At times it can be helpful to examine family law cases from jurisdictions outside New Jersey to see where the law is headed in those locations. In a case from Canada, a judge has ruled that a single father’s child custody rights must be revoked and his children put up for adoption. The ruling rests on results from an assessment of the man’s fitness to be a parent to his sons.

Although some news outlets focused on the role the man’s weight played in the custody determination, the ruling in fact presents a multi-faceted analysis that easily goes beyond declaring that the man was unfit to be a father because he was overweight. The man once weighed 525 pounds, lost weight and then regained some to reach his current level of 380 pounds. The assessment said that the man would be unable to keep up a weight loss routine while at the same time performing the duties of a single parent to his sons, who have special needs.

The assessment went far beyond the man’s weight, however. It chronicled the man’s drug use and proclivity to play video games for hours in a row. In addition, a doctor who examined the man noted that he possessed anti-authoritarian characteristics, which he said could compromise the man’s ability to make the best choices in his sons’ lives. Claiming that the judge’s ruling was based solely on his weight, the man has vowed to engage in a hunger strike, even to the point of death, in response to the ruling.

But the assessment was not one-sided. It noted that the man was loving toward his sons, ran two companies and never abused the children. While this case may seem strange to some in New Jersey, it could be that it is an outlier case in Canada. It does raise the question of how far courts can go to determine what is in the best interests of a child. But by examining what other courts take into account in child custody cases, we can use those criteria as a foil against which we can see the pros and cons of our own custody factors in much sharper relief.

Source: The Ottawa Citizen, “Obese father loses children to adoption on judge’s order,” Gary Dimmock, June 21, 2012.