While the bill failed again this year, we hope for continued support, because this issue isn’t going away. Our current standard placement model is keeping great parents and extended family out of our kids’ lives, and the laws are out of date and creating more problems than they solve. What will it take to bring about change? That’s tough to answer, because the divorce industry has quite a stranglehold on the Legislature. The State Bar Family Law Committee gives the recommendations for the visitation guidelines to the state Supreme Court. The people who should be giving these recommendations are not attorneys, but rather therapists, teachers, counselors and psychologists. Unfortunately, many noncustodial parents don’t have the money to fight these rulings made by these guidelines and many judges rule in accordance with the guidelines, because that’s what they believe the Supreme Court says is best. Only five spoke out this year against the Kids Need Both Parents bill in committee: three attorneys, the State Bar and a domestic violence group. All of them stand to financially lose if parents are granted more equal time with their children in a divorce. The scare tactics of how terrible it would be to presume it is in a child’s best interest to have as much time as possible with both parents were atrocious, and at best were decades-old arguments that, across the nation, state by state, others are realizing couldn’t be further from the truth.