In a courtroom somewhere in Michigan, likely Barry or Allegan County, a parent waits — again.
Not for a final decision, but for yet another rescheduled hearing. Meanwhile, their child starts kindergarten. Then first grade. Then second.
Still no resolution.
Family court is supposed to be a forum for resolving life-altering decisions with care and urgency. Instead, it has become a bureaucratic limbo where cases stall for years or disappear altogether.
Everyday, readers reach out to me looking for help; wondering what can be done about judges who fail to help families and as a result, make a mess of their lives.
The hard part, is there isn’t one simple answer. Because the family court structure isn’t just inefficient; it’s dangerous.
Why? Because we’re counting on unqualified individuals to make decisions that forever impact a family’s trajectory.
The Family Court Crisis: Justice on Life Support
We’ve all heard the excuses: courts are underfunded, dockets are overloaded, families are complicated. But no amount of backlog excuses what’s happening in family courtrooms across the country.
This is paradoxical, especially when counties bring in revenue by drawing cases out as long as possible.
These are not criminal trials (which they aren’t great at either). These are human lives.
Delays in family court have become so normalized that they’re treated as part of the process. Judges cite backlogs, missing paperwork, and procedural snags, but the deeper truth is more damning.
Judges, most of whom have no formal training in family systems, trauma, or mental health, are routinely and wrongfully put in charge of decisions that should be rooted in clinical insight, never in legal theory.
Yet judges are trusted to make critical decisions about child safety, emotional wellbeing, and parenting. Meanwhile, the real experts such as therapists, social workers, and child psychologists, are routinely ignored, overruled, or excluded from the decision-making process altogether.
These cases move slowly because they are being handled by the wrong people entirely and never held accountable when they’re flat-out wrong.
And families? They’re left waiting, paying, and hurting.
Judges Are Not Mental Health or Child Development Experts
Family court judges are lawyers by training.
Yet they are expected to determine what’s in a child’s “best interest” often with little more than dueling attorneys, conflicting affidavits, and whoever files the most motions the fastest as decision-making criteria.
They don’t even have to listen to the professionals if they don’t want to. In high-conflict cases, this becomes a battleground of egos and legal strategy, not healing or resolution.
It’s self-serving nonsense.
Mental health and family systems experts should be the ones driving these decisions, not just advising. Their training allows them to assess emotional abuse, co-parenting dysfunction, childhood trauma, and complex power dynamics in ways judges are simply not equipped to handle.
Yet they are tasked with determining who gets custody, how often a child sees each parent, and what kind of interventions are needed, often based on limited testimony and superficial evaluations. In some states, judges can ignore a licensed therapist’s recommendation and make the opposite call without providing any clinical rationale.
Would we let a divorce mediator sentence someone to prison? Of course not.
But multiple Allegan County Judges have sent people to prison. Now former Judge Roberts Kengis used the Allegan County Sheriff’s Department as his own personal muscle. Thankfully, he was forced to retire.
Through blatant inaction in family court cases, Judges often create criminal trajectory sending children down the prison pipeline by leaving them with mentally and emotionally abusive parents, as is currently unfolding in Allegan and Ottawa County.
Ottawa County Sheriff’s Department did not provide comment.
So why do we let these individuals dictate the mental health trajectory of a child?
Real Families, Real Harm
Every delay in family court, every missed opportunity to follow professional recommendations, comes at a real human cost.
These are just a handful of the cases my readers have sent in this year:
- Ottawa County children stuck in a toxic environment with a severely mentally ill mother, even though they beg for help, thanks to THREE Allegan County judges.
- An entire county (Barry) where mothers are encouraged to move their cases to get the outcomes they want.
- A survivor of domestic violence forced to co-parent without safety protections because Barry County Judge Schipper knows the Dad.
- Parents cut off from their children over false accusations and completely alienated.
- Wealthy grandparents who fought for and won “grandparenting” time (which doesn’t exist), solely because they are personal friends with the Ottawa County Judge.
- …And between all of these cases, years of lost time, trust, and emotional development
Family court isn’t just slow.
It’s structurally and intellectually unqualified to deal with what it’s been tasked with doing.
Family Court Is Just as Broken as Criminal Court — and For Many of the Same Reasons
We like to think family court is softer, gentler, more therapeutic than the punitive grind of the criminal justice system.
It’s not.
In fact, family court is just as chaotic and politically influenced as its criminal counterpart, if not worse.
Here’s why:
- Judges are expected to do everything. Hear evidence. Interpret psychological evaluations. Evaluate parenting. Understand trauma. Spot abuse. They are generalists playing specialists — and the families suffer for it.
- Legislators write the rules. And most of them care more about re-election than justice. Instead of consulting mental health professionals, lawmakers write family court laws that poll well with voters: 50/50 custody mandates, one-size-fits-all parenting plans, “parental rights” bills that ignore abuse dynamics.
- There’s no due process for dysfunction. In criminal court, constitutional protections set a floor. In family court, the rules are murky, decisions are subjective, and outcomes are wildly inconsistent.
It’s the same flawed formula as criminal court:
Unqualified people + Political lawmaking + No accountability = A hot mess.
The Bottleneck Begins at the Bench
Family court judges often wield unchecked discretion. Proceedings are sealed. Appeals are rare.
Oversight is nearly nonexistent.
This allows inefficiency, bias, and flat-out neglect to go undetected for years, even decades.
Some judges delay decisions for months or years. Others override licensed professionals with gut instincts. The system rewards expediency over insight, appearances over outcomes.
In one Allegan County case, the children will likely age out of the system before Judge Matthew Antkoviak, heavily embroiled in an conflict of interest, makes a decision.
What Needs to Change
Fixing family court requires more than speeding up the docket. We need a full paradigm shift:
Let Mental Health Experts Lead
Mental health clinicians should have decision-making authority on matters involving trauma, custody, reunification, and child wellbeing.
Make Trauma-Informed Care the Standard
All professionals involved in family court — including judges, attorneys, and mediators — should be trained in trauma, child development, and domestic violence.
Build Multidisciplinary Review Panels
Key decisions should be reviewed by panels that include social workers, child advocates, and mental health clinicians not just lawyers in robes.
Transparency and Accountability
States must publish data on case durations, continuances, override rates of expert recommendations, and long-term child outcomes post-court. How many of them end up in the juvenile system?
Take Politics Out of Parenting
Legislation governing family court must be informed by mental health research, not poll-tested campaign slogans.
Until Then: Families Are on Their Own
We say family is the foundation of society but our court system treats it, on all fronts, like a legal technicality; something to be thrown away.
The people who understand family trauma, child development, and healing are sidelined. And families pay the price for it every single day.
It’s time to stop pretending that judges know best.
Because when the wrong people are in charge, justice isn’t just delayed; it’s dangerously misinformed.
