American Thought Leaders - How the Family Court System Is Fueling a Fatherless Society: Mark Ludwig

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

“The science is out there: There have been 64 peer-reviewed studies that Linda Nielsen has reviewed. And they all come to the same conclusion—that children fare better with both parents.”After experiencing firsthand systemic problems within the family court system, in which one parent, typically the father, is relegated to weekend visits with his children in divorce cases, Mark Ludwig founded Americans for Equal Shared Parenting to raise awareness about the need for children to have equal access to both parents.“The opposition has done a great job of creating the narrative that this is just a bunch of angry dads who have anger management problems, conflict resolution problems, and maybe they shouldn’t even be a dad,” he says.Ludwig travels the country advocating for a 50/50 rebuttable presumption—legislation that presumes both parents will share equal custody in a divorce, so long as they are fit, willing, and able.“The No. 1 stability point a child needs is not where they live, but who they have a relationship with. And the stability of the relationship with both parents is more important than what house they live in,” says Ludwig. “I'll fight just as hard for mothers as I do fathers, because I’m not fighting for the mother or the father. I’m fighting for the child.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The number one stability point a child needs is not where they live, but who they have a relationship with. And the stability of the relationship with both parents is more important than what house they live in. After experiencing the family court system firsthand, Mark Ludwig founded Americans for Equal Shared Parenting to make equal access to both parents the default in divorce proceedings. Too often, judges relegate one parent, typically the father, to a lesser role in a child's life. The opposition has done a great job of creating the narrative that this is just a bunch of angry dads who have anger management problems, conflict resolution problems, maybe they shouldn't

even be a dad. Ludwig travels the country advocating for what he calls a 50-50 rebuttable presumption, legislation that makes 50-50 equal custody in a divorce the norm, so long as both parents are fit, willing, and able. Now, I'll fight just as hard for mothers as I do fathers, because I'm not fighting for the mother or the father, I'm fighting for the child. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Mark Ludwig, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it. So Mark, when we interviewed

five years ago, and this was actually one of the earliest American Thought Leaders interviews, I remember it very well. You told me that I think 80% of the people that go through some sort of divorce cases, one of the parents basically becomes the main custodian. And that's kind of what we expect, in a sense, to happen. Like, why is that an issue? Yeah, until it happened to me, I wouldn't have thought there was a problem either. If somebody would have told me one parent gets every other weekend, I would have thought, well, yeah, isn't that normal?

And then I went through a situation myself. and it's funny how it changes your perspective when it happens to you, and more importantly, when it happens to your child. That's when I started realizing there was a serious problem. Well, tell me about your situation. Let's remind our viewers that might not have been watching five years ago. Yeah, mine, without going into too many details, there was some question on paternity, and I ended up going 204 days without seeing my son. He was moved without my knowledge, and I was told I'd never see him again. And I did end up getting a DNA test, and he is mine.

So I'm very glad. It was worth everything that I went through. But after that 204 days, I kind of expected the norm was going to be I would walk out of the courtroom with at least 50-50. And I ended up getting relegated to even less than, you know, and every other weekend because my son was so young. Matter of fact, the guardian had lied and literally made the statement, well, your son hasn't really seen you so much. He went seven months without seeing you. So it might be traumatic for him to get too much time with you. And I thought, so if a kidnapper had kidnapped my son, would you say, well, you know,

your son's kind of used to that kidnapper, so we're going to leave him with the kidnapper. I'm like, he's my son. He needs to be with me to get that bonding in. And I was pretty well known in St. Louis. A TV station did a story on what happened. And I started getting message after message after message of people saying, hey, the same thing happened to me. Same thing happened to me.

And that was when I realized this wasn't me. This is a systemic problem within the family court system that needs to really be worked on. So that was when I really started my deep dive into what I'm doing now. Well, so, I mean, it was 83%, I think, where one of the parents was, you know, the main custodian. I think an 83% of that was the mother, right? Yeah, in 83% of the cases, if there's a primary custodian, it's going to be the mother. Now, I'll fight just as hard for mothers as I do fathers, because I'm not fighting for the mother

or the father. I'm fighting for the child. child i truly believe in my heart a child needs both of their parents okay well this because this is the question isn't the mother actually more important isn't that the assumption i think that's what a lot of people might think right yeah a lot of people picture the mother is the more nurturing and traditionally the mother does have a nurturing role but that's because in a traditional family dynamic traditionally the one of the parents usually the father is the breadwinner they're the disciplinarian the mother is the more than nurture the caregiver but when two when two people split now you have to have both dynamics in each house both

parents have to be the nurture in the provider in each house and so the child needs both because to remove and rip one parent out of a child's life, that's going to create a lot of confusion. I believe that God designed opposites to attract for a reason. Each have a strength and each has a weakness. You know, one parent may be a little more lenient, the other is a little more strict. So it's sort of they pull each other together when they're raising a child. You remove one parent out of the picture, and you've got a very, you know, it spins in a circle instead of having that dynamic of the parents

bouncing back and forth off each other. I mean, there's research that's been done on this, right? Yeah, Dr. Warren Farrell, who you know, is just a great guy. He wrote a book called The Boy Crisis, where he covers a lot of that information in a lot of great detail of what happens to children who grew up without a father. And like I said, I'll fight just as hard for the mother, but we've got the statistics that a child growing up without a

father that doesn't have the disciplinarian, that doesn't have the person who sets the boundaries for the child, is so much more likely to grow up with behavioral problems, drug problems, be incarcerated, high school dropout rates, teen pregnancy rates. All those problems, the one common threat is they grew up without a dad. Now, yes, there's some dads that walk away, but you don't punish the children of the other dads because some parents walked away.

You know, the presumption should be that a parent is presumed to be fit, willing, and able unless proven otherwise. I give the analogy, should be that a parent is presumed to be fit, willing, and able unless proven otherwise. I give the analogy, if someone gets a DWI, you don't take everyone's driver's license away. The fact that you have a driver's license gives the presumption that you're a fit, willing, and able driver unless proven otherwise. Well, the fact that you have a child, you should be presumed to be a fit, willing, and able parent unless proven otherwise. But you don't just rip a parent out of a child's life just because, well, this is the way we've always been doing it. It's interesting. There's a lot of research that I've seen, frankly, in a very bipartisan way, more conservative researchers, more liberal researchers,

that children growing up in a nuclear family are set up for success, statistically, basically, right? Does that still hold for children that are, you know, basically where the parents are separated, but both parents are in the home? That's a question. Do we know that? Yeah, two great points about that. One is, ironically, the research that's been done that shows either the nuclear family, the dad is the custodial parent, or the mother is the custodial parent. The best is the nuclear family. Believe it or not, very, very slim difference

between a child raised by a single father, but a marginal difference where it declines raised by a single mother. And I think that's because of those boundaries. Now, in the research we do have, though, of parents who do have co-parenting arrangements where they're 50-50, there's been a lot of research, an organization called National Parents Organization on their website has a lot of research that they've done. Dr. Bill Fabricius has done the best study that's out there from Arizona State. Arizona passed a bill, it's not what we call a true 50-50, but in 2012 it was the closest thing to that at the time and he studied i forget how

many either 300 or 600 kids for a six year period of time before 2012 and then to 2018 and it was amazing he it shows point by point so a child who had 36 percent did better than a child who had 31% time. A child who had 40% did, and it was literally a linear progression right up to 50-50. And he studied academically, emotionally, socially, and behaviorally. And on all four points, the children literally, it was a dramatic progression that the more time they got with both parents, the better they did on all those standings. So your 50-50 is not just based on the idea of fairness. It's also based on the idea of... The science is out there. There have been 64 peer-reviewed studies that Linda Nielsen has reviewed,

and they all come to the same conclusion, that children fare better with both parents. That's amazing. So this is really the answer, because this is my other question. Why 50-50? Why should we assume the default should be 50-50? But you kind of answered that here. Yeah, if it takes two parents, the child needs equal time with both parents. Because if not, the child gets confused. What happens in many cases is one parent from the child's perception and i always try to think about it from my son's eyes early on i thought about you know this isn't fair

to me as a dad my son's being taken away and i always encourage parents that are going through this forget about yourself think about your child but a child growing up where one parent is considered in their mind perceptuallyually, the superior parent, and one's the inferior parent. And one parent has to beg to be able to change the schedule. One parent has to beg for phone time. One can be the gatekeeper. One pretty much decides whether the child can

do extracurricular activities or not. From the child's perspective, this is my real parent. And this one's kind of almost like an uncle or an aunt. They're not really a parent in their mind. And imagine the child then when they become a teenager and they need disciplinarian help. How much are they going to respect this person? They've been relegated to a visitor or you're not important. It's going to be very hard. But the child is very confused because they love both parents the same. But they see it too. They see the hurt of the one parent. And the child internalizes that to where they feel like it's me.

I'm the cause of this. I'm the cause of the fights between my parent. I'm the reason this parent's hurting. You know, I try to not let Levi see, you know, when I'm hurting. But children pick up on that energy. He can tell. And from his perspective, I hope he never feels this way, but I know he has to at times thinking, I'm the reason why dad's hurting

right now. Children have enough pressure trying to grow up nowadays. They don't need that extra pressure of they're the reason for the struggles between the two parents. When we met, you had just begun getting legislation passed that would make 50-50 the default. I want to explain that as well. For example, one of the criticisms I've heard is, you're going to put a kid into an abusive parent's home because of this obsession with 50-50. I want to get you to respond to that. But also, how has this basically developed since then? And why is it that the default hasn't naturally been 50-50, right? Like, why is it that it ended up being 83% or whatever it is? Yeah, it's been a fun ride.

I shouldn't necessarily say fun ride. It wasn't the direction I thought my life would take. But yeah, I started becoming involved in the shared parenting community about nine years ago, and then progressively getting more and more active. And prior to that, what had happened was we had a lot of dads who meant well, but they fed right into the angry dad narrative. You know, the opposition has done a great job of creating the narrative that this is just a bunch of angry dads who have anger management problems, conflict resolution problems.

Maybe they shouldn't even be a dad. And what used to happen is people would have protest. And so they would stand at the courthouse, and they would hold these signs, my rights as a dad, and corrupt judges. And I understand where they're coming from. I've felt that too. The challenge is you get 10 guys together that have been through a family court situation. One tells their story and it's emotional. It's a form of PTSD. I mean, you can

feel all the emotions, the triggers. You can feel your heart beating faster when you're recalling the worst part of your life. And so they tell their story, and that riles up somebody else who tells their story that's even more impassioned than the first one. And pretty soon these guys are all riled up in a frenzy, and they look like they're in a Braveheart scene, ready to go into battle. And it just feeds right into the narrative of, wow, those guys look a little extreme. So what we've tried to do, I've got quite a political background, so I started doing these Facebook Lives every Monday night,

trying to educate people on the proper way to meet with legislators. How to frame the narrative, how to keep calm while you're talking to people, how to get past the gatekeeper, what are the steps in passing legislation? And it sort of caught on. So we started doing some things

and I've been very fortunate to combine, it's not my efforts, it's a bunch of people all working together. It's just that while I'm here, we're obviously talking about me, but I hope everybody watching understands I'm not bragging about myself. There's a lot of people out there that are working on this, but yeah, we've done a lot of great work. We've been able to, we started off Kentucky, passed a bill, a lot of help with that NPO organization, getting that one passed. Then we passed a bill in Arkansas, then West Virginia, Florida, Missouri, and now just recently New Hampshire. So we have six states that we have what we call a 50-50 rebuttable presumption. And then we've passed minor bills in a couple of other states.

Very briefly, that rebuttable part is very important. Yeah, thanks for clarifying. I forgot. Yeah, a 50-50 rebuttable presumption just means that the presumption should be that 50-50, each parent is going to get equal time, or more importantly, the child's going to get equal time with both of those parents. The word rebuttable means a judge still has judicial discretion. So it's not a rubber stamp. The opposition always tries to say, well, you're going to rubber stamp and force every kid to get 50-50, which means abusive parents. No, no, no, no, no. A judge has what's known as determining factors that they look at to find out, is a parent fit, willing, and able?

If not, that removes the presumption. We just say, instead of starting at the 83 percent, where one parent's going to get every other weekend, start with a presumption in the middle, and then a judge can determine, do we need to vary that? So give me a picture of how this movement has grown, right? Yeah, grown quite a bit. Matter of fact, as of right now, I'll be working in 31 states around the country this year in 2025, that we're going to have different bills in 31 different states. And that's just the ones I'm working on. I know there's others out there besides the one. So it's really neat. It's really sort of the ripple effect.

You know, it's really spread all across the country. And I think people are really waking up to the fact, the damage that is done to a child by ripping one parent out of their lives. So we're getting a lot of support and we're getting a lot of support too, because now we have so many legislators. I'm amazed. I was just talking to one today across the street who said the same thing. They were like, oh, my gosh, I just went through a custody battle last year. And in just about every chamber across the country, I'm coming across legislators that say, hey, I went through this. I'd like to sponsor your bill.

I mean, fascinating. And tell me, you've gotten some very interesting, like, preliminary information from Kentucky about some positive impacts from this bill, as I understand it. If you could just speak to that a bit and what research needs to be done, right? Yeah, it's an interesting thing because for years the opposition continually said, boy, if this bill passes, it's going to create havoc because people are going to be, you know, creating, you know, all these adversarial relationships are going to be creating all these adversarial relationships are going to get worse. You're going to increase domestic violence because kids are going to be with abusers. And ironically, it's turned out to the exact reverse. On this NPO website, you'll be able to see the actual statistics from Kentucky, but I don't know them offhand, but it's about 15%, 10 to 15% that divorce rates dropped. And I think the reason

why is because right now I have a lot of my followers that say, Mark, I didn't hate my ex near as much until I went into my first family law attorney's office who said, look, in our state, you're not going to get 50-50. So I need you to help me dig up dirt on why you're the better parent. Now picture this. Here's a couple, they're already emotional. They're splitting up. And instead of thinking of positive things, how can we work together? How can we benefit our child? They're rehashing the worst of the worst parts

that they know about their ex. That's not a healthy way to start a new dynamic in the child's family. And anytime you're thinking about the past, you're not thinking positive. You're thinking of the worst of the worst. And so this adversarial relationship is created. And why?

Not putting down, but it's a fact. Family law attorneys make their money on billable hours. If a couple's going to get 50-50, there's not a lot of billable hours in that. But man, if they can keep you fighting back and forth, they can rack up tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills. Imagine how different it would be if you could walk into a state like Kentucky and the family law attorney says, look, in our state, you're probably going to get 50-50. So unless you've got some proven abuse, you may as well

learn how to co-parent and put that money in your kid's college fund instead of my kid's college fund. And so that's what I think is happening in Kentucky and Arkansas and a lot of these other states is people are realizing that they shouldn't be fighting. And I think about 10 to 15 percent of marriages are now being getting back together and reuniting because instead of being riled up, they take a step back and they realize we don't have to come out slinging right out of the ring. We can take a breath. We can take a step back. And now they realize, you know what, for the benefit of our child, let's give this marriage a second try. You know, that actually reminds me of the case of Greg Ellis, which he wrote in the book about in the book The Respondent. And I guess our viewers can see and can watch that interview.

It can be pretty traumatizing what family court looks like in America, and maybe not just America, in my country of Canada as well, I'm aware of that being the situation. And you're kind of speaking a bit to kind of the incentive structures here, a bit of why that might be. I want to get you to comment on that a little bit, because there might be a very positive impact of this 50-50 assumption. That's just what's striking me as we're talking about this.

Yeah, and Greg's book is a great book. Greg's a good friend of mine, too. I just talked to him a couple of weeks ago. But yeah, his book really brings out what happens in family court. And as I said, it really is a form of PTSD because the person you love the most in your life, your child, there's the chance they could be ripped out of your life. You don't know, are you going to get zero custody? Are you going to get 50-50? And most men in most states, and like I said, there's some women too, but as a man, most guys walking into the courtroom know that there's a chance they're going to get every other weekend, a high probability of that. But in some cases, they'll get nothing at all. Imagine what you feel like every time the phone rings or every time

you get something in the mail that says family courts or from your attorney, your blood pressure rises, you can feel your pulse, you can feel your temperature rise, your whole body goes into into fight or flight system and it does that every day while in these family court cases go on for over a year in most cases and then what it does to your body, the trauma that it does from a health standpoint, it's amazing the trauma you go through. And I still get to that point every once in a while. I can remember. There's times, and most noncustodial parents know that feeling of seeing your ex on the phone. And as soon as you see that name, you're like, uh-oh, is this a problem again?

And it's created by this dynamic of the family court system. And as I said, if they can rack up those billable hours, and the easiest way to do that, you'll give up on your house, you'll give up on your car eventually. But most people aren't going to give up on their kids. And attorneys know that. And sadly, and this is not putting all attorneys down. There's a lot of great attorneys out there, but some of them unknowingly, and I think they don't intentionally mean to, but they know psychologically, hey, if I can keep this up, there's more billable hours here. How does that change when the assumption is 50-50 unless there's extraneous circumstances? Yeah. And I've got

several attorney friends of mine in St. Louis that off the record have told me, yeah, the billable hours, it drops substantially once they know they're probably going to get 50-50. Now, it increases, and this is the good thing about 50-50, too, because people always say, what about a situation where there is abuse? Well, that's why we need 50-50, because right now the courtrooms are so clogged with cases that shouldn't be in there, judges don't have the time to worry about those cases right now. They've got a docket with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cases. Imagine if we could clear those dockets of all the cases that really shouldn't even be there. Now a judge has the time to focus on the cases where there may be abuse or there is abuse and the judge needed the time but hasn't been getting them. And so that's one thing that really is beneficial beneficial but I'm hearing from a lot of attorneys that off the record they don't want to say it on the record because

that's you know the Bar Association will will it will come down on them hard if they say anything on the record but off the record they'll tell me you know Mark this is a lot better income where outcome we're seeing a lot better you know the dynamic of the parents after, you know, normally a parent leaves a courtroom, they don't talk to their parent. They're looking the other direction. They're mad. If they do say anything, they're yelling at them across the hallway. And I'm hearing a lot of attorneys that are telling me now, you know what, it's amazing to watch in the courtrooms in St. Louis that both parents afterwards are literally saying goodbye

to each other in the hallway now, instead of screaming at each other or ignoring each other and stomping out of the courtroom. And it's just, so maybe play this out for me too. I want to, I'm still sort of fixated on this incentive structure piece because I really think that that determines a lot these days, right? If the assumption is 50-50, why wouldn't an attorney still try to besmirch one of the parents and just keep it going? You'll still get some of that going on, but the 50-50 is a presumption that says, hey, you're presumed that you're both going to get 50-50, but you better have some overriding reason. Without a 50-50, there don't need to be an overriding reason. You just come out swinging, and whoever wins, one of you is going to win, one of you is going to lose. It's really what's in the judge's mind at the

beginning that matters. Exactly. And that's why we're wanting to start that presumption that, hey, you're both on a level playing field. You've got to come up with some kind of reason. If there's something that stands out that, hey, this is a problem here, there's some abuse here, now we're going to talk about that. But if not, let's get that out of the courtroom and start learning how to co-parent. So, you know, one thing that I was read in some of the notes that you sent me as we were preparing for this was that you actually, you've kept a journal for your son. I mean, like very committed. So like, what has come of that? I've written to him every single day. I shouldn't say every day, but just about every day since he's been born, almost every single day. Because early on, as I said, I went 204 days of not seeing him. And I don't know if I would ever see him. And during that time, I started

reading books about children growing up with parents and heard about this term called parental alienation, where a parent intentionally tries to basically block the relationship with the other parent. And I read stories of kids who grew up thinking their dad hated them, didn't want anything to do with them, and finding out that, no, dad did want me. I was lied to all my life. And I thought, just in case that happens and something happens to me, I want my son to know how much I care to him. So I started writing a journal to him during the 204 days.

I tried to be very careful. I'm not perfect, but I tried to be very careful to not put his mom down. It was more my thoughts of, hey, I saw kids at a school bus today on the way to work, and I thought about how neat it would be to be able to see you someday at the school bus. So it's still a lot hard to talk about. But I tried to talk from my feelings so that someday if my son never met me and I passed away somehow, and all he had was this journal, he would say, you know what? My dad loved me.

He really cared about me. And so I kept it up. And to this day, I've got almost every day of his life. And so what I do, I write on the one page. In most of the journals, I've gone back. So like when I take him to the zoo, I get the picture developed. And on the left side, he's got literally maybe one of the only kids in the world that if you go back and you tell me October 22nd of 2018, I can tell you,

we went to the zoo at 2.45. There we are. What's the relationship like now with your son? We've got a very good relationship, I would say. It's not as good as it can because, once again, the parental alienation wears on over time, and kids pick up on that. He's a great kid. As a matter of fact, I literally just talked to him. He had a basketball game last night in St. Louis, and he's a freshman, and it's a small school, so normally the freshmen are on

the varsity team, which means they're probably not going to play. But he got a little bit of playing time last night, so it was just kind of fun to be able to talk to him about that. But do you get 50-50? Yeah, I still have not gone back for 50-50 yet at this point. My case is a little bit more complicated. My ex has substantially more financial resources. Well, and I've been thinking, but you've also been a busy guy, right?

Yeah. But the sad thing is there are extreme cases where one person has substantially more assets and they can create even more problems where you know you're going to get 50-50, but it'll drain you in the short term, though. She has remarried a little over a year ago. And the guy's a great guy, by the way. I love this guy to death. I don't get a chance to talk to him too much, but just a great guy. And since she's remarried, I have gotten pretty close to 50 50 time, even though it's not in the court order. They've got another home in Pennsylvania. They travel all the time. And I wish it was a little more coordinated where I'd get more notice. But it happens quite often where I'll get a notice, hey, we're leaving town tomorrow.

I'll be gone for a week. Do you want them? And I'm like, heck, yeah, I'll take that time. So I have gotten a lot of good quality time with him in the past year. I guess he's 14 now? 14 and a half, yeah. Yeah. Does he, like, has he ever watched one of these interviews?

I'm hoping not. And that's why I said I try to not talk too much about his mom. 14 and a half, yeah. Has he ever watched one of these interviews? I'm hoping not. And that's why I said I try to not talk too much about his mom. And, you know, the people in St. Louis know there's some things that have gone on. She's known a little bit in St. Louis. But I try not. You know, my attitude is her and I may have some disagreements, but that's his mom. And if you love your child enough, I don't want him thinking bad about either one of us. I try to never talk about her when,

you know, around him. And there's some, there's some research around that too, isn't there, about how parents talk about each other to their kids, right? I vaguely remember something like this. A child hears things. They're not dumb, you know, even at a young age and they can pick up, even I said, just the energy they can feel when you're upset. And so many parents I see, even in my own community, especially in my own community, I see people bragging online and they'll post arguments about their ex on social media. And I'm thinking someday your kid's going to read that. You know, if I have a disagreement with my son's mom, that's between my son's mom and me. That's not for the whole world to see.

It's definitely not for my son. How do you think a child feels when they read their both parents talking about them on social media? A child should be shielded from that. They should never feel the, they're going to feel it a little little bit but you need to do everything you can to make sure because as i said a child loves both parents and they internalize it if you put the other parent down they think you're putting them down because their attitude is this disagreement is because of me i must be the problem and so the child grows up with a low self-image thinking i'm the problem there's something wrong with me you know either one of them didn't love me or you know i was such a bad person that they had to

fight amongst themselves because of me and I I never want that to happen for my son so I do everything I can like said I'm trust me I'm not perfect I guarantee you you could find things you're like I know you messed up there we're all human we do but you need to go in with a conscious effort saying hey this is about our child let's let's try and shield them from everything we can in this. It takes a very particular sort of person, I think, to decide, well, I'm going to dedicate my life to manifesting 50-50 across 50 states, I guess, which is your program here from the sounds of it, right? And so like, just, I want to get a little, you know, you, of course, you were fighting for your own particular situation, but somehow it became this, you know, big grassroots movement. Now, I think there's what 1.2

million people involved, right, or something like that. But, like, just I want to, what, how is it that you ended up doing this? Yeah, I never thought and once again, there's a lot of other great people, so I hope it doesn't sound like, you know, this is all about me. But I know my part came about just because this was definitely not what I had intended. I had intended to run for office. My goal was to be governor of Missouri and potentially move on to some higher positions down the road. I noticed that there was an empty niche where everybody was saying somebody needs to do something, somebody needs to do something, but nobody knew what to do.

And I had a pretty good background in the political arena, and so I knew what to do. So I started doing these Facebook Lives on Monday nights, and I would cover a different topic every night. They'd be, you know, sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes 20, 30 minutes. But I would cover how do you contact a legislator? What do you say to get their attention to deserve an appointment with them? How do you get past the gatekeeper? How do you frame the narrative in a way

that it will resonate with somebody who doesn't understand what we're going through? And these Facebook Lives started resonating. I started getting, early on it was like 500 people at night, and this is not the rebroadcast, these are people tuning in live. Then it grew to 2,000, 3,000cast these are people tuning in live then it grew to two thousand three thousand four thousand tuning in live every monday night and i realized there there's some people hungry for this type of information and my name got out

there quite a bit and i became sort of known as the guy if you will that that works on legislation so i started getting calls from people all over the country saying hey can you help me in our state can you help me in our state and it grew help me in our state? And it grew. And then I started getting involved, as you know, with a lot more national organizations, like I'm up here this week for ALEC. And becoming, I spoke this year for the National Association of Christian Lawmakers for their annual convention. And so now I have legislators calling me on a regular basis, seeking me out. Matter of fact, last night I was at a reception at ALEC, and a legislator from Alabama came over to me and said, hey, you're the one I saw on the video.

Hey, I've been wanting to get with you. Can you help us with a bill in Alabama? And then I also started training people because I realized one person can't be the magic. It has to be systematized with a Chick-fil-A. It's not the owner of Chick-fil-A who cooks the chicken. It's so systematized that you can take a kid, you know, a 15-year-old kid homeschooler and put them in a Chick-fil-A and within two hours they know how to cook the fries. They know how to bag it. You know, within a day they know how to cook the chicken. And that's what we need within the shared parenting community is a legislative process that it's not Mark Ludwig that's the magic,

it's the system. And anybody who's trained on the system, on the right methods and techniques, they don't need me. They can be the magic in their state. So that's where I've really, over the last year I've transitioned from trying to be sort of the figurehead, if you will,

to I'd rather be known, you know, when it's all said and done and they're eating potato salad and coleslaw at my funeral, I'd rather instead of them saying know, when it's all said and done and they're eating potato salad and coleslaw at my funeral, I'd rather instead of them saying, boy, Mark passed that bill, I'd rather a lot of people say, hey, you know what? I'm glad he trained me because I was able to pass the bill. And so I've worked very hard over this last year doing more training things. I think, you know, I wrote that book on how to pass legislation.

And now I started a training class where I actually do a seven series training class of people of how to get legislation passed. And so is this just for shared pairing legislation or shared parenting legislation or for any legislation? It's funny you mention that. Right now it's strictly shared parenting because I said it's a 324 page manual that I wrote step by step. And then the class, if people have the manual and the class, it's a goldmine because they can follow along. But I tweaked the class because I've been to dozens and dozens of training seminars over the years with people, you know, Kellyanne Conway and Joe Gaylord and people like that. And I sort of took that information and tweaked it to the shared parenting community. But since then, I've been getting a lot of people saying, hey, we're wanting to pass parental rights bills in our state, not the shared parenting, but the general parental and education bills.

Can you help us? And I was talking to Mike Huckabee. We were at John Ashcroft's house a couple of months ago. Mike's going to have me on his show next month. And Mike said, you know, Mark, instead of just training for your niche, he said, there's a lot of my viewers that would like to know how to pass legislation. He said, you really had to open up this class. So I am actually thinking in February of doing a general class that any type of legislation, if people want to get active, not to brag, but I've got a system where if they follow the template, I take them through step by

step by step, everything they need to do through both the art and the science to be effective and efficient when they're passing legislation. You know, it's interesting because this is also at a time where there's a huge, all sorts of huge grassroots movements that have actually become, you know, incredibly effective. You know, a fairly new one, right, for example, is Moms for Liberty. I mean, it's just a few, only a few years old and has, you know, grown up to be basically looking at parental rights in most states now, if I'm not mistaken. There's a huge

interest in this grassroots stuff. So it sounds like, my comment is, it sounds like this is something that would be warmly received. Yeah, I was just with a couple of the heads of Moms for Liberty at Bedminster at Trump's golf resort there a couple months ago. I was just reminded, you know, when we were speaking earlier, there's some kind of federal funding mechanisms that keep pushing things away from the kind of 50-50 system. Yeah, it's funny. Phyllis Schlafly, I was very fortunate. She was from St. Louis, and so I got a lot of time with her over the years, not realizing how important she was gonna become in my life until after she passed away but she used to always say if there's a problem

there's a funding mechanism somewhere that's creating that problem if it's ongoing and she started raising the flag in the early and mid 90s that title 4d was going to create a fatherlessness society. And what happens, there's Title IV-D of the Social Security Act. It meant well. The program was set up so that back in the days when I was born in the Beaver Cleaver days, my dad was a chemical engineer and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. So if 10 years into the marriage they would have gotten a divorce, it would have been very hard for my mom, who had been out of the workforce for 10, 12 years,

to get back into the workforce competing with kids graduating from college, high school, having all the social media skills. It would have been very hard for her to get a decent career going out of nothing. So if someone wasn't paying child support and that woman was ending up on welfare as a result, they set up this Title IV-D program that said said if this person is not paying child support and we're paying welfare we're gonna recoup the welfare from this person who's not paying child support and it was a means-tested program the only people in that program was supposed to be people who were receiving welfare

benefits and they made some changes in 96 and 98 that basically lumped every child support order in the country into the Title 40 program and states there's two parts to the program one is states get money they get a reimbursement for the money they spent in child support enforcement collections so if a state has to you know spend time garnishing a wage or tracking someone down or something they get two dollars for every dollar that they spend reimbursed from the federal government. The problem with that scenario, I give the analogy, imagine that you were going to open a restaurant. And as most people know, the first year you own a restaurant,

the owner, you lose money. The employees get paid right away. So you've budgeted that you've got $30,000 set aside, $10,000 for each of three employees. And that's going to be the start of your restaurant, a little sandwich shop. So you have three employees, $10,000 a each of three employees and that's that's gonna be the start of your restaurant a little sandwich shop so you have three part two three employees ten thousand a year but your rich uncle comes to town and says hey you know what I'd like to help you get a start so I'll tell you what for every three employees you hire I'll pay the salary for two of them are you gonna stop at those three employees you had a thirty thousand dollar budget can you imagine how efficient your your restaurant would look if you had nine employees now because you're seeing thirty thousand but now you got nine nine employees

you're only paying three of those so that's what happens is you get what i call the government bloat where they bloat the budget because they're allowed this much hey the feds are paying two thirds of that we can just rack up more and so that's what's happened is states have increased this budget and it gets larger and larger. And to be able to keep getting that money in, they have to keep increasing child support amounts. And the reason is because the second part of Title IV-D, there's a performance incentive bonus pool where a certain amount of money, over a half a billion dollars, is put into a pot, and the states compete amongst.

There's five factors that basically all revolve around how much money do you collect in child support. The more money you collect, the more money the state's going to get in this incentive pool. And the money bypasses the state general fund. It goes straight to the courthouses making the decisions. Now, a judge can't increase their own salary, but they can hire more clerks. They can, you know, increase the office space. And the only stipulation is you have to increase over the previous year. So, you know, if you have 50-50, unless you've got a big disparity in income, there's not a real need for child support. Each parent is going to take care of their own expenses. They both have a bedroom. They both have electricity. Both have closing costs, food costs, 50-50. I say, unless there's a big disparity in income. However, if you can give a big differential in time and one parent gets

every other weekend, now you've got a reason to transfer child support amounts through that Title IV-D program. And I've had a lot of attorneys and judges off the record tell me there's an incentive to split that time. So this is, again these whatever the incentive structures is in a sense it creates a market around that. I'm thinking of you know we were once looking at the market created around food stamps because of that particularly odd incentive structures around food stamps. But yeah sadly some of these programs start out with a great intent and it just grows and grows and grows, and the dynamic becomes the exact opposite of what they were. And so here's the sad part.

Imagine that you're a child support enforcement worker and you have two files on your desk. One is a means-tested program. This is the one who really needs the money. The other one, though, is the middle class person who was thrown in because of all those extra Title 40 cases thrown in in the 90s. This one, the challenge is the child support amount is probably only like $150 a month. The person's probably changed jobs three or five times. They've changed apartments three or five times. It's going to be hard to track them down. And if you do, we don't know how many assets they're gonna have however you have this file over here this one it's $800 a month they're a computer programmer we know where they

work they work the same place all you have to do is make a garnishment garnish their wage and now you look like a hero because instead of collecting 150 you collected 800 which file are you going after you're neglecting the cases that the program was set up for and instead you're chasing the money over here so I said we need to clear the all the cases that weren't supposed to be there so now the time and effort can go into the people who really need the money the people who are on welfare because they're not getting child support and but we also need to make sure that we're looking at what about those child

support orders you know a lot of people think well this person you know there's a bedroom in that house and if that's your child you should be paying for the bedroom in that house. Well if that's true in the non-custodial house there's a bedroom too. You can't call your mortgage company and say you know what my child's only here four nights a month so can I carve out part of my you know that portion of my mortgage every month? No, you're paying the mortgage on that full house. The marginal cost to have the air conditioning for two people versus one person at a house is not that much more. It's probably going to be the same temperature. So a lot of these costs that they're looking at, they're not looking at them in the right way of

what is the actual increase, the marginal cost of having the extra child in the house versus what's looking at in both homes. What happens if the child has a strong preference for one of the parents, but there's this assumption of 50-50? How does that play out? My thought as a parent, and I'm not putting down other parents, but my personal thought is I don't want that responsibility on my child at 14 years old to feel like he's making that decision. There are situations where there's what's known as an alienator, someone who's intentionally trying to sabotage the relationship with the other parent. A child knows which parent that is, and they know that parent has conditional love. The other parent probably has the unconditional love.

But the child feels like, you know what, if I go with this parent, this parent's still going to love me. But if I go with this parent, this parent's going to hate me and I know there's going to be hell to pay. And so I don't want to, I really want to be with this parent, but I kind of have to pick this parent. And that's why there are a lot of child suicides where a child was chosen to pick one parent. They knew that the parent was being alienated. They picked this parent, and they felt so much guilt that there's children who have literally committed suicide because they felt guilt of picking the parent that they didn't really want to be with.

I don't think a child should be put in that position anyway. You know, as a parent, it's my responsibility. I can determine whether I think my child should, you know, have a cell phone or not. I can determine when I think my child is appropriate, you know, what kids I want him hanging around. And I don't think a child should be put in a position to make a parenting decision of which parent they want to spend more time with. I think they need, regardless of how they feel about both parents, both parents add value in a different way. And like I said, I may disagree with my son's mom. We don't agree on a lot, but it's still his mom. And she adds value to his life in a different way and like i said i i may disagree with my son's mom we don't agree on a lot but still his mom and she adds value to his life in a different way so i don't want to i i wouldn't

want if people ask me that a lot too they're like you know don't you wish you were the custodial parent no i don't i want him to have equal time with both of us practically speaking right you just can't imagine there's just like a lot of negotiating that has to happen. It just strikes me as easier in some ways to have like one executive and the other person not being the executive. Instead, you're kind of like, is it management by committee or I don't know. In the short term, it's a problem. But in the long term, you and I were talking earlier today about, you know, true happiness. And there's times where you get short-term pleasure but you sacrifice the long-term gain and it's the same way in a dynamic when you're in a co-parenting situation that first

year is going to be very tough however for the child's perspective you know when there's a married couple both both of those parents have input within the same house that child needs to see that same dynamic when there's a co-parenting situation. If the child perceives that one parent is the superior parent and the other one is the one who has to beg, that is very unhealthy for the child to see. And I have to wonder too, for children who see a father go through this, especially boys, what goes, do they want to be a father when they grow up? Or do they see, man, I saw the way my dad was treated. I don't want to be a dad when I grow up. I'll go through the same type of a thing. So what is the impact of a child that keeps going back and forth between homes? Yeah, that's one thing that the opposition brings up. And I thought about it at

one point, too, of how healthy is that for a child to be going back and forth between the two homes until I started realizing, wait a minute, they're going to be going back and forth between the two homes, whether it's 50-50 or whether it's every other weekend. But what I started realizing, wait a minute, they're going to be going back and forth between the two homes, whether it's 50-50 or whether it's every other weekend. But what I've realized in talking to a lot of psychologists is the number one stability point a child needs is not where they live, but who they have a relationship with. And the stability of the relationship with both parents is more important than what house they live in. There's a lot of homeless people out there. There's people that travel. There's military people that move every six months

or a year. There's pastors that move every two years. They don't consider that unstable. Why? Because they're with the parent. And so the number one thing a child needs is that active relationship with both parents. But in my mind, it's much more stable for a child to feel like they live in that home than they're a visitor. If they go every other weekend to the one parent's house, that's not really their room in their mind. In their mind, they're kind of visiting that house. It's much more stable for the child to feel like, hey, these are both my bedrooms. I have two homes.

And what about scenarios where the parents live quite far apart, like across the country in a different state in another country? Yeah, and that's one we, I talked about these, what we call determining factors for a judge to look at to rebut the presumption. And that's one thing you look at. It's going to be very hard to do a true 50-50 if one parent's living out of state or out of the country for sure. I know for myself, and this is not putting other parents down, there's some situations people can't avoid. If they're in the military and get a transfer, they can't say, sorry, not going there. Some people get a job transfer. I just know for myself, you know, every decision I make is based on my son. So I would want to live where my son is. If my son's mom moves, I'll move to where she moves. And hopefully both parents are going to

realize that, wait, if you have a child and you're not living together anymore, you need to do everything you can to keep as close to that environment as you can. But yeah, if you're living out of state, it's going to be very hard. So that's something that's going to be not in the immediate presumption, and it's going

to be looked at individually. So Mark, where can people get access to all these resources that you're developing or maybe if they've become intrigued by what you and all these other parents are doing? Where can they find out more? now. So if anybody wants to get, especially legislatively, if people want to get involved legislatively, I need them to go through the training because I need to do it the right way. I don't want people who say, oh, I want to help. And they show up at a Capitol, but because they don't know what they mean well, but because they don't know what to do, they're creating more harm than good. If you're going to be a dentist, you don't just open up somebody's mouth with a pair of pliers. You're going through dental school. The website I've set up, I'm from St. Louis. so it's stlmarkledwig.com. So stlmarkledwig.com will get information on the training.

I'm very active on Facebook, so if you look for the Mark Ludwig Facebook page, or I do have the group Americans for Equal Shared Parenting, I've got a page for that, and then a website, AFESP.com for the Americans Frequently Shared Parenting. Wonderful. So any final thought as we finish? The ship never turns as quick as you'd like it to. But over the last nine years, it's been very rewarding to get cards and letters from people in the states that we've passed,

letting me know that, hey, Mark, thanks, I just got 50-50 in our state. And it's a rewarding feeling to think that there's a great team of us across the country all working together and we're making a difference. And like I said, it's not where I thought my life would go, not in any way the way I wanted it to go, but I think we are finally making a direction. I think we're finally making the progress we thought. We just need a lot more people helping out. So if there's anybody out there going through a battle, we need you. Please reach out to that stlmarkludwig.com and let's get you helping us out. Well, Mark Ludwig, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you all for joining Mark

Ludwig and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.