The Legal Issues 145
Basically I tell clients that legal custody pertains to the major/
macro/life-affecting issues in the life of the child. This often trans-
lates into a requirement that both parents must sign documents
on behalf of their child for certain key items. Under joint legal
custody, these crucial issues are to be decided jointly rather than
solely or unilaterally by the parent who has physical custody.
Examples of joint legal custodial issues include choices regard-
ing such decisions as religious upbringing (will the child be raised
as a Catholic, a Buddhist, or a Druid?); the choice of attending
private versus public school; choices surrounding any kind of
elective surgery; when to get a driver’s license; parental access
to the child’s medical or educational records; enlistment in the
armed forces while still a minor; and marriage while still a minor.
These typify major decisions that parents must make for (and
often legally sign on behalf of) their children. Under joint legal
custody, these sorts of decisions must be made jointly.
Joint custody’s trendiness. Joint custody (especially joint legal
custody) has become a progressive and popular trend nowa-
days. In California, there is now a presumption in favor of joint
legal custody, and the courts there will often force the issue. This
trend comes as a result of recent studies that seem to indicate that
the most wrenching aspect of a divorce for kids is to be totally
estranged from either parent.
This new-wave approach (which initially came out of Califor-
nia’s touchy-feely brand of child psychology) now argues that kids
are much more resilient than had been previously thought, and that
they can bounce back and forth between parents much more read-
ily than had been imagined. Indeed, what really constitutes the big-
gest emotional hit that kids take from divorce is to be estranged, cut
off, and emotionally isolated from either parent. Under this view,
the worst thing that one can do is to place a child of divorce under
the auspices of just one parent and to keep the other one away and
altogether estranged. In those situations the child winds up hav-
ing to internalize feelings of estrangement, oftentimes wondering
what it was that he or she did that drove daddy away.
The more contemporary and progressive approach is now
to maintain a great deal of interaction between kids and both
parents. Having joint custody whereby both parents feel that