Seven-year-old Penny is swimming under the July sun when a baby tooth pops out. As her father scrambles to retrieve the wayward fang from the watery depths, the young girl grows anxious, agitated. She’s not just worried about whether the tooth fairy would appear, but because “Mommy’s going to be mad.”
Seven-year-old Penny is swimming under the July sun when a baby tooth pops out. As her father scrambles to retrieve the wayward fang from the watery depths, the young girl grows anxious, agitated. She’s not just worried about whether the tooth fairy would appear, but because “Mommy’s going to be mad.”
Editor’s Note: The name of the young girl in this story has been changed
and her mother’s last name excluded in order to protect their privacy.
Because important things are supposed to happen with mommy, not daddy, and she gets mad when Penny does anything without her — even homework — at her father’s house.
It’s 2014 and Penny has spent the last two years in the “crossfire” of her parents’ “Cold War” of a divorce; “the worst kind of custody dispute,” according to a January ruling from Ontario Superior Court Justice Alex Pazaratz. After a 36-day trial — a length more common for a criminal hearing than a custody dispute — they’ve spent half a million dollars on lawyers.
A recent custody battle in Ontario cost the parents $500,000
What will it take to convince angry parents that nasty and aggressive litigation never turns out well?” Pazaratz wrote in a recent follow-up to that ruling in which he awards Penny’s father Davis Jackson $192,000 in costs. The judge lambastes the parents for having “squandered” money that could have been benefitted their now eight-year-old daughter.
He’s a cop making about $100,000 a year, his ex — Eileen — does computer-based “control detailing” earning $30,000 part-time. But the most shocking thing isn’t the eye-popping legal bill on modest means, but the stomach-churning “emotional manipulation” detailed in the lengthy ruling.
From karate classes to soccer matches, Jackson fought for years for even the most basic access to Penny, at one point “begging” Eileen to obey the suggestions of a social workers tapped to facilitate their shared custody.
The judge called it “a ‘perfect storm’ of unbridled, destructive emotions” spun from the mother’s “obsessive, smothering, possessiveness toward their young child.”
There was an explicit finding that mom was emotionally harming the child
“There was an explicit finding that mom was emotionally harming the child,” said Melissa Fedsin, who represented Jackson in his application for custody access. “Dad never would have pursued this if he wasn’t really genuinely concerned.”
While the length and the subsequent bills make this trial stand out, the rancour is unfortunately common, as Pazaratz notes. There are about 1.2 million parents who have ended marriages or common-law relationships, and even the most amicable divorces can be detrimental to their mental health.
The end of a marriage is hard on the parents losing a partner, but children are losing a family unit, a loss that can prompt real grief they can be too young to process, said Jason Carey a counselling manager with KidsHelpPhone. Many callers are sad, even depressed, or have anxiety during a custody battle.
“The majority of the ones we do hear about are the ones where there’s a lot of stress and parents playing the kids against each other,” Carey said.
Most troubling was the persistent psychological campaign the (mother) embarked on
And Penny’s case serves as an extreme example of just that.
“Most troubling was the persistent psychological campaign the (mother) embarked on,” the judge wrote in awarding Jackson custody. “The mind games she has been playing with her daughter cannot be allowed to continue.”
Eileen — whose lawyer did not return requests for comment — would tell Penny “bad things are going to happen to mommy” when she misses her, would do everything in her power to prevent happy visits with the father and say “daddy doesn’t love you” and left her for a new family.
Even something as simple as haircuts exposed the child to unnecessary drama
“Even something as simple as haircuts exposed the child to unnecessary drama,“ the judge wrote, referring to another incident when Penny was worried her mother would be upset she got her haircut with her father. One of her teachers recalled her fretting in class over the new coif, not because she didn’t like it, but because she feared Eileen’s reaction.
It’s just one of many times the other adults in Penny’s life testified about the emotional toll her parents’ war was waging on the little girl. She had headaches and often felt ill, even vomiting from stress or soiling herself before being taken to swap from one house to another. Before a school Christmas party, one teacher asked her why she seemed so upset.
“Mommy and daddy were both going to be there and they were going to argue or fight,” a teacher recalled the then-six-year-old saying.
That was a year-and-a-half after disagreement turned to duplicity. The couple married in 2004, separated in 2011 and co-parented well until the summer of 2012, when Jackson started seeing another officer, his now-fiancée. That’s when “the mind games” started.
Penny was just about to enter senior kindergarten, and her mother used that to keep her from her father’s visits. The girl told one teacher she missed her father, who later that year decided to take legal action just to see his daughter. First, he sent an email to Eileen “begging” her to be reasonable and avoid the legal bills.
Over three years later, Penny lagged behind her peers in school, largely because of the stress of the dispute. Her emotional state remained fraught.
Her father had been awarded custody, so he can make all important decisions, and her mother still got to see her every other week — for the time being.
Pazaratz noted that, most of the time, Eileen was a very good mother, but was also “overt, manipulative, scheming, deceitful and oblivious to the needless family suffering she perpetuated for at least the last three years.”
“If the emotional abuse continues, swift and decisive intervention may be the only option. Even if it causes short-term upset for (Penny),” he wrote, ordering Eileen to seek counselling and “get control of herself.”
“It was a really sad case,” Fedsin said. “The strong message that needs to come across with this is case is it’s a no-win situation for anybody” to drag things out in court. “It should never have cost this much.”
“It’s completely driven by parents who are being unreasonable with each other.”
Such cases can be harmful to the psyche of the kids involved. “Parents completely underestimate” the effects of acrimonious custody squabbles, said Dr. Marshall Korenblum, chief psychiatrist at the Hincks-Dellcrest Centre. “It can be extremely detrimental.”
That’s especially true in cases where one child is “brainwashed” against one parent by another. Dr. Korenblum said there a swath of academic literature on “parental alienation.” When the kids grow up, they often end up regretting the alienation with one parent and reunite with the one they were taught to hate. They might feel guilty or ruin their relationship with the parent who discouraged the relationship. They might internalize that anger, and grow up to have issues with, or even hate, the sex of the parent they blame for the breakdown. They’re also more susceptible to depression and anxiety and significantly more likely to get divorced. Many don’t think it affects them later in life, but it does.
Amicable divorces, by contrast, can actually lead to relief among children that the fighting will stop.
“Divorce and separation itself is not a bad thing for mental health,” Dr. Korenblum said. “It’s when there’s a high-conflict or a protracted battle or lots of anger… that it has a negative effect on mental health.” Source