Pawns in a Losing Game

Dan Reidenberg, 33, knows how 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez must feel.

Elian, the Cuban refugee caught in an international child-custody tug-of-war, was asked by his Miami relatives under the glare of television cameras: “Tu te quieres quedar aqui?” (Do you want to stay here?)

Reidenberg was about the same age when his father, a divorce attorney, leaned toward him in their kitchen and whispered, “You don’t want to live with your mother, do you?” Alone and on the spot, he told his questioner what he wanted to hear.

No one can say for sure how the ongoing custody dispute between Elian’s Cuban father and his U.S. relatives will ultimately affect him. But Reidenberg, one of the first children in the United States to be given to a father in a custody dispute, affirms the researchers who say the long-term fallout can fallout of such battles can be devastating for children.

Reidenberg says he grew up hearing his embittered mother berate his father for having shamed her in the community, his father criticize his mother for how the child-support money was spent and their constant fights over who would have him for holidays, vacations and birthdays. Their animosity continues still and, he says, has left him intolerant of conflict, afraid of marriage and on the verge of moving away from them both.

“This is what happens in long-term custody battles,” says Reidenberg, of Minnesota. “The parents are trying so hard to get back at the other person that they lose sight of what is really best for the children.”

Despite the spread of court-ordered education and mediation services in many states, including California, one in 10 divorces escalates to a high-conflict dispute--battles that involve more than 100,000 U.S. children a year. From poor-little-rich-girl Gloria Vanderbilt to shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez, these children can become pawns of adults focused on the highly strategic and increasingly complex business of winning custody or visitation rights.

With charges and countercharges ranging from inappropriate cookie baking to “parental alienation syndrome,” the very rich can drag fights out as long as 15 years and spend millions of dollars. Others sometimes resort to abduction, “the poor person’s custody fight,” says Janet Johnston, a Bay Area social worker and specialist in high-conflict custody battles.

Trapped in a

‘Loyalty Bind’

For children growing up with angry, strong-willed parents, the problem, Johnston says, is that “the same people you get nurturance from are also the people who can be really scary. They can easily trap you in a loyalty bind so if you please one parent, you don’t please the other.”

Such children grow up in a black-and-white world where “people are either enemies or friends,” she says. “It’s hard to know what is safe and what is not, who’s good, who’s bad.” They tune in to what other people want from them and learn not to express themselves.

Her studies of hundreds of California children whose parents’ arguments remained unresolved after two years found, perhaps not surprisingly, that the children had trouble forming stable relationships as adolescents and young adults.

More than memories of chronic fighting, she says, it is the accumulation of painful incidents--large and small, public and private, subtle and blatant--that is linked with their inability to judge social situations, tolerate ambiguity or even identify their own feelings.

Whatever the issues, they were brewing well before the divorce and continue long after, she says.

One woman who asked to remain anonymous says she grew up with a homemaker mother and an abusive, controlling father. A psychiatrist, he won custody of the five children after a bitter divorce. She was in grade school and remembers with guilt the day she lied to the judge about her mother’s faults because her father had promised her a trip to Disneyland.

Her mother quit fighting when she ran out of money. Eventually, she was limited to visiting her children for two hours every other month. After years of defeat, the mother became a “petrified person” and a stranger, the daughter says.

At 22, the daughter fled to California to escape her father--and her mother too. At that point, the daughter says, “All she had to give me was her paranoia.” She hasn’t seen her father in 15 years, her mother in 12.

Until the 1950s, most custody disputes were settled with a “tender years” rule that favored mothers as the more nurturing parent for young children. Now, the law in most states requires custody judges to use “the best interests of the child,” a term dating from 18th century England, as the standard. State laws also provide lists of parental characteristics for judges to consider, such as emotional ties and economic stability. California law gives judges the widest discretion and includes such possible considerations as domestic violence and a parent’s use of illegal substances.

Critics say the “best interests” rule alone doesn’t reflect children’s developmental needs, their wishes or feelings, and is so vague it opens the door to gender bias.

Child advocates have long contended that the adversarial nature of family law court--with attorneys and evaluators needing to brand parents as good or bad, for instance--helps perpetuate disputes and shifts attention away from children’s needs.

“Divorce is big business and many players in the system profit from high-conflict cases,” says Karen Winner, a New York writer and author of “Divorced From Justice: The Abuse of Women and Children by Divorce Lawyers and Judges” (ReganBooks, 1996). “All it takes is one side, one parent with a lot of anger or an ax to grind to drag out a case in the court and ruin the lives of the children.”

Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Robert Schnider, an 18-year veteran of the family-law department, says if there are problems in the most difficult cases, it’s “because the human beings involved in them have problems. It’s not the system. It’s the people.”

Indeed, while the number of divorce filings in L.A. County has dropped, from 50,000 in 1980 to 35,499 in 1998, observers say the intensity of the disputes seems to be rising. One reason, says Mary Ann Mason, a social-welfare professor at UC Berkeley, is that Americans have placed an increasing emotional value on children as traditional family ties have broken down.

Another, according to University of Maryland abduction expert Geoffrey Grief, could be the rising numbers of mothers without custody. “We have 2 million single fathers now who have custody of children. There’s more pressure on women to get their children back.” Whereas 20 years ago, almost all abductors were fathers, now many desperate mothers are also taking their children into hiding, he says.

Abducted and

Alienated

Such children can easily become alienated from one parent if the abducting parent decides to poison them with the idea that the other parent isn’t interested or hasn’t called. In 1979, Stephen Fagan kidnapped his two daughters, told them their mother was dead and raised them under an assumed identity in Florida. The public was shocked last year when the daughters, told their mother was alive, were uninterested. “Lisa and I want to thank our father for the many sacrifices he has made on our behalf,” said his 25-year-old daughter, Rachel.

Some high-conflict parents keep fighting because they are psychologically enmeshed with their children or one another. Others are only trying to postpone the loss and sadness--and the potential shame of failure--that invariably lie beneath the anger and bitterness of a divorce, Johnston observes. Sometimes, it is a matter of money.

Married only 18 months, New York billionaire investor Ronald Perelman and Democratic Party fund-raiser Patricia Duff have been fighting for three years over custody and support for their daughter, Caleigh, 6.

In what’s been called one of the most high-stakes child-custody battles to play out in a U.S. court, the pair have argued over child support (recently set at more than $12,000 a month) and other issues ranging from whether Duff baked cookies that allowed Caleigh to violate Jewish dietary laws, to whether bodyguards should stand at the apartment door or the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Towers where Duff and Caleigh live, and whether the girl should take ballet lessons, attend preschool during her nap time and what her curfews should be as a teenager.

In an effort to reduce the number of high-conflict cases, Los Angeles County led the state in 1989 in requiring all parents who are separating or divorcing to attend prehearing education classes. Those who are unable to reach a custody plan are then required by law to attend mediation services. If they violate the court orders they’ve agreed on, the judge will send them to a “contemnors group”--another group-counseling class.

The hard-core combatants are encouraged to engage a private “special master,” usually an attorney or therapist who will meet with them to mediate their issues.

According to the California Judicial Council, state courts are now conducting about 100,000 mediations a year, up from 85,000 in 1996.

Of the parents in the program, 41% say their children have witnessed violence at home, a third allege substance abuse and a third live below the poverty line; 53% of program cases involve a restraining order.

Sherrie Kibler, coordinator of the Los Angeles contemnors program, says classes, held downtown in a courthouse with metal detectors, try to help parents shift their focus from themselves to their children’s thoughts and feelings.

“Our job in teaching these high-conflict families is to get them to see the price,” she says. “We ask them to consider: What would I like my child to say about me as a parent? What kind of a relationship do I want with our children when they’re adults?”