When Ayden Wright was 1 month old, his mother sued his father, Rustin Wright, over custody, child support, and visitation.

That lawsuit began a nearly 20-year legal odyssey during which Rustin Wright fought courts over jurisdiction, and fought Ayden’s mother over his role in Ayden’s life.

Wright and other noncustodial fathers say they are often left to the mercy of judges, lawyers, and law enforcement who are either indifferent or antagonistic to their parental rights.

They’re pushing for more states to abandon the traditional adversarial family court system of awarding child custody in favor of shared parenting, an approach that begins with the presumption that parents will share care and responsibility for their children as equally as possible.

In a shared parenting arrangement, each parent is typically responsible for the direct costs of caring for his or her child while the child is with that parent. Shared parenting may not completely negate the necessity of child support, but aims to avoid a situation in which one parent has primary physical custody, while the noncustodial parent pays child support but has a rigid visitation schedule. The object is to minimize, for children involved, the disruption inevitably caused by a divorce.

Advocates for shared parenting say that when applied properly, it protects parental rights, reduces stress and pressure on children, and may reduce rates of divorce and domestic violence.

Ayden was taken into police custody because he refused to return to his mother’s house.

Wright didn’t see his son again until he graduated from high school more than four years later.

Ayden was the result of a brief college relationship. Wright said Ayden’s mother was angry that he did not want to make the relationship long-term.

“I did not love her, and I did not want to be with her, right? [But that had] nothing to do with me taking care of my son,” he told The Epoch Times.

Wright said that when Ayden was an infant, the child’s mother moved more than 100 miles from Collin County, Texas, where Rustin Wright’s home was located, to Parker County, Texas, a move that violated their initial custody agreement.

Even though the Parker County courts had no jurisdiction in his case, Wright said, judges there issued rulings and made decisions that he was bound to abide by until he could successfully challenge them. And, as a father representing himself, Wright said courtroom success was hard to come by.

Ayden’s mother “found out that [court] was a weapon that she could use,” Wright said.

“I mean, it didn’t matter what she filed in court. I was not going to win,” he said.

Ayden said his mother never directly criticized his father. Instead, she framed any discussion of their living arrangements as something that the court had ordered.

Ayden said he missed many of those also. When he was returned to his mother’s house, Ayden said he was determined to make life uncomfortable in the hope that she would send him back to his father.

Because he wasn’t happy at home, Ayden said, his mother sent him to a reform school, then to a Catholic boarding school in Nebraska. He said he was never asked by any court what he preferred. Nor was he given the opportunity to tell a judge where he wanted to live.

When he turned 18 and graduated from high school, he returned to his father’s house.

Ayden talks regularly with his mother and says he wants to maintain a relationship with both parents.

His mother’s attorney did not respond to an email seeking comment for this story.

Mickey Berlianshik can empathize with the Wrights. The property developer from the Brooklyn borough of New York City has been fighting his ex-wife over their son since their divorce in 2014.

Over breakfast in a café on Sunny Isles Beach, near Miami, Berlianshik talked about being stood up when he went for court-ordered visits, missing important dates in his son’s life, and being arrested on baseless charges of criminal contempt of court—charges of which he was later acquitted.

Berlianshik said police took photos of him in shackles to show to his son. They produced “Wanted” posters to post in his Brooklyn neighborhood and kept him in jail overnight.

His last arrest in 2024 led to a bench trial in which he was found not guilty of violating a protective order. He has filed a $50 million lawsuit against the New York Police Department for false arrest, among other charges. He said that when he saw his son during a recent supervised visit, the boy’s stress was obvious.

“So, he’s upset, and he told me why he’s upset, because [his mother and her new husband are] getting served with lawsuits. They shouldn’t even be telling him about the lawsuits at all, but they are,” Berlianshik told The Epoch Times.

Mark Ludwig is a politically active single father with a similar story and a drive to change the system.

Ludwig is reticent about details of his story, citing a desire to protect his son’s privacy. However, he said his legal fight to see his son has motivated his work to reform the family court system.

The objective, he said, is for fit parents to be with their children on more than specific holidays and every other weekend—what he calls “Disneyland” parenting.

“The difference is I’m a dad and I have a responsibility to raise a son, and I can’t raise a son with the values that he needs if I’m a Disneyland dad,” Ludwig told The Epoch Times.

Like in Wright’s case, Ludwig’s son came from a brief relationship. And, like Wright, Ludwig was committed to building a relationship with his son despite not wanting to pursue a relationship with the mother of his child. However, he said, she resisted his efforts and moved away with their child.

In 2018, the most recent year for which data are available, custody was awarded to the mother in almost 80 percent of cases, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Fathers are usually ordered to pay child support and to comply with a visitation schedule set by the court or agreed to by both parties.

That arrangement—the dad pays child support while the child lives with the mom—is often the default even when custody is decided through arbitration or private agreement.

According to fathers’ rights organizations, Wright’s and Berlianski’s stories are typical of how noncustodial fathers are often treated. Activists such as Ludwig say antiquated laws, cultural biases, and an adversarial family court system make it easy for an angry mother to exact vengeance on her child’s father.

Even as women have entered the workforce over the past several decades and attitudes toward traditional marriage have changed, the nuclear family has more or less remained the template in many U.S. communities.

A traditional model that sees the father as breadwinner and the mother as homemaker is the basis for the default divorce court arrangement, Ludwig said. In that arrangement, the father provides financial support and has visitation rights, and the mother is the caretaker for the children.

Brian Mayer, a San Francisco-based family law attorney, cautions against assuming that this is entirely gender bias. He said judges can decide a case based only on the information available to them. So it benefits everyone to ensure that the court has all the information.

“We need a narrative to understand what’s going on in someone’s life. And when there’s a void, we naturally fill in those blanks. And what I think a lot of men see happen in the courts is that those blanks are filled in for them in a way that gender plays a role,” Mayer told The Epoch Times.

According to Ludwig, there are other forces at work as well. Ludwig said radical feminist groups, gay rights organizations, political parties, and others who want to influence future generations are dedicated to redefining, or even destroying, the nuclear family.

“There’s always been a war on dad. How do you break up the family? You get dad out of the house,” Ludwig said.

Without the framework of a stable two-parent household, a divorce situation can effectively remove dads from playing an active part in the family aside from financial support, he said. Ludwig said he sees shared parenting as a way to protect the role of fathers in the family.

Ludwig said couples often tell him that they are told that the only way to protect their interests is to “dig up dirt” on their spouse. He said a custody fight is tailor-made for racking up billable hours.

“I thought, this is systemic. This isn’t about me anymore. It’s about the family court system, and the systemic problems need to be changed for everybody,” Ludwig said.

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He became an advocate of shared parenting.

Generally, under shared parenting, each parent maintains a home for the child and covers their own expenses. Medical bills, school expenses, and other costs not directly attached to a parent’s home are shared equally by both parents or may be negotiated, taking into account income and time disparities.

Shared parenting doesn’t necessarily mean 50–50 parenting, Mayer said. If a child saw his or her father each evening pre-divorce, or if one parent took responsibility for helping with homework or extracurricular activities, the agreement should be designed to continue that, he said.

This could result in an 80–20 arrangement in which one parent has more time with the child, but the amount of time is only one factor, Mayer said.

Unlike the concept of joint custody, which focuses on the arrangement between the parents, the fundamental principle of shared parenting is the stability and happiness of the child, and the continuity of care to which the child is accustomed. Shared parenting and joint custody may overlap in practice, but shared parenting is a collaborative approach, not a legal framework.

In a shared parenting arrangement, divorced parents, deemed as fit by the court, are meant to focus on the child’s needs, rather than on custody arrangements.

Although Mayer acknowledged that a courtroom can be an adversarial environment, he said that doesn’t mean that parents have to view each other as adversaries over their children. The court is mandated to rule in the child’s best interest. So parents should be willing to adjust their lives to accommodate that, he said.

“So, if you have one parent who is ... providing that stability, they’re taking the kids to Little League games, they’re putting them to bed at night, that sort of thing. The court will usually find that it’s best to continue that precedent ... because the kid is used to it.”

Ludwig noted that divorce rates have declined in states that promote shared parenting in family court. When couples know that they’re going to be in a shared parenting arrangement, they may no longer feel a need to rush into divorce, he said, and may turn to mediation or give the marriage another try.

Meanwhile, a 2024 study in Spain found that adopting presumptions of shared physical custody led to a significant decrease—almost 50 percent—in violence between separating spouses.

Joan Meier is a professor of clinical law at George Washington University Law School’s National Family Violence Law Center in Washington. She is concerned that the shared parenting model places restrictions on the court before any evidence is heard.

“It robs courts and parties of discretion, and it coerces this equal sharing of custody, which does not necessarily benefit children and is not the right policy in many, many contexts,” she said.

Meier said a better plan is to strengthen and enforce existing laws “to ensure children are not placed with unsafe, uncaring parents.” Meier said protecting children should be the overriding priority for courts. However, she said that many are failing because of a lack of information and resolve.

“Right now, domestic violence is dealt with really badly in many cases, and there’s no reason for that except that courts are both undereducated and resistant to really giving family violence the weight it deserves,” Meier said.

Kayden’s Law is named for 7-year-old Kayden Mancuso, of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Kayden was murdered by her father during a court-ordered unsupervised visit in 2018. He had been awarded the visit despite evidence of an abusive, violent history—including criminal records and a previous order of protection that Kayden’s mother presented to the court, according to the National Safe Parents Organization.

“We don’t want to have specious, non-expert opinions masked as expert opinions on that issue,” Meier said.

Even in cases in which no abuse is alleged, Meier said that shared parenting is often a bad idea. She points out that even in the best-case scenarios, divorce and separation are disruptive. Forcing a child to divide his or her time between two homes only intensifies that disruption, Meier said.

Ludwig said he has worked with the NPO to promote the legislation in 31 states.

The report card gave six states an “A” for promoting shared parenting in family court, including the five states that have enacted laws, as well as Arizona, which strongly encourages shared parenting and provides sanctions for false reports of abuse, among other issues.

The NPO report card gave 10 states a “B,” 19 states a “C,” and 14 states a “D” over the issue. Two states—New York and Rhode Island—received failing grades because they have no “statutory preference for, or presumption of, shared parenting” provisions and no specific statute for addressing false abuse claims.