Other Voices

At the close of this week’s Enterprise podcast, through tears, Jason Houck gave a shout-out to his two daughters.

“I love you both and hope to see you again someday,” he said.

Houck of East Berne chairs the New York Affiliate of the National Parents Organization.

His organization is pushing for changes in state law that would make it more likely, after parents divorce or separate, to have their children spend half their time with each of their parents as long as those parents are fit and loving.

Currently, he reports, the norm is that children spend 65 percent of their time with their mother and 35 percent with their father.

He was divorced in 2011 and said he shared equal time with his daughters until 2013.

“Their mother had moved to a different town and the normal things started to happen where they wanted to see me every other weekend and one night during the week, and I had become a little bit hardened to that,” he said.

Houck went on, “I love my daughters. I was an involved father. I went to all their school functions, all their field trips.” His daughters had been were Berne-Knox-Westerlo students from kindergarten through elementary school.

After the estrangement started, Houck said he tried father-daughter and family counseling and reunification counseling to no avail.

“We began litigation in June of ’16,” he said. “We didn’t finish up litigation until January of 2021 — five years, seven adjournments in Family Court to try to get an ending verdict.” By the time the verdict came, his daughters had aged out of the system.

For five years, Houck said, he had “no contact at full child support” and no finding on fitness.

He also said, “When the estrangement happens with children, many times it cuts off an entire side of a family …. My mother lost the relationship with her grandchildren.” She had been “a primary caregiver” for his daughters, he said, “going through school, getting [them] on and off the bus before and after school.”

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