Author: Super User

April 15, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This brings us to the nut of the matter in the Final Report of the Australian Law Reform Committee, i.e. its scrapping of the requirement that judges “consider” equal parenting time when parents divorce.  If the number of citations to pro-shared parenting documents and commentators is any indication, the committee entirely ignored any input that favors shared parenting.  Put simply, there are no citations to literature and no quotations of those on the side of shared parenting.

That’s true despite the fact that the report bemoans the current system as “too adversarial,” which it certainly is, and the detrimental effects of father absence.  Needless to say, a presumption of shared parenting would address, if not solve, both problems.  The committee is aware of the extreme imbalance in custody between mothers (69.4%) and fathers (under 9%).  Although it nowhere mentions it, the committee, composed as it is of a substantial number of lawyers and judges, must know that the current system, as a matter of precedent, refuses to enforce orders for access via the court’s power of contempt.  Therefore it must have some inkling of the fact that courts play a big role in the very father absence the report inveighs against.

And yet its recommendation is that even considering shared parenting is so burdensome on judges that it should be removed from the law.

And what of the science on shared parenting?

At a broad level, studies based on population level samples demonstrate that poorer outcomes for children are linked with: financial disadvantage, exposure to inter-parental conflict and family violence, and problematic parenting. There is no strong link between post-separation parenting arrangements (in other words, the amount of time children spend with each parent) and child wellbeing per se.

Well, isn’t that clever?  By excluding all studies not “based on population level samples,” the committee enables itself to ignore all those smaller, but highly persuasive studies that demonstrate the benefits of shared parenting to children.  Plus of course, the statement is simply false.  Swedish researcher Malin Bergstrom’s studies include sample sizes of up to 150,000 and they in fact find shared parenting to produce the best educational and psychological outcomes for children except those of intact families.

And what of Paul Millar’s study of the raw data on Canada’s parenting arrangements and children’s outcomes.  At the time (2009), it was the only analysis of the data of its kind and it disclosed some remarkable things.  Anticipating the very words of the ALRC’s final report, Millar called “spurious” the idea that “less favorable outcomes for children of divorce are due to some external factor, such as lower income or higher inter-personal conflict.”

We might also pause to ask the committee, “When the report refers to ‘financial disadvantage,’ were its authors aware that single-mother-headed households are in fact the most likely of any to live in poverty?”  In other words, there’s a lot of overlap between the set of financially disadvantaged households and single-mother-headed ones.

As to the statement that “there’s no strong link” between post-divorce parenting arrangements and child well-being, it’s true as far as it goes.  The 60+ studies that show improved outcomes for children with shared parenting do not in fact reveal huge gaps between those kids and others.  But the committee’s statement is little more than glib.  The reality is that essentially all the well-done science on the issue comes out the same, i.e. favoring shared parenting.  Where are the studies with a “strong link” between sole-parent arrangements and improved child well-being?  That’s right, there aren’t any.

So, as happens so often, the committee finds the lack of a statistically strong link between shared parenting and children’s well-being to be fatal, while ignoring altogether the entire absence of any study with a strong link of any kind between sole parenting and children’s welfare.

Paul Millar pointed out that the preference for sole parenting “is not only unsupported by evidence, but, worse, appears to promote harmful outcomes for children through the legal support given the destruction of one of the important parental relationships for the child.”

And that’s a real problem because judges invariably order one sort of parenting arrangement or another.  They’re not free to simply sit on their hands and wait for more studies to come in.  They have to do something.  And what they usually do is order sole parenting.  They do so in about 78 – 79% of cases.  The science on children’s welfare opposes that habit.  There is essentially no science that supports it.  To the august members of the committee, apparently that’s as it should be.

By now, we should all be asking the question, “How did they get it so wrong?”  I asked Australian journalist Bettina Arndt that question.  Here’s her response:

The terms of this enquiry had over 200 references to violence and no mention at all of enforcement of contact orders, parental alienation or any of the other relevant issues. They were bombarded with submissions from women’s groups arguing that children need protection from violence fathers and of course most of the cases that make it to court include violence orders, because this is now the major tactic mothers use to gain power in family law disputes. The recommendations reflect that bias and the success of the orchestrated campaign from feminists to wind back Australia’s laws supporting shared parenting. Here’s hoping the government doesn’t cave into this pressure but chances are we will soon see a feminist-captured Labor government and shared parenting will be out the door.

April 13, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The Final Report of the Australian Law Reform Commission reads like it was written by opponents of shared parenting.  Indeed, it may have been.  Here in the U.S. and throughout the English-speaking world, we see the same straw-man arguments against shared parenting again and again.  Like all straw men, they carry no weight.  The ALRC’s report, as regards parenting time and children’s best interests, is more of the same.

Its recommendation is that the current requirement that judges consider equal parenting time be done away with.  Why?  The one and only problem claimed by the commission with that requirement is that it introduced “an unnecessary additional step in the process for determining care-time arrangements.”  In short, “considering” shared parenting arrangements is inconvenient for judges. 

Yes, various stakeholders complained about the provision as not in children’s interests and a danger to them.  Those complaints of course are too contrary to known facts to bother with.  Equal or almost equal time tends to promote children’s well-being as some 60 + studies demonstrate and judges are always equipped with the authority to deny parenting time to anyone who presents a danger to children.  Why we have to continue repeating the obvious is anyone’s guess.

The removal of the requirement to consider 50/50 parenting time is all the stranger because, since its enactment in 2006, there’s been no change in how judges rule.  That’s right, the commission remarks that “A review of the 2006 amendments found that there was no evidence of significant changes in the extent to which orders for shared parental responsibility are made.”  Judges didn’t much order equal time before the 2006 amendments and they still don’t.  Many people might say that constitutes evidence of bias against fathers, but not the commission, despite noting that fathers are given primary custody in under 9% of cases, while mothers receive it in 69.4%.  But whatever the case, the requirement can scarcely be said to have caused a problem for children or parents, because it’s so widely ignored.

Perhaps more importantly, shared care arrangements, defined as one parent having between 35% and 47% of the parenting time, are on the rise in Australia.  That’s occurring because, more and more, parents are opting for them outside of court.  Is there a problem?  Have we seen spikes in violence between those parents?  No.  Have their children’s well-being suffered?  If they have, the commission didn’t mention it.  Perhaps shared parenting isn’t such a bad idea after all.

But the commission ignored all that.

So, having junked the need to even consider shared parenting, the commission got down to brass tacks.

The consideration of the benefit to the child of being able to maintain significant relationships with each of the child’s parents and with others with whom the child has a relationship that is significant to the child is intended to replace the existing consideration of the benefit to the child of having a meaningful relationship with both of the child’s parents.

Under the new regimen then, Mom and Dad find themselves demoted from their important post as the child’s parents to simply two people of many.  Does the child have a significant relationship with, say, a coach, a teacher, the next-door neighbor?  Apparently those people have as much right to continued access to the child as do the parents.  Seriously.  If anyone reads that another way, I’m open to their interpretation, but words have meanings and what the above means is that the sky’s the limit when it comes to kids and their significant relationships.  The term “significant relationships” is nowhere defined in the report, leaving us to conclude that pretty much any relationship can qualify.

I’ll have more to say on this tomorrow.

April 11, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

It’s a spectacularly bad idea, but the Australian Law Reform Commission is recommending that the requirement that judges at least “consider” shared parenting in child custody cases be “scrapped.” (The Australian, 4/11/19).  What, if anything, the commission’s report recommends to replace that requirement, the linked-to article doesn’t say.

Legal scholar Patrick Parkinson wouldn’t mourn the loss, but

Professor Parkinson, one of the architects of the Howard government laws, said he would be “happy to see it go” — however, he wanted the shared parenting laws to retain recognition that the best interests of children were met by both parents having a meaningful involvement in their lives.

Parkinson has long harbored at least somewhat pro-shared parenting views, so I suspect that his indifference to the current law stems at least in part from the fact that it doesn’t work.  If the overwhelming anti-father/pro-mother bias for which Australian family courts are so infamous has been tempered by the law, it’s not been obvious.

Meanwhile, anti-shared parenting forces have opposed the law literally from the start.  They waited all of three months after its effective date to begin demanding its repeal.  They’ve been beating that drum ever since. 

So, unless the Australian Parliament demonstrates some hitherto unnoticed courage and ignores the commission’s recommendation, shared parenting in the Land Down Under is headed for the round file.

Needless to say, this is the worst news for Australia’s fathers and children.  Clearly, the family law on child custody needs strengthening, not weakening.  Just as clearly, the commission, despite issuing a ponderous tome 583 pages long, having gathered reams of data of all sorts, omitted some rather interesting items.

For example, nowhere in the report is there a breakdown of custody decisions.  How many are sole-mother orders, how many sole-father ones?  How many are for shared parenting and what percentage of parenting time for each parent did that mean?  You’d think those would be important data to be considered in formulating recommendations.  But they weren’t to the commission.

What about the by-now-voluminous science on shared parenting’s benefits to kids?  Not a word.  Oh, the commission devotes a few words to shared parenting – just enough to utterly misrepresent the reality of the science.  I’ll say more about that tomorrow.

And then there’s our old friend – Enforcement of Access orders.  Non-custodial parents, almost 90% of whom are fathers, find that, according to Australian historian John Hirst, alone among all court orders issued by all Australian judges, only visitation orders are to never be enforced by judges’ power of contempt.  In short, those orders are all but worthless.  If Mom wants to obey them, fine, but if she doesn’t, Dad and little Andy or Jenny are simply out of luck.

So what did the commission have to say about orders for child access by non-resident parents?  Not a word.  In the section entitled “Articulation of the Problems,” nothing is said or suggested about what Australian fathers have complained about for decades.  For that matter, the entire issue of children being unable to have meaningful time with their non-custodial parent is utterly ignored.

That’s all true despite the fact that the commission established a Tell Us Your Story portal online and received countless complaints about the family law system generally.  Did truly none of those complaints come from fathers who feel abused, belittled and overlooked by courts?

There’s much more to this report.  I’ll have more to say on it tomorrow.

April 10, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s a good article on parental leave policies and how they may be out of step with the desires of workers (Financial Times, 4/6/19).  Parental leave policy seems to be very much a front-burner issue in the U.K. these days.

The article’s points are straightforward: fathers generally want to spend more time with their kids, when they do, mothers are freed to do more paid work and the earnings differential between men and women narrows.  I’ve said the same many times over the years.  Data out of Sweden for example, a country with equal parental leave for men and women, suggest that the author may have a point.  There the workforce participation rate for women was 70% in 2017 compared to the U.S. in which it was 57%.  And the earnings differential between men and women in Sweden was 12.5% versus 15% in the U.S.

Still, the FT piece is too facile by half.  The idea that the only thing standing between men and childcare, and women and the coveted cubicle is parental leave policy is dubious at best.  The writer, Pilita Clark, actually admits as much, although I’m not sure she realizes it.

The discrepancy [in earnings] takes off after women give birth and continues to rise so that by the time a child is 12 years old, the gap is around 33 per cent.

How does Clark figure that parental leave that never covers more than a year off work, could still be affecting the choices women make when a child is 12 years old?  She doesn’t say for the good and sufficient reason that it has no such impact.

So the differences between men’s and women’s involvement in paid work and childcare are considerably more complex than parental leave policies indicate.  Now, we all want equality between the sexes and parental leave is a significant part of that.

The British government pays 26 times more to a mother on the average wage in the first year after a birth than a father, according to family researcher Duncan Fisher, one of a growing number of men calling for the scales to be balanced.

So yes, companies and governments should equalize their policies.  Fathers and mothers should get the same amounts of time off at the same pay rates.  That done, the parents can decide for themselves what they want to do with their leave.

But Clark’s omissions extend further.  She inveighs against governments giving mothers more time with the kids but never considers the possibility that that’s what mothers want.  After all, motherhood is as powerful a biological urge as there is among humans.  The hormones that connect adults to children and vice versa have a way of being obeyed.  Countless studies and sets of data demonstrate that, given the choice between staying at home with baby and returning to the gray cubicle, mothers tend strongly to opt for the former.  They do so overwhelmingly because oxytocin, beta endorphin and the like encourage them to be with and nurture their children.  They’ve been doing that for untold millennia and aren’t about to change now.  Unsurprisingly, data assembled by researchers like Dr. Catherine Hakim show most women’s preference for childcare over paid work.  They also show men’s preference for the converse, men being the resource providers that they’ve always been.

So basic biology tends to militate against the idea that men and women are interchangeable parts in the scheme of human survival.  We aren’t and never have been.  Indeed, Dr. Anna Machin stresses the fact that evolution abhors replication, i.e. too much overlap in roles.

Perhaps more important though is the role played by family courts in keeping men out of the nursery.  By now, many men have become aware of the rather extreme anti-male/pro-female bias of family courts.  In the U.K., a father’s chance of getting meaningful parenting time with his child post-divorce is somewhere between slim and none.  Even researchers like Maeb Harding who want to convince us that family courts are evenhanded end up showing that it takes a seriously dysfunctional mother for a dad to get custody of a child.

So why would a man devote himself overmuch to his child knowing that it could be taken away at any minute by a so-inclined ex and a compliant judge?  Family court reform is one of the keys to equality between the sexes.  Without it, parental leave will accomplish little.

April 5, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Dr. Anna Machin’s new book, The Life of Dad, is the greatest leap forward in our comprehensive understanding of fathers and fatherhood to date. It seems the more we learn about fathers, the more we understand their importance to children, to mothers and to society. Machin weaves the threads of genetics, bio-chemistry, anthropology and behavioral science together to form a tapestry of the human father.  She does so in a way that’s easily accessible to non-scientists.  The Life of Dad is a must read.  It will transform the reader’s understanding of fathers, children, mothers and the human family.

Machin likes fathers, not because they help mothers or some other indirect reason.  She likes them for their unique selves.  Her prose is peppered with the word “wonderful” to describe what fathers do and what our increasing knowledge about them reveals.  She demonstrates her respect by interviewing fathers and actually listening to what they say.  All that is refreshing in a day when the discourse about fathers often ranges from disrespectful to actively hostile.

Machin makes no bones about it: without fathers’ active involvement in the care of children, the human race would never have made it at all, much less to where we are.  That’s because, some 500,000 years ago, when our already big brains took another great leap in size and our upright gait narrowed females’ birth canal, our offspring were born even more helpless than before.  With females bearing usually but a single child who then took many years to reach maturity, the only way for our hominid ancestors to survive was if Mom could hand off the child to someone else, stop nursing it and once again become fertile.

That someone of course was Dad.  So the very existence of Homo sapiens and our success as a species is down to fathers being willing and able to pick up the childcare ball and run with it.

But why did they do so?  After all, the males of very few other social mammal species take part in childcare.  The answer is hormones.  Those chemicals direct human behavior toward childcare when a female becomes pregnant.  Clearly, Mom’s biochemistry changes during pregnancy, but so does Dad’s.  Production of hormones like oxytocin prepares both parents to be sensitive to their children’s needs.  In mirroring each others’ hormonal output, mother and father form a team whose goal is the survival of the child and its preparation to take part in the complex world of human society.  Mothers and fathers are both vital to a child’s well-being.  Each brings unique benefits to the child.  There’s limited overlap between what they offer.

Plus, once the child comes into the world, Dad’s testosterone level drops precipitously.  That reduces his tendencies to take risks and to look for other mates.  His focus changes to the care and survival of his family that, unlike most mammals, needs his unique contributions.   

The attachment that forms between fathers and their children is bio-chemical in nature.  Fathers’ interaction with their children stimulates the production of hormones like oxytocin, dopamine and beta-endorphin.  Each is pleasurable to him, encouraging him to repeat the interaction that produced them. 

And fathers’ interactions tend to be the classic rough and tumble play.  Mothers tend to receive those pleasurable hormones from nurturing the child, fathers from R&T play.  Fascinatingly, the child does too.  Children’s levels of oxytocin for example increase with Mom’s nurturing and Dad’s play.  Unsurprisingly, they tend to turn to each parent to satisfy differing needs.  But that bio-behavioral synchronicity is the nature of what we call the parent-child bond.

The heart of fatherhood is the protection and teaching of the child.  His focus is outward toward others, society and the world.  Humans are the only animals on the planet to actively teach their children.  Other animals’ offspring learn from adults, but adults don’t teach.  Humans do and doing so is the core of the paternal role.  Because of Dad’s outward focus on the environment and because that environment is often unpredictable, his parenting brain must be flexible to meet unknown risks and challenges.  And it is.

Mother’s parental behavior is centered in the limbic system, primarily, that most ancient of all brain structures, the amygdala.  By contrast, fathers’ occurs in one of our newest structures, the neo-cortex.  That means that maternal behavior is as ancient as the amygdala and the paternal evolved much, much later. 

The neo-cortex is involved in social cognition, our ability to handle complex thoughts and make plans based on extant and changing circumstances.  So when his parenting behavior “lights up” his neo-cortex, Dad is assessing his child’s needs and figuring out what needs to be done to meet them, how to teach the child what it needs to know in a given situation.  It is therefore inherently flexible, i.e. able to respond to different and changing circumstances.

By exposing children to challenging situations, fathers have a unique impact on their development.  Fathers’ unique role in parenting imparts values, knowledge and independence.  A U.K. study conducted over 40 years of 17,000 children born in 1958 found that fathers had a unique impact on their children’s academic success including their attitude toward learning.  In the area of acquisition of language, fathers’ influence appears to be more important than mothers’.  Fathers’ importance to children exists regardless of the socio-economic status of the family.

Machin’s book is mostly about fathers’ importance to children and the society in which they grow up.  She’s a scientist, not an advocate, but advocate she does.  A significant minority of The Life of Dad is devoted to the social zeitgeist in which fathers find themselves.  She points out that even the concept that fathers might be important to children is relatively new to science and that serious research into fathers and fatherhood is barely a decade old.  She inveighs against a medical establishment and family leave policies that all but exclude fathers.  When a man’s wife is pregnant, he’s likely to find himself an afterthought at best in the eyes of doctors, nurses and hospital staff, despite the fact that he’s going through one of the most life-altering experiences of his life.

The fathers she interviewed felt unrecognized and belittled.  She excoriates maternal gatekeeping and the image of the incompetent Homer Simpson-style father that’s so often depicted in the news and pop culture.  But she reserves her special contempt for governments that, in the face of an unprecedented level of scientific knowledge about the importance of fathers to children, mothers and society generally, resist even modest reform.  She urges men to “man the barricades,” engage in the political process and demand the changes from which, frankly, everyone would benefit.  In her words,

Fathers are wonderfully flexible creatures, capable of altering their role on a minute-to-minute basis to ensure the well-being and survival of their family.

We all need to learn from Dr. Machin, particularly legislators, judges and policy-makers.  Thanks to her for her dedication to fathers and bringing us the latest science on them and their indispensable role in children’s lives.

You can purchase Dr. Machin’s book here.

April 4, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

In late January of this year, Public Policy Polling of North Carolina conducted a survey of Texas voters’ attitudes about shared parenting.  As in numerous other states, Texans strongly favor shared parenting.  And, again as in other states, that support crosses all lines of sex, race, party affiliation, etc.

So for example, 77% of women and 77% of men agreed with the statement “it is in the child’s best interest to have as much time as possible with both fit, willing and able parents following a divorce or separation.”  71% of women and 80% of men said they thought children have a right to spend equal or near equal time with each parent following divorce or separation.  65% of women and 69% of men said they believe that children spending equal time with each parent would reduce re-litigation of custody cases.  And 63% of women and 69% of men said they thought an equal parenting law is needed in Texas.

81% of Democrats, 79% of Republicans and 69% of independent voters thought children should have as much time as possible with each parent.  82% of Democrats, 73% of Republicans and 69% of independents said they thought children had the right to equal time with each parent.  And 77% of Democrats, 67% of Republicans and 51% of independents thought Texas needs an equal parenting law.

Similar figures apply to black, white and Latino voters.

In short, as in other states, Texans strongly support the idea of equal or near equal parenting time for kids post-divorce.  And, as in other states, so far Texas lawmakers aren’t listening.  It’s a case of what British academic Dr. Anna Machin called governmental resistance to “the scientific evidence and increasingly loud calls for change.” 

Legislators are supposed to represent the people.  Yes, there are issues about which the will of the people is uncertain.  This isn’t one of those issues.  Again and again the people register their landslide support for equal parenting.

And yes, there are times when elected officials must lead in a direction other than what popular sentiment dictates.  Again, this isn’t one of those times.  The science is far too solid, the justice of equal parenting all too clear.  In this case, it’s the people who are leading.  It’s far past time their officials started following that lead.

To view the full poll results, please visit: https://tx.tfrm.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/TexasResults1.pdf

March 31, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The Kansas Senate’s Judiciary Committee has passed NPO’s shared parenting bill.  NPO’s Will Mitchell’s article is here (Kansas City Star, 3/28/19).  From here, the bill’s prospects look good.

That’s because SB 157 has a whopping 17 co-sponsors out of a total of 40 senators.  Plus, the lead sponsor is the President of the Senate, Susan Wagle.  Her comments on the bill were predictably on point.

“Children deserve consistent love and care from both parents, but all too often our judicial system does not treat fathers fairly in custody decisions. Senate Bill 157 encourages a much-needed shared parenting arrangement, allowing children to benefit fully from having an involved mother and father in their life.”

Indeed.  As Mitchell points out, the bill is squarely in line with Kansans’ attitudes about parenting arrangements following divorce.

A recent Kansas statewide survey on shared parenting shows 80 percent support the new law while 2 percent oppose. It is nearly unprecedented to see these kind of numbers in lawmaking.

Eighty-seven percent of Kansans said they believe it is in the best interests of the child to have as much time as possible with both fit parents.

Plus, bi-partisan support in the Senate accurately reflects the bi-partisan nature of shared parenting’s support among the general public.

Shared parenting (equal physical time with two fit parents after divorce/separation) has widespread support among men and women, Republicans and Democrats and across every age and racial group. 

In other polls in other states, the same has held true.  Old and young, Republicans and Democrats, blacks and whites, men and women all overwhelmingly support shared parenting and the reform of laws to encourage it.

And what happened in Kansas is mirrored in other states.

Over the last month, Missouri, Oklahoma, Iowa and Minnesota committees have all advanced shared parenting laws.  

The urgent need for shared parenting to be the default position in the law when people divorce is overwhelmingly reflected in the data on children’s welfare.

Children raised by just one parent account for 65 percent of teen suicides; 71 percent of high school drop-outs; 75 percent in chemical abuse centers; and 90 percent of homeless and runaway children.

And those figures are just a small fraction of the information we have demonstrating that shared parenting is the best arrangement for kids.  Children do better with shared parenting than they do in any other arrangement save an intact biological family, something that, of course, divorce makes impossible.

Good for Kansas, good for Will Mitchell and NPO’s vital affiliate there.

March 29, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Texas is privatizing its child welfare system (Texas Monthly, 3/6/19).  It’s a change that makes many child advocates uneasy.

As readers will remember, the Texas system has for years been a shambles.  It’s been found by a federal judge to violate children’s civil rights and by an independent auditor to be chronically understaffed, overburdened and underfunded.  Caseworker turnover approached the astonishing rate of 30% per year.  And then there was the steady drumbeat of anecdotal evidence of children killed and injured, children known to be at risk by CPS.  The most famous of those involved the 2016 death of a little girl in the Dallas – Fort Worth area.  Her caseworker was swamped with 70 cases – five times the industry standard.

One “therapeutic camp,” licensed in Texas for 22 years and receiving about $1.3 million annually, housed boys in primitive open shelters; the boys cooked their own dinner with water they heated themselves on a fire, and their outhouses discharged sewage all over the surrounding area.

So Texas started budgeting money to change the system.  That of course is what it should have done ages ago.  Even a casual glance at the agency’s problems encouraged the conclusion that more money would keep more caseworkers on the job, reduce caseloads and provide better service.  But Texas is a low-tax/low-spend state and even when it came to children, couldn’t be persuaded to loosen the purse strings.

But the devastating findings of federal Judge Janice Jack of Corpus Christi turned the tide.  The legislature began taking the problem seriously and budgeting large increases for CPS.

But now it’s decided that privatization is the way to go.  That’s true despite the fact that the two states (Kansas and Florida) that privatized their child welfare systems haven’t seen an improvement in services.  Indeed,

Florida, which transitioned more slowly, spent $27.5 million on five pilot programs—four of which failed—and still received mixed results.

Those results haven’t improved. In January 2017, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau rated Florida as needing improvement in 11 of 14 categories and gave the state 90 days to come up with a plan to improve care.

So privatization per se has scarcely proven itself to be the magic bullet everyone so desires.  And Texas’ rollout looks to have serious problems before it’s even close to fully implemented.

For starters, the state intends to turn over all aspects of children’s welfare to private employers.  Now, all states include private providers in their mix of services.  So if a parent needs parenting help, it’s likely that a private entity will provide the training.  The same is true for substance abuse, educational help for kids, etc.  Texas of course has long done the same.  But now it’s turning over case management to those private entities.  That is, there will be no state employees visiting kids in their homes.  Of course a caseworker employed by a private provider can do as good a job as one provided by the state.  But without state eyes on kids, the ability of the state – that’s legally the child’s conservator or guardian – to know what’s going on with kids is entirely subject to the transparency of the private provider.  The state overseers may find themselves as much in the dark as the rest of us have always been.  The private provider will be the gatekeeper of information.

Plus, the new system is clearly burdened with a conflict of interest.  Private providers may be given a financial incentive to take children from their homes.  After all, they don’t get paid for kids for whom they don’t provide services.  The CEO of one private provider, Wayne Carson, attempts to refute that notion.

“What people don’t understand is, this contract evolves to [a stage that] would actually incentivize us to send kids home earlier because we get paid kind of the same amount; it doesn’t matter how long they’re in care,” he said.

In other words, his company, ACH, gets a particular amount every year from the state, so it pays not to take more kids or keep them in care longer, but to send them home ASAP. The problems with that gloss are all too clear.

First, not taking kids into foster care can be as dangerous as the opposite.  Financially incentivizing caseworkers to leave kids in homes may well result in the same horror stories we’ve been hearing for years.  Why would it not?

And the amounts paid to ACH by the state are in fact determined by the number of kids they think, at the beginning of the budgeting session, will end up in foster care. 

The pilot contract ran January 2014 to August 2017 for between $35 million and $45 million. (The number was flexible and dependent on how many kids would be taken into foster care.) 

So the state is offering an incentive to keep those numbers up.  The more kids served, the more money budgeted for ACH.

In short, Texas appears to simply be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  Will privatization cost less than the public system?  I don’t see how it can.  Will it provide better outcomes for kids?  That of course is the acid test and one we won’t know the result of for years to come.  And with all the vital information in the hands of the providers, we may not know even then.

March 28, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Anne Stuhldreher gets it (Los Angeles Times, 3/27/19).

She’s something called the director of financial justice for the City of San Francisco.  I have no idea what that position’s job description is, but Stuhldreher’s writing about child support and specifically that paid to mothers who’ve received some form of public assistance such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.  As we all know, when Dad pays child support to Mom who’s received public assistance, the money goes, not to her but to the state to reimburse it for the money it paid her.

I’ve never understood the connection.  Why does Dad’s money go to the state that paid, not him, but Mom?  He owes the state nothing, but pays it back anyway.  My guess is that federal and state governments noticed a source of funds and decided to grab them, sidelining in the process all their solemn comments about children’s need for support.  If public assistance were even close to sufficient to support a family, then I could see a dollar-for-dollar reimbursement scheme.  But in most states, it’s nothing like what’s required for families to make ends meet, so the only person deprived by the scheme is little Andy or Jenny.

In my first year as the director of financial justice for the city of San Francisco, I got asked one question over and over: “Can you please do something about child-support debt?”…

The child-support question at first had me puzzled. Why would government want to wipe out such debts? Wouldn’t that take money away from kids?

Of course it does exactly that.  But it does worse too.  Fathers who know their money isn’t going to their kids are far less likely to pay what they owe.  And needless to say, the payback program only harms the poor.

But 70% of outstanding child-support debt in California is owed to the government, not to kids. That’s because three-quarters of California child-support cases involve low-income families — disproportionately families of color — currently or previously on public assistance. Of the parents who owe payback debt, most earn less than $10,000 a year.

That’s not just true in California, but nationwide.  Indeed, almost 70% of child support debtors earn less than $10k per year.  But California is uniquely bad in that it still charges stratospheric interest rates on what’s owed.

California charges 10% interest on missed child-support payments, one of the highest interest rates in the country.  

Most states dialed back those rates years ago, but some haven’t.  Even most of those that did still charge in the 5% – 6% range, far in excess of rates paid by even chancy debt instruments, but 10% is outrageous.  It’s purely punitive and aimed directly at the poorest members of society.  Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo would understand completely.

Stuhldreher notes the consequences.

In California, a parent with $36,000 in public assistance payback debt can pay $50 every two weeks for 30 years and still end up owing the government more than $400,000. 

Does anyone anywhere believe that encourages a parent to pay?  Or does it encourage him to hide out, make payments under the table to his ex or simply abandon the whole enterprise and hope he doesn’t get caught?

And let’s not forget that child support that goes to the state is treated just like child support that goes to the child.

Most California counties also may send people to jail who cannot pay back public assistance, and the state can suspend the driver’s licenses of those whose payments are more than 30 days late. None of this makes it easy for parents who owe child support to get or keep a job.

Yes Dad, Mom got money from the state, you failed to repay it, so you got to jail.  Make sense?

Fortunately, there are a couple of bills before the California Legislature that would fix some of the worst aspects of the payback scheme.

State Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) introduced Senate Bill 337, which would require that 100% of parents’ payments go to their children and would end public-assistance payback requirements in California. When Colorado enacted this reform, child-support payments in the state jumped 63%. Families’ reliance on welfare and food stamps went down too.

Another bill put forward by Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) would end the 10% interest rate on public-assistance debt. Jones-Sawyer is also introducing a bill that would extend a law that prevents public-assistance payback debt from growing while parents are incarcerated and cannot pay.

Thanks to Anne Stuhldreher for an informative piece.

March 26, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Recently, I reported that a judge in New Jersey had declared unconstitutional its child support enforcement scheme that automatically suspended the driver’s license of anyone owing back child support in a given amount.  Now it appears Missouri is doing much the same thing.

And the organization Equal Justice Under Law doesn’t like it one bit.  It’s suing the state for suspending the license to drive of anyone owing $2,500 in child support or who’s been in arrears for three months, whichever amount is less.  This article makes some telling points about the advisability of doing so (Liberty Unyielding, 3/22/19).

Low-income people with cars have access to 30 times as many jobs as low-income people dependent on public transit, notes transportation expert Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute: “Transit speeds average just 15 mph while average auto speeds in most cities are twice that.”  Moreover, “autos allow users to go where and when they want to go, while transit riders must go where and when the transit goes, which often means less direct routes than they could drive.”

I and others have said it many times.  Driver’s license suspension makes getting and retaining a job difficult.  A person who can drive can get to and from work.  A person who can drive can get a job operating a motor vehicle.  He/she can drive a taxi, a truck, work for a delivery service, Lyft, Uber, etc.  A person with no license can’t.  States that suspend drivers’ licenses make paying child support harder, not easier.  That means kids go without.  You remember kids.  They’re the ones states are supposedly helping when they enforce child support orders.

Why don’t people pay their child support?  It’s mostly for two reasons.  The first is that states set support levels too high for obligors to pay.  It’s a fact long admitted by the Office of Child Support Enforcement.  And,

When California commissioned the Urban Institute to investigate why parents were often behind on their child support, it reported that the number one reason for arrearages was that “orders are set too high relative to ability to pay.”

Then there’s the fact that, when an obligor loses his/her job, becomes disabled or otherwise isn’t earning the usual wage, it’s all but impossible to get a downward modification of the child support order.

The Urban Institute noted years ago that only 4% of noncustodial parents manage to get their monthly child support payments reduced when they lose their job, even though jobless people can’t afford to pay as much as people with jobs. Their unpaid child support just grows and grows, leading to them losing their driver’s license and access to most potential jobs.

The reason for all of this is that, back in the 80s, the myth of the “deadbeat dad” was born and rocketed to popularity.  State legislatures grew convinced that, if Dad was behind on his child support payments, it was only because he didn’t care about his kids and preferred to live a feckless existence.  That there was essentially no evidence for that proposition and much that refuted it mattered little.  Laws were passed to punish non-custodial parents, the great majority of whom were fathers, and regulations put in place to punish those in arrears in the most draconian ways.  Until comparatively recently, states routinely charged obligors 10% and 12% interest on unpaid balances, rates seen elsewhere only for the junkiest of junk bonds.

Then of course the federal government stepped in and offered states financial incentives that made those draconian enforcement methods all but inevitable.  Paying states for what they collect was part of that plus a budget of $5 billion annually for child support enforcement.  No one is surprised at the outcome.

The few people who argue in favor of those draconian enforcement mechanisms often point to the fact that sometimes they actually work.  Sometimes money is forthcoming when the obligor goes to jail.  It’s true.  The problem being that the money usually comes, not from the obligor, but from his relatives or friends – you know, people who owe no obligation of support to the child.

In the lawsuit, the State of Missouri will likely point to the fact that, unlike New Jersey’s, its law doesn’t automatically suspend the licenses of those in arrears, but only allows the state to do so.  It will claim that, in accordance with U.S. Supreme Court precedent, it conducts hearings to ascertain a person’s ability to pay.  Don’t believe it.  We’ve been to that rodeo before.  Parents in arrears are overwhelmingly poor and uneducated and have little way of knowing what evidence of inability to pay they have to produce for the judge or how to produce it.  Given that those “hearings” generally last about five minutes, the reality is that driver’s license suspension comes perilously close to being automatic.

OCSE data reveal unpaid child support levels that increase every single year.  Today, there is absolutely no chance that those balances will ever be paid off, a fact candidly admitted by the OCSE.  As of 2016, the unpaid balance was over $116 billion and climbing.  In 2007, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the Department of Health and Human Services reported that 70% of arrears were due from obligors who had either zero income or reported earning less than $10,000 per year.  The same office reported that it expected to collect just 40% of arrears over a ten-year period, during which time of course, the total amount owed would keep climbing.  Here’s my post from last year on the matter.

There are sensible ways of approaching child support.  Principally, that would mean setting support orders that parents can pay, reforming parenting time so each parent has as close to half the time with the child as possible, making downward modifications easier to obtain and enforcing visitation orders with the same vigor as we do child support orders. 

Needless to say, we’re lightyears away from taking such reasonable steps.  In the meantime, we’ll have to rely on organizations like Equal Justice Under Law to force a degree of sanity on states that still seem to believe that non-resident fathers don’t care about their kids and the way to squeeze money out of the poor is to treat them as harshly as possible.