Although I appreciate the point that Michael Hassett is trying to make in his article "Losing custody: the odds" (Zeit Gist, Aug. 7), he asks the wrong question to try to determine a man's probability of heartbreak and turmoil and uses statistics in a way that is misleading.

The right question is, "How likely is it that a father will be prevented from having a relationship with his child, assuming that he has a child?" The assumption of having a child first is necessary to compensate for the large difference in overall birthrate in Japan and the U.S. Without this, the Japan result will be too low and the U.S. result too high, relative to each other.

In addition, as Mr. Hassett's friend's experience shows, losing contact with your child does not require a divorce in Japan. In fact, some parents in Japan deny a divorce to the retaining parent indefinitely, as a last hope of someday establishing a relationship with their child. Adding divorce into the calculations penalizes the U.S. because of the high divorce rate, despite the fact that unlike Japan, divorce in the U.S. no longer carries much social stigma.