GOSHEN, Ky.--Matt Hale is no stranger to divorce he's a product of it and even went through his own when his three daughters were under the age of five.
"I grew up basically with a single parent and I saw how hard that was on my mom and I knew as a kid I would have hoped to see both parents even though that didn't work for me," Hale said.
But Hale who is now remarried , and a father to daughters Gigi, Ava and Sophie has never faced custody issues of his own but sought to create a law that starts with equally shared parenting time.
"Children their best interest is seeing both parents equally as long as the parents meet a list of 11 factors and those factor include such things as positive mental and physical health proximity to each other and there can be no domestic violence things like that," Hale said.
Kentucky is the first state to pass the permanent custody order for shared parenting. It passed 81 to 2 in the house and unanimously in the senate .
"A parent has to file an affidavit they have to ask to get shared parenting so if the parent doesn't take that step it doesn't apply to them," hale said.
The law has been six years in the making and Hale's new wife Jennifer who also went through a divorce says she couldn't be prouder of her husband.
"I’ve read through the bill many of times we practiced speeches. I'm very prof him of and especially coming from a place where he didn’t have to fight for this it was something he choose and wanted better," Hale said.
For Hale the passion behind his drive has always been about the children in our state and it's something he expects to see other states start to replicate in the near future.
"We saw a lot of cases where because of how people had always had traditionally split child custody they were trying to find one parent to win and one parent to lose and that doesn't work because when you a put parent against parent winner take all lose all situation it's the kids that lose," Hale said.
And as for his daughter Gigi she's already seen the law at work.
"There's a girl that I know at my school who has one parent who just recently moved from Louisiana to here her mother lived in Louisiana and her father lived in Kentucky but thanks to the shared parenting law she can see both of them,' hale said.