For divorced parents, child custody can be challenging. Child exchanges these days risk violating local shelter-in-place orders, or worse, exposing a child to the coronavirus. Displaying a Sixth Sense, actors Bruce Willis and Demi Moore have developed a work-around: they quarantine together! And there’s more good news on the coronavirus.
Pulp Fiction or Armageddon?
A big part of child custody and timesharing challenges is logistical. Many divorced parents do their exchanges at schools, but schools are closed. Florida, like many states, have cities issuing shelter-in-place orders prohibiting all child timesharing exchanges.
Parents are faced with a stark choice this Passover/Easter season: not have any holiday timesharing with the children, or timeshare with a vengeance:
It may have been almost 20 years since Bruce Willis and Demi Moore divorced, but the pair are as happy as 12 Monkeys and clearly still on good terms. Willis and Moore seem unbreakable, as they spend the coronavirus quarantine together with their daughters.
Ok, it is not for every divorced couple. But, Bruce is proving he is not Expendable, and may even be the Last Boy Scout, by hunkering down with his ex-wife during a quarantine. Demi and Bruce’s daughter Tallulah shared a photo on Instagram of her parents wearing goofy, matching, striped pajamas.
The divorced couple have remained on good terms, so much so they’re even pictured hugging each other while giving the camera a thumbs up.
It’s not known if Willis’ current wife Emma Hemming Willis, 41, is staying with the Willis-Moore family, too. Earlier this month, Moore wished her former husband a happy birthday on Instagram, thanking the actor for her three daughters.
Moore and Willis were married from 1987 until their divorce in 2000. They announced their separation in June 1998. The actress opened up about their split in her memoir Inside Out, writing:
It’s a funny thing to say, but I’m very proud of our divorce. I think Bruce was fearful at the beginning that I was going to make our split difficult, and that I would express my anger and whatever baggage that I had from our marriage by obstructing his access to the kids — that I’d turn to all of those ploys divorcing couples use as weapons. But I didn’t, and neither did he.
The Ghost star went on to admit that the couple felt more connected than we did before the divorce.
Florida Child Custody
I’ve written about child custody issues before. In 2008, Florida modified its child custody laws to get rid of outdated and negative terminology about divorcing parents and their children to reduce animosity.
Florida law did that by deleting the definitions of the terms “custodial parent” or “primary residential parent” and “noncustodial parent” and creating a definition for the terms “shared parental responsibility, “parenting plan”, and “time-sharing schedule.
Shared parental responsibility, is similar to joint physical and legal custody, and is a relationship in which both parents retain their full parental rights and responsibilities.
Under shared parental responsibility, parents are required to confer with each other and jointly make major decisions affecting the welfare of their child.
In Florida, shared parental responsibility is the preferred relationship between parents when a marriage or a relationship ends. In fact, courts are instructed to order parents to share parental responsibility of a child unless it would be detrimental to the child.
But the “best interest of the child” is not an empty slogan. In Florida, how you act during mandatory quarantines and municipal ‘shelter-in-place’ orders can impact a judge’s decision.
In determining the best interest of the child, a court has to consider things like a parent’s facilitating and encouraging parent-child relationships, honoring the time-sharing schedule, and being reasonable when changes are required.
Good Coronavirus News
Some of us are depressed about the coronavirus, but millions of people are rising to the occasion, and there’s a lot of good news mixed in with the bad. The website 80,000 Hours has a listing of some of the positive things we’ve learned:
- Some countries are turning COVID-19 away at the door, while others are turning the tide of the pandemic. COVID-19 remains mostly controlled in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Taiwan was barely touched.
- Italy, Spain and countries that engage in national lockdowns are seeing the rate of new cases level off or decline as we hoped and expected.
- Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine just estimated that the reproductive rate of the coronavirus in the UK is now below 1, thanks to people mostly staying at home. If that’s correct the number of new cases will level off and then decrease over the next 6 weeks.
- Testing is increasing rapidly in most countries. The US has gone from testing 350 people on the 7th of March, to 30,000 people on the 19th of March, up to 101,000 on the 1st of April.
It is inspiring to see the world come together to help fight this pandemic, whether they are biologists, statisticians, engineers, civil servants, medics, supermarket staff, logistics managers, manufacturers, or one of countless other roles.
The Yahoo article is here.