The Deployed Parent and Child Custody

Parents who disappear from their children's lives are usually not well treated by the courts. Almost everywhere, the dominant public policy when it comes to a child's welfare is to ask, “What is in the best interest of the child?” This, however, is not the only public policy to guide court decisions. Another relevant policy involves protecting the rights of the men and woman deployed in the service of our country. Currently, when those two public policies conflict, the result differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and from court to court. A patchwork of state legislation and court precedents leads to confusion and uncertainty on the part of our military parents stationed throughout the world. According to the Department of Defense, the United States has hundreds of thousands of men and woman actively serving in the military and more than a hundred thousand members in the National Guard and Reserves. Yet, we have no cohesive rules governing the relationship between a divorced or divorcing parent and his or her child when that parent is deployed in military service.