than the first one.
And pretty soon these guys are all riled up in a frenzy, and they look like they're in a Braveheart scene, you know, ready to go into battle.
And it just feeds right into the narrative of, wow, those guys look a little extreme.
So what we've tried to do, I've got quite a political background, so I started doing these Facebook Lives every Monday night, trying to educate people on the proper way to meet with legislators, how to frame the narrative, how to keep calm while you're talking to people, how to get past the gatekeeper,
what are the steps in passing legislation, and it sort of caught on.
So we started doing some things, and I've been very fortunate to combine it.
It's not my efforts.
It's a bunch of people all working together.
just that while I'm here obviously talking about me but I hope everybody watching understands I'm not bragging about myself there's a lot of people out there that are working on this but yeah we've we've done a lot of great work we've been able to we started off Kentucky passed a bill a lot of help with that end
And just very briefly,
that rebuttable...
Yeah, thanks for clarifying.
I forgot.
A 50-50 rebuttable presumption just means that the presumption should be that 50-50, each parent is going to get equal time, or more importantly, the child's going to get equal time with both of those parents.
The word rebuttable means a judge still has judicial discretion, so it's not a rubber stamp.
The opposition always tries to say, well, you're going to rubber stamp and force every kid to get 50-50, which means abusive parents.
No, no, no, no, no.
A judge has what's...
It's known as determining factors that they look at to find out, is a parent fit, willing, and able?
If not, that removes the presumption.
We just say, instead of starting at, you know, the 83% where one parent's going to get every other weekend, start with a presumption in the middle, and then a judge can determine, do we need to vary that?
So give me a picture of how this movement has grown.
Yeah, grown quite a bit.
Matter of fact, as of right now, I'll be working in 31 states around the country this year, in 2025, that we're going to have different bills in 31 different states.
And that's just the ones I'm working on.
I know there's others out there besides the ones.
So it's really neat.
It's really sort of the ripple effect.
You know, it's really spread all across the country, and I think people are really waking up to the fact that the damage that is done to a child by ripping one parent out of their lives.
So we're getting a lot of support, and we're getting a lot of support, too, because now we have so many legislators.
I'm amazed.
I was just talking to one today across the street who said the same thing.
They were like, oh my gosh, I just went through a custody battle last year.
And in just about every chamber across the country, I'm coming across legislators that say,"Hey, I went through this.
I'd like to sponsor your bill." I mean, fascinating.
And tell me, you've gotten some very interesting preliminary information from Kentucky about some positive impacts from this bill, as I understand.
If you could just speak to that a bit and what research needs to be done, right?
Yeah, it's an interesting thing because for years the opposition continually said, boy, if this bill passes, it's going to create havoc because people are going to be creating all these adversarial relationships are going to get worse.
You're going to increase domestic violence because kids are going to be with abusers.
And ironically, it's turned out to the exact reverse.
On this NPO website, you'll be able to see the actual statistics from Kentucky, but I don't know them offhand, but it's about 15%, 10 to 15% that divorce rates dropped.
And I think the reason why is because right now I have a lot of my followers that say, Mark, I didn't hate my ex near as much until I went into my first family law attorney's office who said, look, in our state, you're not going to get 50-50.
So I need you to help me dig up dirt on...
Now picture this.
Here's a couple.
They're already emotional.
They're splitting up.
And instead of thinking of positive things, how can we work together or how can we benefit our child, they're rehashing the worst of the worst parts that they know about their ex.
That's not a healthy way to start a new dynamic in the child's family.
And anytime you're thinking about the past, you're not thinking positive.
You're thinking of the worst of the worst.
And so this adversarial relationship is created.
And why?
Not putting down, but it's a fact.
Family law attorneys make their money on billable hours.
If a couple's going to get 50-50, there's not a lot of billable hours in that.
But man, if they can keep you fighting back and forth, they can rack up tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills.
Imagine how different it would be if you could walk into a state like Kentucky and the family law attorney says, look, in our state, you're probably going to get 50-50.
So unless you've got some proven, you know, abuse, you may as well learn how to co-parent and put that money in your kid's college fund instead of my kid's college fund.
And so that's what I think is happening in Kentucky and Arkansas and a lot of these other states is people are realizing that they shouldn't be fighting.
And I think about 10 to 15 percent of marriages are now getting back together and reuniting because instead of being riled up, they take a step back and they realize we don't have to come out slinging right out of the ring.
We can take a breath.
We can take a step back.
And now they realize, you know what, for the benefit of our child, let's give this marriage a second try.
You know, that actually reminds me of, you know, the case of Greg Ellis, which he wrote in the book about in the book The Respondent.
And, you know, I guess our viewers can see and can watch that interview.
It can be pretty traumatizing what family court looks like in America, and maybe not just America, in my country of Canada as well.
I'm aware of that being the situation.
And you're kind of speaking a bit to kind of the incentive structures here, a bit of...
You know, why that might be.
I want to get you to comment on that a little bit, because there might be a very positive impact of this 50-50 assumption.
That's just what's striking me as we're talking about this.
Yeah, and Greg's book is a great book.
Greg's a good friend of mine, too.
I just talked to him a couple of weeks ago.
But yeah, his book really brings out what happens in family court.
And as I said, it really is a form of PTSD, because the person you love the most in your life, your child...
There's the chance they could be ripped out of your life.
You don't know, are you going to get zero custody?
Are you going to get 50-50?
And most men in most states, and like I said, there's some women too, but as a man, most guys walking into the courtroom know that there's a chance they're going to get every other weekend a high probability of that.
But in some cases, they'll get nothing at all.
Imagine what you feel like every time the phone rings or every time you get something in the mail that says family courts are from your attorney.
Your blood pressure rises.
You can feel your pulse.
You can feel your temperature rise.
Your whole body goes into fight-or-flight system.
And it does that every day.
And these family court cases go on for over a year in most cases.
And then what it does to your body, the trauma that it does from a health standpoint, it's amazing the trauma you go through.
And I still get to that point.
Every once in a while, I can remember.
There's times, and most non-custodial parents know that feeling of seeing your ex on the phone, and as soon as you see that name, you're like, uh-oh, is this a problem again?
And it's created by this dynamic of the family court system.
And as I said, if they can rack up those billable hours, and the easiest way to do that, you'll give up on your house, you'll give up on your car eventually, but most people aren't going to give up on their kids.
And attorneys know that.
And sadly, and this is not putting all attorneys down, there's a lot of great attorneys out there.
But some of them unknowingly, and I think they don't intentionally mean to, but they know psychologically, hey, if I can keep this up, there's more billable hours here.
How does that change when the assumption is 50-50, unless there's extraneous circumstances?
Yeah, and I've got several attorney friends of mine in St. Louis that off the record have told me, yeah, the billable hours, it drops substantially once they know they're probably going to get 50-50.
Now it increases, and this is the good thing about 50-50 too, because people always say, what about a situation where there is abuse?
Well, that's why we need 50-50, because right now the courtrooms are so clogged with cases that shouldn't be in there, judges don't have the time to worry about those cases right now.
They've got a docket with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cases.
Imagine if we could clear those dockets of all the cases that really shouldn't even be there.
Now a judge has the time to focus on the cases where there may be abuse or there is abuse, and the judge needed the time but hasn't been getting them.
And so that's one thing that really is beneficial.
But I'm hearing from a lot of attorneys that off the record, they don't want to say it on the record because that's, you know, the Bar Association will come down on them hard if they say anything on the record.
But off the record, they'll tell me, you know, Mark, this is a lot better outcome.
We're seeing a lot better, you know, the dynamic of the parents after, you know.
Normally, a parent leaves a courtroom, they don't talk to their parent.
They're looking the other direction.
They're mad.
If they do say anything, they're yelling at them across the hallway.
And I'm hearing a lot of attorneys that are telling me now, you know what, it's amazing to watch in the courtrooms in St. Louis that both parents afterwards are literally saying goodbye to each other in the hallway now instead of screaming at each other or ignoring each other and stomping out of the courtroom.
Play this out for me, too.
I'm still sort of fixated on this incentive structure piece because I really think that that determines a lot these days, right?
If the assumption is 50-50, why wouldn't an attorney still try to besmirch one of the parents and just keep it going?
You'll still get some of that going on, but the 50-50 is a presumption that says, hey, you're presumed that you're both going to get 50-50, but you better have some overriding reason.
Without the 50-50, there don't need to be an overriding reason.
You just come out, swing in, and whoever wins, one of you is going to win, one of you is going to lose.
It's really...
What's in the judge's mind at the beginning that matters, right?
Exactly. And that's why we're wanting to start that presumption that, hey, you're both on a level playing field.
You've got to come up with some kind of reason.
If there's something that stands out that, hey, this is a problem here, there's some abuse here, now we're going to talk about that.
But if not, let's get that out of the courtroom and start learning how to co-parent.
Any final thought as we finish?
The ship never turns as quick as you'd like it to.
But over the last nine years, it's been very rewarding to get cards and letters from people in the states that we've passed, letting me know that, hey, Mark, thanks, I just got 50-50 in our state.
And it's a rewarding feeling to think that there's a great team of us across the country all working together, and we're making a difference.
And like I said, it's not where I thought my life would go.
Not in any way the way I wanted it to go.
But I think we are finally making a direction.
I think we're finally making the progress, we thought.
We just need a lot more people helping out.
So if there's anybody out there going through a battle, we need you.
Please reach out to that stlmarkludwig.com and let's get you helping us out.
Well, Mark Ludwig, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thanks so much.
I appreciate it.
Thank you all for joining Mark Ludwig and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
I'm your host, Janja Kellek.
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