I’d like to introduce FatherX, a man who has turned hard-earned experience in the family court system into practical guidance for fathers. He teaches the fundamentals that most men are never told — how custody works, how to navigate the courtroom, how to read case law, and how to keep your emotional balance through it all. His work equips dads not only with knowledge but with strategy and calm confidence in one of the most painful arenas a man can face. Tom Golden

 

Good Morning! I’m Father X, the creator of the Youtube series “Father X - How Fathers Can Win Child Custody” at YouTube.com/@FatherX2022.

My video series should be required viewing for every dad going through family court. I often get comments like this from dads:

“I can’t possibly express enough gratitude to you, Father X! Thank God I found your video series. I followed all of your steps and took all of your advice and it SAVED ME AND MY CHILD!”

During my 3 years in family court, I learned the system isn’t designed to determine the actual best interests of the child. Instead, their process is designed to produce a standard factory output: the mother must get custody, and the dad must pay child support. I managed to get primary custody of our son, but it took superhuman effort to break the family court machine.

How did all this come to pass? It started in real life, before family court got involved, when I lived with my ex-girlfriend for over a year. We moved in together when she became pregnant and I immediately became a male victim of her domestic violence. The second time she assaulted me, I called the police, who told me it didn’t matter what I said because they only believe the woman. They told me they could just have me arrested based on her word alone, and I should just leave our home for the night...even though I was the one who called 911! Obviously, that’s not a competent process.

When I tried to file a police report a couple of weeks later, a police lady told me I wasn’t allowed to file a report because the mother had already filed one. Days later, I learned this police officer lied to me. I had a lawyer call the police station to tell them I was coming to file a police report against my ex-girlfriend, and only then was I able to do so. You can see the barriers created for men.

I also called the domestic violence hotline, who confirmed the police would always just arrest the man, maybe unless he was bleeding from the skull. I learned the police and domestic violence hotline only exist to help women, whether the woman is guilty or innocent.

In addition, I considered leaving my son’s mother. When I researched family court, I learned that mothers get primary custody about 85% of the time. But I wanted to raise our son, and I had no interest in leaving him in the hands of a violent and abusive mother. Thus, I had to stay in that abusive relationship if I wanted to continue raising our son. The legal system, end to end, provided no relief for a male victim of domestic violence and his child.

The day I finally moved out of our home, because it was too dangerous for me to live with my son’s mom, she went to court and got a restraining order based on false allegations against me. And a couple of hours later, she went to the police to file a false report, and the police started the process of having me arrested. For her, it was as easy as ordering a Big Mac at McDonald’s. And then the Dominoe’s fell into place...starting the standard process where the government agencies all avoid learning the facts, so they can rubber stamp everything the mother wants and enable and reward her false allegations.

To see the incompetence of the government agencies starting on Day 1, you have to know that after 3 years in family court, after a full trial, after I testified 14 times for a total of 28 hours, after I “politely forced reality down my judge’s throat”, the court decided it was in the best interests of our son for me to have primary custody. And I proved the allegations of domestic violence that I made in my petitions on Day 1. The mother’s restraining order against me was cancelled. And my restraining order against her was extended for 2 years because she was found guilty of assaulting me.

So, knowing that end result, the questions are, starting on Day 1, how does family court handle this scenario, where the father is a better parent, and the mother is an abusive, unfit parent? And does the court have a competent process for figuring out the correct answer when it comes to domestic violence allegations and child custody disputes?

With every new government agency involved, the starting point is “supposed” to be neutral. But there was an obvious pattern that each new government actor started by giving the mother whatever she asked for. And these government actors never started by conducting intelligent analysis to figure out the truth. I had to force the truth upon them, one at a time.

When the mother filed her false police report and restraining order, this started the feeding frenzy where these government actors took their shots at me one at a time and I was fighting a war on multiple fronts.

Police and District Attorney: The police arrested me based on the mother’s allegation alone. They never asked for my side of the story to see if I had evidence to contradict her. The district attorney told the police to arrest me even though the DA didn’t investigate either - because any investigation would have involved me. That’s not a competent process.

Bail Judge: After I was arrested, I appeared in front of a bail judge. He was complaining to me about how terrible it was for an infant child to see his father assaulting his mother. It never occurred to the bail judge that the mother was lying in order to get custody. Or that she was the one punching me in front of our child. That judge was just using stereotypes, disconnected from reality. Another incompetent actor in this game.

Custody Judge: Next, we appeared in front of a custody judge. I already submitted my own petitions for custody and an order of protection, where I stated the mother assaulted me multiple times, I showed police reports against her, and I shared that she had anger management problems and was suicidal. But this judge never bothered to read my petition. So, she started off by giving the mother temporary primary custody, only because the mother was unemployed and available to parent, but I had a job. The judge ignored all the other best interest factors that the appellate courts required to be addressed. That’s not a legitimate process.

This judge also denied me an order of protection, even though I talked about how the mother assaulted me. My lawyer started yelling at this judge because my allegations against the mother were greater than her allegations against me...and the mother was getting an order of protection! Only then did the judge read my petitions and gave me a temporary order of protection against the mother. Then I told the judge that since she hadn’t read my petitions, she needed to reassess her custody order because she was giving primary custody to a violent, suicidal mother. This judge denied my request, ignored the issues, and kept the mother as the primary custodial parent...without stating why that was an intelligent decision.

I saw how courts make temporary custody and restraining orders based on whatever reason they need to rubber stamp the mother. And remember that I ultimately got primary custody and a final restraining order. They could have made a correct custody decision on Day 1, but they chose to ignore everything the man said.

It’s possible the judge was thinking I was arrested, therefore I must be guilty, so it must be safer to give the mother custody. But we know the police arrested me without any actual intelligent thought – that’s their standard “process”. But the judge wasn’t questioning the validity of the police work. So now you have one incompetent agency feeding another agency...and incompetent decisions are building on incompetent actions. That’s a central pillar of the family court culture.

Child Protective Services: Next, we had Child Protective Services investigate us. The CPS worker wrote a report where she stated she had no idea which of us committed domestic violence. However, we had couple’s therapists, while we lived together, who all knew the mother had anger management problems and the mother was the violent one. The CPS worker spoke to them, and this information was at her fingertips. But because she was incompetent and/or biased, she didn’t provide the judge with a view of reality. So, we had another layer of incompetence building on incompetence.

Child Support: Next, the child support agency ordered me to pay about $16,000 per year of support to the mother, even though the actual cost of raising our infant son was $4,000 a year. The mother was making a profit from child support. This made my net income negative, and I was bleeding cash every month. I had to pay my criminal defense lawyer, my custody lawyer, and the forensic evaluator. I ended up with over $100,000 of debt and no assets. So even though the priority question is figuring out who committed domestic violence and who should have custody of the child, the child support agency makes it extremely difficult for any man to proceed with a trial to figure out the truth to these questions. And if you quit because you can’t afford a trial, then the mother wins automatically…because she was given temporary custody to start, without any fact finding, without any intelligent analysis.

With all these agencies taking their turn siding with the mother, without any intelligent thought, you can see how demoralizing it is for any man to face all of this. And, too often, dads have to settle for whatever the mother or the courts offer them. It’s emotionally and financially draining. Many men quit and many others kill themselves.

And this is all standard operating procedure in family court. This is how you get the end result where about 85% of moms get primary custody.

Ultimately, I was able to overcome the gender bias and incompetence of family court. It took superhuman effort for me to overcome family court and get primary custody of our son. I quickly recognized that most fathers can’t do this and are destined to be railroaded by the system. I promised myself that I would do something to expose this system. As a result, I now create educational videos on YouTube, teaching dads the flaws of family court and how to overcome those flaws. I teach dads everything that I learned the hard way, over 3 years.

I teach the basics of primary custody, sole custody, restraining orders, and legal custody. We discuss whether you need a lawyer and how to interview lawyers by asking the hard questions. I teach strategic behaviors in the courtroom. I teach how to handle your first day in family court, as well as the overall family court process. I teach how judges make bad decisions…so you can anticipate where they’ll go wrong and how you can counter maneuver. I teach dads how to read case law to learn the real laws. I teach dads how to correctly analyze the best interests of the child so you can present the best possible case for your kid. We discuss how to handle the enormous emotional burden on fathers. And for those parents that can mediate, I teach you exactly what a fair parenting plan looks like.

It’s important to recognize that nobody is coming to save you or your kids. You must be your own advocate. I teach you how. Find me on YouTube or get my family court guides at FatherX.LemonSqueezy.com…before it’s too late.

https://www.youtube.com/@FatherX2022

https://x.com/FatherX2022

https://fatherx.lemonsqueezy.com/

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Introduction to Women’s Historical Gift of Love: the Evolution of Empathy

Many of us here know the pain of being hurt by women — through betrayal, false accusation, alienation, or cruelty. For those who have lived that, it can be hard to read praise of the feminine without flinching. That’s natural.

Yet healing often begins when we can hold two truths at once: some women have done harm, and women as a whole have also given civilization gifts. In this essay David Shackleton looks at women’s impact on empathy. Shackleton explores how, across generations, mothers quietly expanded humanity’s moral depth while men advanced knowledge and invention. Both streams were essential to our progress, and both were not mutually exclusive.

Feminists have long tried to obscure this moral achievement because it doesn’t fit their preferred path for women — getting a job. They celebrate women who break ceilings but ignore those who built the foundations of love and empathy that made civilization humane. The following is an excerpt from David Shackleton’s forthcoming book, Matrisensus: The Masculine Collapse and Feminine Shadow. See what you think. How have we ruined this balance and to what effect? Tom Golden

Women’s Historical Gift of Love: the Evolution of Empathy

 

Civilization has been built by two parallel and complementary streams of human achievement. On one side, while most men did not add to the collection of human knowledge, a few exceptional men pushed forward the frontiers of knowledge: explorers charting unknown lands, scientists discovering natural laws, philosophers clarifying moral principles. On the other side, while most women made no difference in their parenting from the way they had been treated in their own childhoods, a few exceptional women advanced the frontier of love – especially empathy – in the private realm of the family, transmitting new ways of caring for children that slowly reshaped society. Both gifts were indispensable.

The historian of childhood Lloyd deMause argued that the deepest motor of history is not politics or economics, but the way parents treat their children. Most parents, he observed, simply repeat what they themselves experienced. Yet in every generation, a few mothers break the cycle, heroically choosing to treat their children with greater tenderness and empathy than they had received. Since mothers in subsequent generations then repeat these new patterns, these quiet decisions accumulate across generations, slowly elevating culture.

To give shape to this process, deMause described six successive childrearing modes, each producing characteristic personality structures and cultural patterns:

Childrearing Mode – Description – Psychological Outcome

• Infanticidal: Routine killing or abandonment of unwanted infants → Schizoid, fragmented personalities

• Abandoning: Physical survival ensured, but emotional neglect and use of wet nurses or servants → Masochistic, dependent personalities

• Ambivalent: Parents swing between affection and cruelty, discipline by fear → Borderline, unstable personalities

• Intrusive: Parents invade the child’s inner life, controlling thoughts and feelings → Depressive, guilt-ridden personalities

• Socializing: Parents train children to conform to external norms and roles → Neurotic, rule-bound personalities

• Helping: Parents empathize with children’s needs and support growth toward autonomy → Individuated, creative personalities

 

(If you find yourself doubting the historical advance of empathy or that childrearing was so brutal in the past, consider that it is less than 500 years since we burned people alive at the stake in public executions. How much less empathy must people have had at that time in order to watch and approve of such horrific spectacles?)

deMause explained:
“Psychogenesis is not a very robust process in caretakers. Most of the time, parents simply re-inflict upon their children what had been done to them in their own childhood. The production of developmental variations can occur only in the silent, mostly unrecorded decisions by parents to go beyond the traumas they themselves endured. It happens each time a mother decides not to use her child as an erotic object, not to tie it up so long in swaddling bands, not to hit it when it cries. It happens each time a mother encourages her child’s explorations and independence, each time she overcomes her own despair and neediness and gives her child a bit more of the love and empathy she herself didn’t get. These private moments are rarely recorded for historians, and social scientists have completely overlooked their role in the production of cultural variation, yet they are nonetheless the ultimate sources of the evolution of the psyche and culture.”

And again, in conclusion:
“Because childrearing evolution determines the evolution of the psyche and society, the causal arrows of all other social theories are reversed by the psychogenic theory. Rather than personal and family life being seen as dragged along in the wake of social, cultural, technological and economic change, society is instead viewed as the outcome of evolutionary changes that first occur in the psyche. Because the structure of the psyche changes from generation to generation within the narrow funnel of childhood, childrearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits—they are the very condition for the transmission and further development of all other cultural elements, placing limits on what can be achieved in all other social areas. … Childhood must therefore always first evolve before major social, cultural and economic innovation can occur.”

To summarize, deMause outlined a new, psychogenic theory of history: that cultural evolution is driven overwhelmingly by the nature of childraising, and that this is dominated by mothers, with those few mothers who courageously advance their own psychic maturity so that they are able to love their children better than they themselves were loved as a child being the engine of advancing social empathy and thus of general cultural progress. Far from being powerless and oppressed figures in history, this theory places women at the centre of cultural evolution, the prime cause. Women provided the substrate, the progressively advancing psychological and cultural backdrop, and men innovated the physical techniques and technologies that delivered greater health, longer lives, better living standards, and increased freedom. It was truly an equal partnership.

A few examples illustrate women’s contribution:

The Breastfeeding Revolution: In eighteenth-century England and France, mothers began to nurse their own children instead of sending them to wet nurses. This seemingly small change radically increased infant survival, deepened maternal bonds, and helped prepare a generation with greater capacity for empathy. Rousseau’s Émile (1762) gave voice to this cultural shift, insisting that “the mother’s milk is the milk of virtue.” Within a century, England and France were leading the world in science, democracy, and industrialization.

Abolitionism: While men like Wilberforce led parliamentary campaigns, the conscience of the abolition movement was profoundly maternal. Writers such as Elizabeth Heyrick, who called for immediate abolition in 1824, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) moved millions, exemplified how women’s empathy translated into moral revolution. Abraham Lincoln’s (perhaps apocryphal) remark on meeting Stowe — “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war” — captures this dynamic.

The Rise of Universal Human Rights: The very notion that all people possess inherent dignity and equal rights, regardless of class, race, or sex, emerged alongside the expansion of empathy across generations. While men codified these rights in declarations and constitutions, women’s work of nurturing developed the human capacity to imagine others as equally valuable. The family was the first school of equality: the mother who held her child in love transmitted, in seed form, the conviction that every human being deserved care and respect. As historian Lynn Hunt argues in Inventing Human Rights (2007), the eighteenth century saw the growth of “empathetic imagination” through novels, letters, and family life, and this undergirded the spread of rights discourse. Without this interior revolution of feeling, the abstract principle of rights would have rung hollow. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and later the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) were thus the public crystallization of a private moral revolution that mothers advanced in the nursery.

Child Labor Reforms: In nineteenth-century Britain and America, mothers and women’s societies were prominent advocates for laws restricting child labor, pressing legislators with the moral claim that children were not merely economic assets but human beings with rights and dignity.

Nursing and Care: Florence Nightingale’s transformation of nursing in the Crimean War and afterward reframed medicine as compassionate service, professionalizing an ethic of care. Her Notes on Nursing (1859) became foundational for modern healthcare.

Education and Literacy: Across the West, women were the primary transmitters of literacy and moral instruction in the home. In the nineteenth century, they became the backbone of the teaching profession, extending their empathic role into the public sphere.

Each of these steps paralleled breakthroughs in men’s domain: Newton’s Principia (1687) reshaping science, Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) transforming biology, explorers charting the globe, inventors powering industry, philosophers clarifying the principles of liberty and democracy. Men advanced the frontier of truth; women advanced the frontier of love.

The prevailing feminist narrative has been that women were excluded from history’s great achievements and silenced by male domination. But deMause’s research reveals a deeper truth: women were not absent from progress; they were its other half. Their contributions were less visible only because they took place in private rather than public realms.

That this polarized narrative of victim and oppressor was completely mistaken is now clear:

• Men’s gift of truth expanded humanity’s knowledge and control over the world.

• Women’s gift of love expanded humanity’s moral and emotional capacity.

This is perfect archetypal balance. Women’s gift was as important as men’s. Both were necessary, both indispensable. Civilization depends equally on both.

Seen in this light, the family hearth was as revolutionary as the laboratory. The quiet choices of mothers: to hold rather than strike, to nurse rather than abandon, to soothe rather than shame, carried forward across generations until they reshaped entire cultures. Just as Galileo pointed his telescope toward the heavens, so did mothers across centuries point their empathy into the hearts of their children, and the world changed.

History must honor both gifts: truth and love, discovery and empathy, masculine and feminine. To overlook either is to tell only half of the human story. We have been doing that for too long. It is time that we stopped.

References

1. Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, Karnac Books, New York, 2002, p.110

2. Lloyd deMause, The History of Childhood, Harper & Row, New York, 1974, p.12

3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or On Education (1762), Book I. Modern edition: trans. Allan Bloom, Emile: or On Education, Basic Books, New York, 1979, p.44

4. Attributed remark by Abraham Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1862, during her White House visit. Source uncertain; first recorded by Annie Fields in Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Houghton, Mifflin, Boston, 1897), p.133.

5. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History, W. W. Norton, New York, 2007

6. Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not, Harrison, London, 1859

7. Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, London, 1687

8. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, John Murray, London, 1859