Days of Our Wives

The second wives of the Coalition of Parent Support (COPS) are demonstrating that some women are their own worst enemies (“Not With My Husband’s Money You Don’t!” by Sonia Nazario, Dec. 3). These women have settled for marriages that focus on anger toward the first wife and spite for the children. What a pity!

What would happen if these second wives instead put their energy into supporting the first wife’s role as a parent, while improving their own role as stepmothers. And they could work toward acquiring more skills so that they could contribute more financially to the second marriage. But then, perhaps, the husband might not want his second wife any more, because she would no longer be a partner in his crusade to get even with his first wife.

Kristine L. Cerone

Huntington Beach

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Many thanks and congratulations to COPS for having the courage to look legislators in the eye and ask for some equality and fairness. All children are precious, regardless of when they are fathered in a man’s life. My daughter and her finanical needs are just as important as those of his first daughter. The difference is, we planned our daughter, and he had no say in the planning of the first one. He was, as the article said just “a sperm donnor with an open wallet.”

L.J. Saez

Ventura

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Most American children entitled to child support get less than they are owed; a third of them get nothing at all. Nazario, in choosing to highlight the most contentious aspect of child support, may have served only to fan the flames between angry parents who clearly have lost sight of the well-being of their children.

Ironically, 50% or so of the second wives who are helping their current husbands evade their legal obligation to pay support may sometime face divorce themselves. Then, these women will be all for full payment of child support.

Barbara Grob, director

Child Support Reform Initiative

San Francisco

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If a man has a couple of kids he no longer can afford to support, he simply shouldn’t have any more children. The woman who is to become the man’s second wife, who presumably is familiar with his situation, must decide whether she really wants a man who can’t afford additional children.

Victor Fresco

Venice

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“If I can’t have it, no one can” seems to be the unspoken motto of the women of (COPS). The author has laid bare one of the reasons that deadbeat dads exist and why many children from first families are not seeing their fathers.

Kids know what’s going on with parents and stepparents; they pick up the rhythm, hear the telephone calls. They’re aware of the COPS wife’s nagging anger directed at the wife and children of the first family; they sense the clear lack of support for a man in a difficult position.

I was not surprised to hear the second wives’ complaint about their needs not being met. They believe they have the complete rights to their current husband, and that anything in the past should have no bearing on the present or on their future plans. It saddens me, though, to think of all the children who will be missing opportunities to spend time getting to know their fathers, all because of another woman’s selfishness and greed.

Devon Clark

Santa Monica

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As adults, we are responsible for ensuring that the children we bring into the world will be taken care of, financially and emotionally, before we create new ones. Accepting a spouse’s lack of commitment to his or her first family shows a lack of character, and encouraging such irresponsibility is incomprehensibly selfish.

The bottom line is, if you want to start a family, marry someone who doesn’t already have one.

Karin O’Callaghan

Long Beach

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Second wives: Observe carefully how your hubby treats his first family. Before you come down hard against his first wife and her kids, remember that if he dumped them to be with you, he may just as easily dump you and your kids for a new, shinier model.

Annie Caroline Schuler

West Hollywood

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Nazario’s article concludes with a second wife stroking her belly and saying that her child is “the forgotten child.” Not so. Her child is the one with whom her husband will have daily contact. The children from his first marriage are more likely to be the forgotten ones.

Lorrian A. Maass

Long Beach

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As a second wife with a job, I resent my husband’s ex-wife using my employment as justification to collect more child support, while she sits at home doing nothing. Why shouldn’t she have to contribute financially to her children’s upbringing?

Sharon Sosa

Valencia

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Three points that need underlining:

--California, in determining how much child support a parent must pay, does take into consideration other children that either parent may be supporting.

--The courts are empowered to consider a new spouse’s income only in very limited circumstances, those that would result in hardship imposed on either the second family or the supported child.

--Second wives or husbands should be glad to see that their spouses are a devoted parents who recognize their legal and moral obligations to the children of their first families.

Donna S. Hershkowitz, staff attorney

Child Support Project Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law

Los Angeles

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L.A. County children are owed more than $1 billion in unpaid support, and only 8.5% of the cases dealt with by the district attorney’s office ever result in payments. Non-support is the leading cause of welfare dependency; 87% of the children on welfare are not receiving support.

L.A. County is dealing with 750,000 child-support cases, and only two commissioners to hear the 660,000 cases that do no have support orders.

In dealing only with divorced families and remarriage, Nazario left out half the story: the part about the children whose parents never married. Their cases, too, need the district attorney’s attention.

The Association for Children for Enforcement of Support Inc. (ACES) is working in L.A. County to help all children entitled to support to receive what they are owed.

Nora O’Brien, regional director

ACES Sacramento