When Ayden Wright was one 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 Wright fought courts over jurisdiction, and fought Ayden’s mother over his role in Ayden’s life.
Wright and other non-custodial 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 where one parent has primary physical custody, while the non-custodial 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.
Opponents say shared parenting laws reduce the amount of discretion a judge can exercise before any evidence is presented. This gives an advantage to abusive parents by presuming they have the same claim to the child on the same level as the more fit parent, despite allegations of abuse that may have been lodged against them.
Ayden’s Story
Ayden, now 20, said the conflict between his parents deprived all three of the relationships they wanted and possibly could have had. Instead, Wright said, law enforcement removed his son from middle school in handcuffs when the boy was in eighth grade.
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, his mother moved more than 100 miles from Rustin’s home in Collin County, Texas, to Parker County, Texas; a move that violated their initial custody agreement.
Even though the Parker County courts had no jurisdiction in his case, he said, judges there issued rulings and made decisions 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. I mean, it didn’t matter what she filed in court. I was not going to win,” Wright said.
Ayden said his mother never directly criticized his father. Instead, she framed any discussion of their living arrangements as something the court had ordered.
He spent the summer of 2017 with his father and enjoyed being close to Dallas, as well as the educational and sports opportunities offered at metro schools. He told his mom he wanted to stay there, and enrolled in eighth grade at the local middle school.
Mom Unhappy With Son’s Decision
Over the next four years, Wright saw his son in court but was not allowed to contact him, he said. He put together a photo album chronicling their life before the custody fight. He missed milestones in the boy’s life, such as high school sports, learning to drive, and graduation.
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 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 Brooklyn, New York, 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 for 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 says, is for fit parents to be with their children on more than specific holidays and every other weekend—what he calls “Disneyland” parenting.
“Becoming a Disneyland dad, where he only sees me on weekends,” can be fun, he said, but it’s not the ideal. “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,” he told The Epoch Times.
Like Wright, 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, she resisted his efforts and moved away with their child.
Both men describe fighting for access to their children in a court system that was, at best, indifferent, and at worst, antagonistic.
Diminishing Dad’s Role
In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, custody was awarded to the mother in almost 80 percent of cases, the U.S. Census Bureau reports. 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—dad pays child support while the child lives with mom—is often the default even when custody is decided through arbitration or private agreement.”
According to fathers’ rights organizations, Wright and Berlianski’s stories are typical of how non-custodial 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 American 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, while the mother is the caretaker for the children.
Brian Mayer, a San Francisco-based family law attorney, cautions against assuming this is entirely gender bias. He said judges can only decide a case based on the information available to them. So, it benefits everyone to ensure 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 sees shared parenting as a way to protect the role of fathers in the family.
In addition, he said that court is typically an adversarial process in which lawyers accumulate billable hours by helping one parent make the other look as bad as possible. According to the website Splitifi, an AI platform for people facing divorce, ending marriage is a $60 billion per year business.
Ludwig said couples often tell him 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.
“If they can keep a couple fighting, they can draw that court battle out, because a couple will give up on their house and their car, but they’re not going to give up as easily on their kids,” he said.
Addressing a Systemic Problem
Ludwig said he learned these lessons firsthand. He was prevented from seeing his son for more than 200 days after his son was born, he said. Even after a paternity test confirmed he was the boy’s father, it was still another 100 days before he got to see his son as the legal process played out.
“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,” said Ludwig.
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, he 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.
While Mayer acknowledged that a courtroom can be an adversarial environment, he said that doesn’t mean 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 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.
In Kentucky, where House Bill 528, establishing a shared parenting presumption, passed in 2018, divorce rates dropped by a quarter between 2016 and 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a Bowling Green State University analysis.
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.
And in a 2023 review of research, the National Parents Organization (NPO) found that in 75 percent of the studies involved, “children raised in shared physical custody had outcomes equal to those raised in nuclear (intact) families.”
Critics Cite Abuse, Disruption
Not everyone is on board when it comes to shared parenting.
Joan Meier is a professor of clinical law at the National Family Violence Law Center, George Washington University Law School 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 many are failing due to 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.
To remedy this, efforts by the National Family Violence Law Center and others led to Kayden’s Law being amended to the federal Violence Against Women Act in August 2024.
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.
The law provides federal funding for states to ensure children are protected from abusers in the child custody process. That includes ensuring that those who investigate abuse claims have expertise in the field, by mandating judicial training on domestic violence, child abuse, and trauma.
We don’t want to have specious, non-expert opinions masked as expert opinions on that issue,” Meier said.
Even in cases where 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, she said.
“Because, you know, one parent may have been the main parent, it’s not good for kids to suddenly be ripped away from their stable lives with a decent parent and forced into the care of someone who may not even be a good parent,” she said.
Shared Parenting Report Card
The NPO calls shared parenting laws “overwhelmingly popular with voters.” The first shared parenting laws were passed in 2017 and 2018 in Kentucky. Since then, Arkansas, West Virginia, Florida, and Missouri have enacted shared parenting laws. The organization is pushing for similar laws in other states.
Ludwig said he has worked with the NPO to promote the legislation in 31 states.
According to the organization’s 2025 Shared Parenting report card, several states have moved closer to implementing shared parenting in their family courts.
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. That state strongly encourages shared parenting and provides sanctions for false reports of abuse, among other issues.
Yet although shared parenting legislation is spreading across the country, “most state legislatures have taken no significant steps toward protecting children’s relationship with both parents when parents are living apart,” according to the NPO (not to be confused with the National Safe Parents Organization, which opposes shared parenting).
The NPO report card gave 10 states a B; 19 states earned a C, and 14 states received a D. 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.
