Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 6:35 pmYellowApple wrote:Llamalandia wrote:
Ok well guess what like most people I'm pretty darn lazy so indulge me while I shift the burden unfairly back to you, how would you decide cases in which, a biological parent is as equally qualified as a non-biological parent? In fact, by what right do any biological parents get to raise their children, after all wouldn't it be best to take every infant away from its parents at birth and then have the govt determine who out of any number of millions of prospective parents is best suited to raise said child, that is if you're arguing for a best interest model of child custody? My point is this is in fact best decided by the political processes and peoples will and not by so-called experts. Now obviously our system is flexible enough as it currently is to remove children from bad situations (at least usually before they turn fatal) and place them in foster care but absent some compelling reason to do so, guess what we don't remove kids from bio parents, it sounds like based on you line of reasoning that perhaps we should but you know why we don't because society as a collective through the political process has decided that it isn't really the best thing to do, that even if some kids might be slightly better off with non-bio parents we feel it is more important that be raised by parents who are genetically related to them.
Well, a child feeling attachment to a parent is not necessarily biological, but rather very much psychological (see also: Ainsworth's attachment theory); thus, whether or not a bio-parent is or is not more suitable as a caregiver than a non-bio-parent is very much dependent on the individual child and his/her attachment to the caregivers in question. For example, preferring a caregiver who only saw her child once in 12 years but is the biological parent (and is otherwise fit for parenthood) versus a caregiver who was present throughout the child's life but is not the biological parent would, in fact, likely cause trauma to the child, who now will experience significant difficulty regarding this biological parent as his/her mother instead of the non-biological caregiver he had grown up considering to be his mother. While that is a very extreme case, it underlines why preferring biological parents with no questions asked is not always in a child's best interests.
Right keep in mind though that even as late as 93 some courts have continued to subordinate the best interests of the child to the rights of the parent in many circumstances. Also at this point I'm looking for some system of determining who should raise every child on the basis of pure best interests, we're tailing raise them from birth here, I don't think anyone would seriously advocate in favor such system I'm merely asking for someone to imagine one for me because my imagination is currently in the shop for repairs
