Custody is never truly final — and you need to keep that in mind if you have primary physical custody of your children and want to keep it.
That’s the lesson to be learned from the case of “DaddyOFive,” a father and YouTube blogger who thought he and his current wife had struck an internet comedy goldmine when they started filming themselves as they pulled “pranks” on their children.
The only problem is that the pranks weren’t particularly funny — they were so vicious and abusive that other YouTube bloggers became concerned. The videos particularly seemed to target one of the couple’s young boys for the majority of the abuse.
Some of the “jokes” the parents pulled included things like falsely accusing the kids of ruining the carpet with ink, screaming obscenities at them until they cried and violently shoving at least one of boys into a piece of furniture, visibly injuring him.
At first, the parents responded to the internet outrage by defending their brand of humor, saying that the kids were in on the jokes and the shows were scripted — but it didn’t seem that way to many viewers, including the biological mother of the two youngest children.
When the biological mother was alerted to what was happening to her son and daughter, she and her husband filed for an emergency change of custody and the order was quickly granted.
While “DaddyOFive” and his wife have now apologized for their actions, other parents are still trying to make it rich by using their children for entertainment fodder. Like DaddyOFive, they try to entice viewers into watching the increasingly outrageous behavior of children that are either clearly out of control or victims of abuse. Some of the parents don’t pull any punches when it comes to the number of ways they’re willing to humiliate their children — or themselves — online for cash.
If you make the decision to post poor parenting choices online, you can absolutely expect them to be used against you in court if another parent or social services gets an idea to challenge you for custody — and a judge probably won’t be amused.
For more information on what you need to do to get — and keep — custody of your children, contact an attorney today.
Source: Fox5sandiego.com, “DaddyOFive couple loses custody of kids over YouTube 'pranks',” accessed July 14, 2017