I should be the last person to defend a father who calls his daughter a "pig" and screams at her because she didn't answer the phone. Except that what has bothered me about this whole incident from the start is that it was reportedly the mother who decided to leak the tape to the press, to secure an advantage in her ongoing battle with her ex-husband.

How can a mother do that?

Maybe I'm the second-worst parent in the world, but I will admit that I've lost it on occasion with my kids and yelled at them. I have said things I regret. I have used words I wouldn't use here. And I am pretty sure I'm not the only one.

An old friend of mine was caught for years in a divorce like Baldwin's, where they fought over everything. Part of their agreement, like his, was that he got to call his daughters every day at an appointed time. And at that time, every day, he would stop whatever he was doing, hang up on whomever he was talking to, leave any meeting he was in, to call the girls — who were never there. Then he'd call back every 10 minutes for the next 30, and they still wouldn't be there, and sometimes, yes, he lost it, too. I don't know if the voicemail messages he left ever reflected his frustration, but I certainly got an earful.

So while I don't excuse Baldwin for a minute, I can understand. He has fought tooth-and-nail for visitation rights with his daughter, and Kim Basinger has fought back every step of the way. It sounds like their phone call deal is working about as well as my old friend's. He should have hung up before he exploded, but he didn't.

But does the world need to know?

That poor girl, my own daughter said to me. She's right. Imagine if you were that little girl, or that she was yours. How do you think it feels to be her this week, to have everyone looking at you differently, to be the center of this kind of attention?

And that part isn't her father's fault. It's her mother's.

If my ex-husband ever left a message like that for one of our kids, and he wouldn't, I know what I would do. I think it is what most mothers would do. Erase it, and find out what was going on before I let him near the kids again.

The point is not that we owe a duty to protect our exes from looking like beasts. The point is that we owe a duty to our children to protect them from being eaten up alive because of our problems. No one forces you to have children or makes you stay married, but if you choose to have kids and get divorced, it shouldn't just be the courts who are concerned with the "best interests" of the children. The primary responsibility for safeguarding the kids belongs to the parents, both of them.

The child here never needed to hear that message. But not only did she get to hear it, the world did, over and over. In the fight over her, no pain is too great to inflict on her in order to "win."

We all know the old Bible story about how King Solomon resolved conflicting claims of maternity by offering to cut the baby in half, knowing the real mother would put the child first and never allow it. But too many real mothers and fathers neglect to do that, and their children suffer the consequences.

In the end, releasing the tape may not help Basinger as much as she'd hoped. It seems pretty clear that she is not making much effort to abide by the agreement and make her daughter available for her dad's calls and visits. It seems pretty clear that this drives him mad.

You drive him crazy, he explodes, you make public the explosion, and then what? Does that prove you're a good mother? Not in my book.

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.