Pittsburgh Family Law Blog

Families headed by single fathers are, according to reports that look into trends of single fathers, the fastest growing household in the United States. In Pennsylvania and across the country, more and more fathers have primary custody and are raising their children after divorce, rather than just widowhood, as was the most common condition of single fatherhood in the past. However, these households are still at a low percentage compared to other households and are still not seeing as much assistance as single mother households do.

Single fathers who manage to gain custody of their children tend to have a sort of reluctance to fight for child support payments, even if they may need them to remain financially stable. These fathers are said to fear that the children's mother will be able to somehow regain custody and take the children away from the father. This is caused by many unfair misperceptions of father's abilities to care for their children, especially considering the traditional motherly role a woman has with children.

Pennsylvania parents may agree that parenting can be hard enough when parents are married and living together. This takes on a whole new level of difficulty when parents divorce and find themselves saddled with stressed, negative emotions toward their ex-spouse while also adjusting to a whole new lifestyle. Even with the fairest child custody agreement, these feelings can still exist between ex-spouses, and can often hold negative consequences for the children involved.

With the stresses of a divorce still hanging between a newly separated couple, it can be difficult to put those feelings aside to work together. However, a positive child custody agreement, coupled with positive parenting ideals, can work together to uphold the best interests of a child.

It was once commonly thought that living with your significant other before you got married significantly raised the chances of a divorce later on in life. But today, with nearly half of marriages ending in divorce within 20 years, the thought of living together might sound like a good thing. Luckily for Pennsylvania couples, a new study suggests that living together before you get married might not be a relevant indicator of the chances for a divorce later on in life. Or, at least, it hasn't indicated that the chances of divorce increase.

The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed 22,000 men and women from 2006 to 2010 and found that couples who were engaged and living together before they were married were just as likely to remain married at least 15 years as those who hadn't first lived together.

The Applied Research Center reports that as of 2011, nearly 5,100 children in 22 states across the U.S. were in foster care as a result of their parents being either detained or deported on illegal immigration charges. In many of these cases, the parents had their parental rights stripped and their children were put up for legal adoption. This can understandably be a difficult and frustrating process for parents in Pennsylvania and across the country. Luckily, some of these parents are able to obtain temporary visas to remain in the country long enough to fight for child custody of their biological children, as in the recent case of one immigrant mother.

The mother illegally entered the U.S. from Guatemala, though her son was born in America some time after. Upon discovery of her illegal status, she was jailed and her son was placed in foster care with a family that later adopted him and raised him as if he were their own son. Several years later when the mother was released, she found herself unable to reclaim her child as her custodial and parental rights to her own child had been stripped.