State Constitutions Must Better Protect Children 

Across the country, we are building a body of family law reforms named after dead children. Kayden’s Law in Pennsylvania. Kyra’s Law in New York. Piqui’s Law in California. Greyson’s Law in Florida. Om’s Law in Utah. The Alec and Lydia Act in Arizona. Each one exists because a mother tried to warn the system before her children were killed by their fathers.

Both federal and state laws inherently fail children because they do not enjoy a right to safety in this country. Parents have a fundamental right to oversee the “care, custody, and control” of their children under federal law and state constitutions, but neither federal nor most state constitutional frameworks recognize a corresponding affirmative right of children to safety within custody proceedings. And since the United States is the only United Nations member state that has failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, American children lack fundamental human rights, including appropriate legal protections and safeguards.

It is no wonder, then, that children keep dying at the hands of their parents during custody battles. State law largely views children as property, splitting the child 50/50, just like splitting the equity in a marital home. Judges routinely ignore mothers’ cries for help and objections to shared custody. 

Tragedies resulting from court-ordered shared custody are not unforeseeable. Over more than two decades spent representing victims of domestic violence in family courts, I have watched women walk into courtrooms carrying police reports, medical records, credible threats, eyewitness reports, psychiatric histories, photographs, and text messages. Again and again, they are treated not as credible witnesses to danger but as obstacles to “co-parenting.”

The judicial system often frames these murders as shocking, unpredictable aberrations, because acknowledging foreseeability would also require acknowledging institutional failure. It is easier to say a father’s violence came “out of nowhere” than to admit that a mother’s warnings should have changed the outcome.

In Arizona, Hope Hooton had just 15 minutes to make her case before a judge ultimately granted unsupervised parenting time to her estranged husband, despite documented mental health concerns and prior threats. In 2024, during that court-ordered parenting time, Brock Mater killed their children, seven-year-old Alec and six-year-old Lydia, before killing himself.

Now Hooton is advocating for the Alec and Lydia Act, legislation that would require judges to make written findings regarding domestic violence patterns and weigh police reports and medical records more heavily in custody determinations. The bill attempts to shift the focus of family court back where it belongs: child safety.

Arizona is hardly unique on this front.

Every time a child is murdered by a father during or after a custody dispute, a grieving mother somewhere is forced to become a legislative advocate. Every time, lawmakers draft another bill bearing the child’s name. Every time, we promise to learn from the tragedy. And every time, the same institutional culture remains largely intact.

Family courts across the country routinely default to shared parenting arrangements, even in cases involving coercive control, physical violence, suicidal and homicidal ideation, or access to firearms. Judges are encouraged to preserve parental relationships at nearly all costs, while allegations of abuse are too often reframed as attempts to gain strategic advantage in custody litigation. In my personal experience, mothers who express fear are sometimes assumed to be lying. In fact, mothers who allege abuse lose custody 70 percent of the time, even when the threats are later proven to be real.

Underlying these decisions is aspiration: Judges want fathers to be equal parents, and the Father’s Rights Movement has lobbied hard to persuade them that 50/50 custody should be the default. It is also much easier for a judge to rule by default than to hold a trial. Across the country, judges encourage mothers (like Hooten) to settle for equal shared custody, even for infants and young children — an arrangement antithetical to what child psychologists recommend.

Yet the warning signs of dangerous fathers are painfully routine: a history of domestic violence; obsession with control, whether physical, emotional, or financial; threats of self-harm; threats of femicide and filicide; escalating instability; and finally, access to firearms. These are not random details discovered in hindsight. They are well-established risk factors for lethal violence. The problem is not that we lack warning signs. The problem is that we repeatedly fail to act on them.

This failure is structural. Family law is among the highest-stakes work in the legal system, yet it is treated within the judiciary as a place judges pass through rather than a specialization they aspire to — so much so that it’s often called a “transient bench.” The work is emotionally grueling, politically thankless, and rarely prestigious. Judges are often assigned there with little family law experience — the judge in Alec and Lydia’s case was a former state attorney general — no specialized training in domestic violence, coercive control, trauma, child psychology, or lethality assessment. This is the case despite their responsibility to make decisions that can determine whether women and children live or die. 

We would never assign an untrained judge to oversee complex patent litigation or billion-dollar securities disputes and dismiss catastrophic mistakes as inevitable. Yet we routinely ask judges with minimal specialized training to make rapid decisions involving life-and-death risks to women and children.

What is needed is not simply another law named after another dead child, although many of those laws, if enacted, will help. One crucial aspect of the Alec and Lydia Act, which is still pending, is a mandate for judges to make written findings when safety concerns are raised. What we also need is specialized custody courts staffed only by judges extensively trained in domestic violence and child safety. And we must reduce docket size so that well-meaning judges can actually hear these cases. 

But even more crucially, we must change the mindset that children are property to be divided. It’s time to bestow children with a fundamental right to safety under state human rights laws and constitutions, modeled after the UN Convention. The language, rights, and policy priorities contained in state constitutions reflect the cultural values that a state’s residents seek to uphold and protect. They signal what a society considers important and legitimate. Over time, they can shape public attitudes by legitimizing certain principles and embedding them in a state’s legal and political framework. Enshrining the humanity of children into state constitutions, then, is a crucial first step to treating children as full humans. A society that recognizes the humanity of children is less likely to overlook documented abuse patterns and to minimize threats to child safety as interpersonal, unsavory “conflict” between two equally situated parents.

We also must confront a truth our legal system still resists: Women reporting abuse are often right. The mothers behind these laws were not irrational or conniving. They were not attempting to sabotage co-parenting. They were trying to keep their children alive.

Kayden. Kyra. Piqui. Grayson. Om. Alec and Lydia.

The list of this grim new legal tradition — naming custody reform laws after the children family courts failed to save — will keep growing until the system changes.

Dale Margolin Cecka is an associate professor at Albany Law School and director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic.

Suggested Citation: Dale Margolin Cecka, State Constitutions Must Better Protect Children, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (June 22, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/state-constitutions-must-better-protect-children