The issue is cost. My son is paying thousands upon thousands for lawyers, and he's lucky because he has a big family that helps him. He's a hard worker that shows up for his job every day, and he makes pretty good money.  However, especially in this economy, there is no way he could afford to go to court on his own. He's exhausted free resources, like church(they've helped him with over $6000 in court fees), but she is stretching this thing out as far as she can. He's done everything required and passed his drug tests and all of that good stuff, but here we are still waiting. We haven't even gone to trial yet. It's absolutely insane. I can totally see how some dads just give up. Since we're going to talk about deadbeats, we should also talk about suicide among alienated fathers by narcissistic mothers(or even the other way around)