Summer Edition 2025 Global Roundup
- Lesley Friedland and the FamilyKind Team
- Aug 26
- 2 min read
Recent family related news included an exploration of two difficult issues that arise in contested custody cases: balancing the rights of parents with the safety of children; and the validity of therapeutic supervised visitation. “Gray divorce,” “Bird nesting,” and “divorce” in the songbird community rounded out the family related news.
Chris Moody, Washington Post, July 9, 2025
“Birdnesting” aims to reduce disruption in children’s lives while their parents are no longer living together. The key to maintaining the health of any nesting arrangement is communication, Ann Gold Buscho, a family therapist in Marin County, California, shared. She added that every detail and contingency should be sorted out, in writing, before starting.
Geoff Brumfiel, NPR, July 30, 2025
The new study revealed that some avian couples appear to call it quits at the end of their breeding season. The divorcees appear to go their separate ways while other couples stick together over the winter months so they can breed together again in the spring.
Patricia Fersch, Forbes, July 25, 2025
The rights of parents to the care, custody of, and decision making for their children are deeply endowed in the United States Constitution. The first and most important prong of parenting is to keep their child safe. This becomes the court’s responsibility in a contested custody case. Custody cases involving mental illness, physical illness or the addiction of a parent are among the most difficult matters faced by the courts as they have to balance parents’ right to care and the safety of the child.
Patricia Fersch, Forbes, August 20, 2025
The general thinking among legal professionals and courts is that therapy is good and therefore in difficult high conflict custody cases the best solution to rekindle the parent/child relationship is to put the parent and the child together in a room with a therapist to supervise the visit and offer parenting advice to the parent while providing a sense of safety for the child. The author believes that this idea is flawed and more work needs to be done in this area.
Alisa Chang and Brittany Luse, NPR, August 21, 2025
Texas Tech University professor, Dana Weisner, who studies human development and family sciences explained what’s behind the rise in ‘gray divorce’: we're living longer than past generations; we are more culturally accepting of divorce than we have been in the past; women in particular are more financially independent; and people just expect more from a marriage or partnership.