In most major newspapers you can read a section called “Celebrating” where you will find the usual assortment of happy events: birth announcements, wedding anniversaries and high school graduation congratulations. Colour photos of happy, smiling faces abound.
But in the Vancouver Sun newspaper one morning, there was one Happy Birthday greeting that unsettled me. The contributor of the greeting wished his 8 year-old son a happy day, and reminded him that: “There’s not a day in the last five years that I have not thought about you…hopefully one day you will be in my life.. there’s so much you and I have missed…maybe next year you will be in my life.”
So, what’s the story here? From where I sit as a family law lawyer, a happy ending is probably unlikely. A number of scenarios come to mind.
Was the boy been abducted by his mother? Is this a case of parental alienation? Maybe the Courts have found this father unfit to parent? Or perhaps he is a victim of false molestation allegations? Is this young boy just a pawn in a dirty divorce?
Each of the scenarios described form a part of the work day of family law lawyers who take cases that no other lawyer wants to handle.
Reading between the lines, the parental pain is apparent and yet, the real victim is this young boy. The psychological literature tells us that kids raised with one parent missing from their lives will experience social, behavioral and psychological problems that children with two engaged parents may not.
Two questions arise: Why would a parent intentionally harm a child in this way? Why would a parent act like an angry child?
Lawdiva aka Georgialee Lang
Lawdiva's Blog 
The current and new best interest of the child model isn’t working. It’s such a vague mess that any judge with a bias, likely based on their own unresolved childhood issues, can wreck havoc on the child of divorce. Even today, far too many father’s and some mother’s are being removed from meaningful relationships in their child’s lives for no valid reason. My story, the mother left with the child, threatened and used police to bully me, used withdrawal access to force compliance but she gets a pass from the court for that behaviour. I persist, a few times too aggressively, never violently to be more involved in my son’s life and I get a face full of lectures and reprimands from a criminal court judge assigned to family court because family court is underfunded. Ms. Lang, you are a veteran of this arena would you be willing to help fix it?