I am pleased that the North Dakota legislature is working to change custody laws. However, changing the long-time terminology regarding child custody is only a first step in changing the longtime inequity in state child custody laws. Recently, the director of the state Child Support Enforcement Agency appropriately won a national award. The NDCSEA is good at doing what it is designed to do, which is to collect child support. But child support is only one of a child's basic rights; visitation is the other. The state must work to protect a child's right to visitation with the non-custodial parent.

In an NDCSEA presentation titled "How We Did It," one of the slides offensively depicts the current attitude in North Dakota - the slide shows a man face down with his hands on his head as one woman stands on him, and another pretends to abuse him. There are slides with extensive data about how child support collections have increased over the years. Yet there is no indication of the percentage of custodial parents who are fathers in North Dakota, nor is there data about the percentage of child support-paying parents who are fathers.

It appears that the proposed laws are not dramatically different than what is in place now. The new law encourages parents to work together on a parenting agreement. Currently, parents are encouraged to use mediators to do the same thing. The problem is that these parents have a difficult time working together, and that is what led to the divorce.

The courts neither have the time, nor the interest, to work out the details of agreements, so when a case goes to court, the Court defaults to a cookie-cutter approach that appears to favor mothers. Again, using politically correct and euphemistic language is a first step, but we still have a long way to go to protect both basic rights of the child.