Court Opinion

ID: 9697381
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 19:15:20.589123+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:31.988655
License: Public Domain

Johnson, J.,
dissenting. An absolute prerequisite to any significant division of parental rights and responsibilities is an agreement by the parents to the division. Our law is clear and unequivocal on this point. *503See 15 V.S.A. § 665(a) (“When.the parents cannot agree to divide or share parental rights and responsibilities, the court shall award parental rights and responsibilities primarily or solely to one parent.”). The majority acknowledges the compulsion of the law in the context of shared responsibilities, yet inexplicably ignores its force in the area of divided responsibilities. This is a distinction that finds virtually no support in either the language or the policy underlying the statute. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.
The majority faithfully reports the trial court’s ruling, but discreetly omits many telling details. The parties had generally agreed during the marriage to home school the children and to defer a number of standard immunizations, but disagreed once the marriage was broken. Each party offered evidence, including the testimony of experts, to support its position. Mother had always been the children’s primary caregiver, and the trial court apparently concluded that her care had been sound and should continue, as evidenced by its award to her of sole physical custody. Indeed, the court acknowledged that mother had been “a good, caring, attentive mother on a daily basis.”
Nevertheless, the trial court disagreed with mother’s decisions in the areas of schooling and immunizations, as well as breastfeeding and sleeping. Indeed, the court’s opinion delves to an extraordinary degree into these intimate areas of childrearing, opining, for example, that “longterm bed sharing and breast feeding. . . are not in the best interests of the children [and] may foster undue dependency,” that home schooling was “no substitute for five days a week in the classroom, or perhaps more importantly, the schoolyard,” and that mother’s medical decisions “reflect[ed] personal whim . . . rather than . . . sound medical practice.” Accordingly, despite its award of physical and legal rights and responsibilities to mother, the court determined to carve out the areas of schooling and health care and award them to father on the ground that his predilections in these areas represented the best interests of the children. This, despite the fact that mother had not only failed to assent to the award to father, but sharply disagreed with his views on both subjects.
The trial court’s decision was untenable. It was untenable under our law, and it was untenable under the sound common sense that informs it. Our statutory scheme governing parental rights and responsibilities reflects a general rule derived from common experience: the parent who is entrusted with the daily care and control of a child must be afforded the broadest possible latitude, consistent with *504health and safety, in decisions relating to the child’s education, medical care, discipline, travel, residence, and general upbringing. This Court has stated unequivocally that the custodial parent’s decisions in these areas may not be second guessed by a trial judge: “[W]e cannot condone a process that substitutes the judgment of a court for that of the custodial parent merely because the court would have done something different if it had been the parent.” Lane v. Schenck, 158 Vt. 489, 495, 614 A.2d 786, 789 (1992).
The same interest in preserving parental authority and minimizing parental second-guessing is codified in our statutes, which expressly prohibit the court from ordering the parties to “divide or share parental rights and responsibilities” absent their express agreement. 15 V.S.A. § 665(a). Recently, in Cabot v. Cabot, 166 Vt. 485, 493-95, 697 A.2d 644, 649-51 (1997), this Court held that the language and policy underlying the statute invalidated an award of shared parental rights and responsibilities where the parents had not agreed to such an arrangement. As we explained:
The Legislature recognized that where parents cannot work together, one parent must be given primary responsibility to make decisions on behalf of the child. In terms of the statute, this means that a court cannot award joint legal parental rights and responsibilities to parents who do not agree to such an award.
Id. at 493 n.4, 697 A.2d at 650 n.4.
As noted, 15 V.S.A. § 665(a) applies to awards of “joint” as well as “divided” custody. Thus, parental agreement is just as much a statutory prerequisite to an order providing for divided legal custody as it is to one providing for shared legal custody. And the policy underlying the statute applies with equal force as well: “[Wjhere parents cannot work together, one parent must be given primary responsibility to make decisions on behalf of the child.” Cabot, 166 Vt. at 493 n.4, 697 A.2d at 650 n.4.
Indeed, common sense teaches that the custodial parent cannot reasonably be asked to supervise and participate in the child’s daily life, so much of which centers on schooling and health care, dispossessed of basic decisionmaking authority in these areas. Every primary care provider of school age children knows that ferrying the children to and from school represents only the tip of the custodial parent’s responsibilities; supervising and helping with homework, attending parent-teacher conferences, PTO meetings, and school *505plays, and participating in school fundraisers and other events all require strong parental interest and motivation, and all are fraught with potential conflicts requiring parental intervention. The custodial parent cannot, and should not, be expected to undertake these daily responsibilities deprived of essential decisionmaking authority. The same may be said for such basic areas of childrearing as medical care, religious upbringing, discipline, travel, and the like. That is why the Legislature wisely established parental assent as a prerequisite to both shared and divided custody.
Thus understood, the Court’s decision in this case should have been as obvious as that in Cabot. There was no agreement between the parents to divide parental rights and responsibilities. Hence, the trial court’s order assigning responsibility for the children’s education and medical care to father, and the balance of legal and physical rights and responsibilities to mother, was patently invalid and should not be allowed to stand.
The trial court’s decision in this case was unmistakably a choice between alternative lifestyles under the guise of divided legal rights and responsibilities. Today’s holding affirms the trial court’s power to make such choices by parsing discrete areas of parental authority based upon the respective views of the custodial and noncustodial parent. The Court’s holding does not endorse the wisdom of such an approach. For the reasons expressed above, I am hopeful that courts will exercise this new power with restraint, recognizing that in childrearing decisions parents must speak with one voice, and that voice should generally be the custodial parent’s.