Dad unfit parent for refusing son McDonalds

One of the bad things about the family court and CPS is that parents have to walk around on pins and needles out of fear that some stupid shrink will second guess some routine parenting decision.

The NY Post reports:

A Manhattan dad is not lovin’ McDonald’s right now.

Attorney David Schorr slapped a court-appointed shrink with a defamation lawsuit for telling the judge deciding a custody battle with his estranged wife that he was an unfit parent — for refusing to take his son to the fast food joint for dinner.

“You’d think it was sexual molestation,” Schorr, 43, told The Post Thursday. “I am just floored by it.”

Schorr says in his Manhattan Supreme Court suit that E. 97th Street psychiatrist Marilyn Schiller filed a report saying he was “wholly incapable of taking care of his son” and should be denied his weekend visitation over the greasy burger ban.

Schorr, a corporate attorney turned consultant with degrees from NYU and Oxford University, had planned to take his 4-year-old son to their usual restaurant, the Corner Café on Third Avenue, for his weekly Tuesday night visitation last week.

But the boy threw a temper tantrum and demanded McDonald’s. So he gave his son an ultimatum: dinner anywhere other than McDonald’s — or no dinner.

“The child, stubborn as a mule, chose the ‘no dinner’ option,” the disgruntled dad says in the suit.

This poor dad is reduced to Tuesday night visitation with his 4yo son, and does not even have the authority to choose a restaurant.

“It was just a standoff. I’m kicking myself mightily,” Schorr said.

“I wish I had taken him to McDonalds, but you get nervous about rewarding bad behavior. I was concerned. I think it was a 1950s equivalent of sending your child to bed without dinner. That’s maybe the worst thing you can say about it,” he said.

Adding insult to injury, he said: “My wife immediately took him to McDonalds.”

Upon reflection, Schorr said he should have remembered that mother knows best.

“The first thing I did was I questioned myself,” he recalled.

“Had I done something wrong? I did what any 43-year-old Jewish man would do — I told my mother. I said, ‘My God, did I do something wrong here?’

“Even my mother, the strictest mother in the world, said, ‘Why didn’t you just take him to McDonalds? What were you thinking? You know that this is a divorce situation.’”

Apparently Jewish mothers do not believe that dads should have the autonomy to decide whether to eat at MacDonalds. Jewish judges, commissioners, and pychologists do not necessarily realize that non-Jews are a lot less likely to see it that way.

Schorr claims that Dr. Schiller only interviewed the child and his mother and never asked for his side of the story before telling the court she was gravely concerned about Schorr’s parenting.

Bari Yunis Schorr sued her husband for a divorce in 2011, just four years after they married in a lavish ceremony at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan.

She recently filed motions asking the judge to punish her husband for flouting court orders and for a judgment on nonpayment of child support.

Her attorney, Louis I. Newman, declined to comment on the McDonald’s matter.

“It’s a litigation between Mr. Schorr and Mrs. Schiller,” Newman said.

In the past two and a half years that he has had partial custody of his son their time together “has run smoothly without incident” save a scraped knee, Schorr insists in the suit.

He wants the shrink to return the $2,750 he paid for the evaluation.

I hate to say it, but the dad is not going to get his money back. psychiatrist Marilyn Schiller is probably incompetent or corrupt or both, but she is probably also immunized by the family court.