Author: Super User

March 3, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Sigh.  Another day, another court that’s failed to protect children (The Chattanoogan, 2/22/19).

The current case is one of international child abduction that a trial court in Tennessee knew was a risk, ignored it, allowed Mom to take the children to Denmark and now no one knows where they are.

Bart Critser and Denmark native Majken Wadum were married for 10 years, but divorced in 2018.  They have two daughters, Ebba and Silvia.  Wadum apparently has long-standing problems with alcoholism that have impaired her ability to be always a fit parent to the girls. 

When Critser filed for divorce in August of 2017, he cited Wadum’s alcoholism and was given primary custody by Judge Robert Whitwell.  But shortly thereafter, Whitwell ordered both children to live with Wadum in Oxford Mississippi.

In June of 2018,

Judge Whitwell grants Majken’s request to again travel to Denmark, this time with both daughters, during the month of July. He returns Majken’s passport to her, along with the passports of the girls. Bart’s legal team objects, stating that Majken is a clear flight risk, noting particularly that the children had indicated to Bart that they are “moving.” 

So the girls’ understanding of what they and their mother were doing was “moving” to Denmark.  To Whitwell, that didn’t signify a risk that they wouldn’t return, so he allowed them to go.  Amazingly,

Judge Whitwell orders Majken to return to Mississippi with the children no later than Aug. 5.

So apparently, the judge figured that a mother who’s planning to abduct her children to her native Denmark would be thwarted by a Mississippi court order telling her not to.  He of course was well aware that Danish courts don’t enforce the orders of Mississippi courts and that the jurisdiction of his court doesn’t extend to Scandinavia.  But he let her go anyway.

Guess what happened.  On August 5,

Majken sends Bart an e-mail saying that she and the girls were staying in Denmark to start their new lives.

That required Critser to travel to Denmark four times over the next six months.  The first trip was to initiate proceedings under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.  The second was for the hearing on that suit in the lower court and the third and fourth times were for Wadum’s appeal of the lower court’s decision. 

All decisions by the Danish courts have been in Critser’s favor.  And those decisions, like that of the court in Mississippi, plus $4.99 will get Critser a latte at Starbucks.  They’re so far worth nothing.

To no one’s surprise, Wadum is no more interested in obeying the orders issued by Danish judges than she was of obeying Judge Whitwell’s.

Majken agrees for Bart to collect the girls on Feb. 6. Bart goes to her apartment – there is no answer at the door. Neighbors say they have not seen Majken and the girls in four days. Bart has made numerous attempts to find the girls. Danish police have searched the apartment. Majken’s mother and brother claim they do not know where she is. She has deleted her email account, her bank account and credit cards are frozen, Interpol has put a warning on her passport – and yet she has disappeared with the children without a trace.

Now, Interpol can track the use of a passport, but of course passports aren’t necessary to travel around Europe.  But there are plenty of other indicators Interpol can rely on, such as the use of credit cards, checks, etc.  But Wadum’s bank account and credit cards are useless, so apparently someone is assisting her in her abduction.  That of course makes that person(s) a conspirator in child abduction.  Who might that person be?

Who knows?  But here in the U.S., we had a similar case in which a mother snatched her son from his father’s custody in Canada and simply disappeared off the face of the planet.  A certain private detective in Minnesota who specialized in parental child abduction cases didn’t hesitate to say where he thought they were – in a DV shelter.  And sure enough, he was right.  Shortly thereafter, both were found in a shelter in South Dakota.  

If the police want to find Majken Wadum, they’d be well advised to start with the local shelters.

We’ll see how this one turns out.  In the meantime, it’s important to note that Judge Whitwell’s shocking failure to prevent this abduction meant (and means) the abuse of two young girls.  He is complicit in that.

February 28, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors

Child support laws and practices are well-known for their many shortcomings.  Child support often bears little or no relationship to what’s required to support a child and has come to look more like Mom support.  Non-custodial parents complain that they don’t know what their support is being used for.  The Office of Child Support Enforcement has complained for years that states set support levels beyond what parents can pay.  Enforcement mechanisms often make the non-custodial parent’s ability to pay harder rather than easier.  Despite knowing that non-interference with visitation is one of the best ways of ensuring payment of child support, neither the federal nor state governments provide any realistic assistance to non-custodial parents to enforce their visitation rights.

Those and many more problems are all at the forefront of the ever-louder debate about child support law.  But there’s another that’s less commented upon – the rape of boys by adult women who become pregnant as a result.  Those boys, sometimes as young as 12, are in every state required to pay to support the child.  That’s true despite the fact that the entire concept of statutory rape holds that underage boys and girls are by law too immature to consent to sex.  Therefore, at every trial for statutory rape, the state need produce no evidence on the issue of consent.  That issue has already been decided by the laws governing the jurisdiction.  There can be no defense of consent.

That leads to a rather striking anomaly as this article points out (Psychology Today, 2/21/19).

Mel Feit, director of the New York-based advocacy group the National Center for Men, told the Arizona Republic newspaper:

“To hold him unresponsible for the sex act, and to then turn around and say we’re going to hold him responsible for the child that resulted from that act is off-the-charts ridiculous… it makes no sense.”

Indeed it doesn’t, but that’s the law in every state in the nation.  Those laws reward adult women who rape boys by allowing them to receive his support.  But in some way, both courts and legislatures rationalize the matter.

In 1993, at the age of 15, Seyer appealed this decision to the Kansas Supreme Court, arguing he should not be liable for these payments. He maintained that his babysitter (Hermesmann) took advantage of him sexually when he was too young to give consent.

The Kansas Supreme Court ruled against him. The judgment stated that because Seyer initially consented to the sexual encounters and never told his parents what was happening, he was responsible for supporting the child.

In other words, to reach its conclusion, the Kansas Court ignored state law that’s based on the concept that a 12-year-old can’t consent to sex and simply ruled that he had done exactly that.

The blatant hypocrisy may fool some, but not most of us.  It’s a transparent veil meant to obscure one of the realities about fatherhood in this country and others.  That reality is that fathers are routinely treated like nothing more than sources of cash.  We see that in essentially everything regarding child support enforcement, but also in things that are supposedly “father-friendly,” like “responsible fatherhood” programs. 

You might think that those would include assistance for fathers to assert their legal rights to custody and access to their kids.  But if you do, you’ll be disappointed.  Responsible fatherhood programs are almost exclusively job training.  I’ve got nothing against job-training of course, but the message of those programs is the same as elsewhere – fathers are nothing but a source of money.  Beyond that, we’re willing to spend virtually no time or money to help them gain and maintain a relationship with the kids they’re bound to support.

And of course we do that despite the fact that fathers who aren’t prevented from seeing their kids are far more likely to support them than are those who are.  Greater dysfunction would be hard to imagine.

Meanwhile, there’s been a movement afoot for years to strip parental rights from men who rape women who become pregnant as a result.  The combination of the two – parental obligations for boys who are raped and the removal of parental rights of men who rape – is vertigo-inducing.  Given our current laws, the concept of gender equality means that women who rape should lose their parental rights and that boys who are raped should be absolved of the requirement to support the resulting child.

But we’re nowhere near doing either.  As usual, we’re content with hypocrisy as long as fathers are the ones holding the short end of the stick.

February 27, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Senator and presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, has trotted out her proposal for kids and their care in the unlikely event she becomes president.  Her proposal is a bad one (National Review, 2/20/19). 

Under it, every parent earning up to twice the poverty level would receive free daycare, i.e. the taxpayers would foot the bill.  Parents earning over that amount would see their daycare payments capped at 7% of their income.  So, in all likelihood, taxpayers would pay some for them too.

As purely a financial matter, the proposal is a non-starter.  There are about 15.5 million children living under the poverty line now.  If there are twice that number in households up to twice the poverty level of income, that would mean 31 million kids.  Now, the cost of daycare varies from place to place.  It’s more expensive in New York and California than in Alabama and Iowa.  According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average range is between $4,000 per year and $22,600.  Of course infant care is significantly more expensive than that for older kids.  The lure of free daycare would hugely increase the number of parents opting for it.  Warren says her proposal would require $1 trillion over a decade, which looks to significantly underestimate its cost.

That’s the more so because the price of daycare, already high, would skyrocket under Warren’s plans.  It would do so because the promise of free care would lure many parents into the market who otherwise make do with parental care, kinship care and that of friends and neighbors.  When Quebec tried something far less comprehensive in the 90s, the number of kids in daycare increased by a third. So demand would greatly increase. 

So would regulations.  If Uncle Sam is paying the bills, Uncle Sam gets to say what he pays for and he’s not about to pay for substandard daycare if he can help it.  Ergo, a mass of new federal – or federally mandated – regulations would crop up on daycare operators and their facilities with which everyone will have to comply. 

But that’s just the economics of the proposal.  Far worse than the cost in dollars is the cost to families and children.  First, every increase in daycare is a decrease in fathers’ ability to care for their kids.  Indeed, the growth of the daycare industry has come hand-in-hand with the growth in divorce and single-mother childbearing.  Courts that hand out divorces like candy and routinely kick fit fathers to the curb necessarily abet the growth of daycare.  How could they not?

So if we offer free daycare, the impetus for mothers to include fathers in the lives of their children can only decline.  Given that there are seldom any consequences for a mother who ignores a father’s parenting time order, it’s all but a certainty that Warren’s proposal would give a big boost to the number of children who don’t see their dads.  They already amount to about 30% of all children, so it’s not as if we need to do more in that regard.

What about the kids?  Serious studies of kids in daycare are troubling, as I’ve written here and elsewhere.  In a nutshell, they have higher stress levels than do kids who spend the day with Dad or a relative and that stress can impact their emotional and behavioral well-being for years – even decades – to come.  Dr. Anna Machin writes in her book The Life of Dad about stress in young children:

[C]ontinued exposure to stress is detrimental, particularly when an individual is young and their brain is still developing, as flooding the brain with cortisol disrupts the creation of the normal neural pathways.  This invariably leads to behavioural and emotional issues in child – and adulthood.

Here’s some of what I wrote in 2016.  Back in 1997, the province of Quebec introduced heavily-subsidized daycare for four and five-year-olds.  One result, as I mentioned previously, was a 33% increase in the number of kids in daycare.  It also provided an excellent opportunity for researchers to study daycare’s impact on kids.

The first award-winning study came in 2009. It concluded that,

We report striking evidence that children’s outcomes have worsened since the program was introduced. We also find suggestive evidence that families we study became more stressed with the introduction of the program. This is manifested in increased aggressiveness and anxiety for the children; more hostile, less consistent parenting for the adults; and worse adult mental health and relationship satisfaction.

A second study, conducted in 2014, found daycare to be particularly detrimental to younger children.

These researchers (like others) uncovered widespread negative consequences, but they emphasized that earlier exposure to the child-care system resulted in larger problems. They wrote:

The estimates indicate that on average, children who gain access to subsidized child care at earlier ages experience significantly larger negative impacts on motor-social developmental scores, self-reported health status and behavioral outcomes including physical aggression and emotional anxiety.

Finally, a 2015 study found the detriments of daycare lasting well into children’s teen years.

While the researchers found that the introduction of the Quebec daycare program had “little impact on cognitive test scores,” they found that the program’s negative effects on non-cognitive skills appear to strongly persist into school years, and in many instances grow larger as children get older. Problems such as anxiety, aggression, and hyperactivity were worse in older children than younger ones exposed to the Quebec system. Moreover, there was “a worsening of both health and life satisfaction among those older youths exposed to the Quebec child care program.”

The study’s most startling discovery is that the program appears to have driven an increase in criminal behavior among teens.

Nice.  This is what Senator Warren wants, mostly for America’s least affluent kids. 

Warren of course will present this as a boon to working women and will cite all sorts of dodgy data for the proposition that this society does them dirt and must improve.  That’s a bogus defense.  We need to encourage married childbearing, especially to adults at the bottom of the pay scale.  After all, they’re the ones having kids without being married.  Just 8% of adults with a college degree or more have kids out of wedlock.  Upwards of 50% of those without a degree do.  If you want to know where poverty comes from, start there.  And don’t try to solve the problem by encouraging more out-of-wedlock childbearing and the further sidelining of fathers.

The solution is for Mom and Dad to raise kids together.  The second choice isn’t daycare, but kinship care, i.e. that performed by extended family members.  The kids do better and so does the economy. 

Senator Warren’s idea belongs in the waste bin of history.

February 25, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Yesterday I posted a piece about an article by Maurice Fisher who calls himself a “mental health professional,” whatever that may mean.  His article is so bad I had to spend two posts on debunking it (Roanoke Times, 2/21/19).  From the looks of that article, Fisher could be one of those off-the-shelf know-nothings who’ve absorbed the all-too-common narrative of male corruption and female – what? – perfection, perhaps.

And yet previous pieces by Fisher are nothing of the kind.  Indeed, in one, he rightly bemoans the marginalization (as through the use of medication) of what was once understood to be normal, rambunctious boy behavior.  Reading it, no one would get a hint of the ignorance and antipathy for fathers Fisher displays in the piece about which I posted yesterday and post today.

What’s up with this guy?  In the former article, he clearly knows his stuff.  In the current one he’s taken not the briefest glance at readily available, easy to understand information, all of which rebuts his thesis.  Who knows?  I can’t figure him out.

What I do know though is what he writes and the linked-to article is a hatchet job on fathers and almost completely uninformed.  Time and again, he allows his fleeting thoughts to pass as facts.

[T]here is a case of a “loser” committing major felonies and being sentenced to state or federal prison for multiple years, but wants to have a voice in his children’s lives. This is typically because the “loser” wants to control and manipulate the biologic mother, not because he has any real interest in the child.

Citation?  Again there’s none.  Who’s studied this phenomenon Fisher is so certain exists?  I’ve never seen anything and Fisher offers nothing.

Then there’s this:

[T]here is a case where a “loser” has a lengthy history of domestic abuse toward the mother of his children, the children, and/or both. Eventually, the female attempts to get away from her tormentor and get a protective order which the “loser” consistently violates. Once the children’s mother finds safety elsewhere, the “loser” desires continued contact with the children in the form of ongoing visitation, joint legal custody and/or physical custody so as to continue to abuse the children’s mother.

I’m sure that happens on occasion, but I suspect it’s rare.  Again, Fisher offers nothing on the prevalence of the described behavior, so we’re left to guess. 

The real problem is his entire failure to balance his negative description of “loser” (his word, not mine) dads with “loser” moms.  Will he do so in a future article?  I’m betting he won’t.  Mothers commit about twice the abuse and neglect of their kids as do fathers.  Is Fisher aware?  If he’s not, it’s inexcusable to write an article criticizing fathers, given that the website for the Administration for Children and Families is just a couple of clicks away.

And, as I said yesterday, non-custodial mothers pay far less in child support than do non-custodial fathers, are less likely to pay all of what they owe and when they do pay, they pay a smaller percentage even though they’re ordered to pay less. 

And of course women commit as much domestic violence as do men and initiate more.

What about parental abduction of children, a practice that appears to be more a Mom than a Dad thing?

What about refusing or interfering with Dad’s visitation, a not uncommon phenomenon?

What about paternity fraud?

What about parental alienation?

What about maternal gatekeeping?

Anyone with the desire to do so could make every bit as good a case for an article on “loser” mothers as for “loser” dads.  But somehow we never see the former, only the latter.

The simple fact is that we should rarely, if ever, see either. The huge majority of fathers are fit and caring.  So are the huge majority of mothers.  Why not stand up to the gales of the cultural zeitgeist and run a piece on the irreplaceable value of fathers to children?  There’s an astonishing amount to say on that subject and, if he were to do so, Fisher would be striking a blow against one of the most pernicious problems we face – anti-father bias. 

Instead he chose to do the opposite.  He chose to, in his small way, make a bad situation worse.  He chose to abet the bias against fathers that’s such a regular part of the news media, popular culture and, worst of all, family courts. 

And that, my friends, is a scurrilous act, irrespective of what he’s done in the past.

February 24, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

We at the National Parents Organization try hard every day to bring sanity to family courts and laws.  Countless other organizations and individuals do too.  It’s a long, hard slog.  The healthy fight to keep fathers in children’s lives is a necessary one.  Too many forces in this society militate against fathers and the result is widespread social dysfunction.  Kids raised by two parents are, on average, far better off than are any other kids, a fact that’s been firmly established and well known now for decades.

And yet there are those who – deliberately it seems – turn a blind eye to the realities fathers face.  Such a person is Maurice Fisher who’s a “mental health professional” working fairly frequently in custody cases (Roanoke Times, 2/21/19).  With an attitude like his, he should find a different job.

However, there seems to be a growing number of people, especially men, who eschew their moral, legal and financial responsibility for their children.   

Citation?  Of course he offers nothing to support his allegation for the simple reason that there is nothing.  Naturally, Fisher would defend his statement because he used the word “seems.”  That raises the question of to whom it seems that “especially men” eschew their responsibility to their children.  That person of course is Fisher.  He’s trotting out his anti-father bias as something akin to fact.

And yet we have data on who eschews their financial responsibility to their kids.  The U.S. Census Bureau has kept that data since at least 1993 and, had he taken a couple of minutes to glance at it, Fisher would have learned that non-custodial mothers are significantly less likely to pay everything they owe in child support or any of what they owe.  That’s been true every single year since 1993 except 2009 when 72.9% of fathers received some child support while 70.5% of mothers did.  That’s true despite the fact that mothers are ordered to pay less than are fathers.

Not content with opining on a subject about which he seems entirely ignorant, Fisher plunges into another subject about which he seems entirely ignorant.

First, there is a case where a “loser” is required to pay a minimal support amount (e.g., an almost insulting amount such as $150 per month for a child which parenthetically is less that 5 dollars daily), but does not consistently pay the support and yet wants to have joint legal custody, visitation and dispense punishments to the child as he see fit.

I know it’s taxing to expect Fisher to read complicated government documents, but the Office of Child Support Enforcement actually has some pretty interesting information on who doesn’t pay everything they owe in child support.  Some 63% of fathers who aren’t paid up report earnings of under $10,000 per year.  Yes, $150 per month doesn’t sound like much, but $1,800 per year is actually a lot for a person who earns under $10k. 

Fisher wouldn’t dream of looking at hard facts, but OCSE data show very clearly that, non-custodial parents who don’t pay do so because they can’t pay.  That’s made clear in other ways too.  When states do sweeps of delinquent parents, they routinely collect about two cents for every dollar owed.  And that’s when the parent is facing jail for their failure to pay.  In that situation, I would think a person who could pay would.  But overwhelmingly they don’t.  And the authorities fully understand.  Few of those netted in the sweeps actually go to jail for the good and sufficient reason that most people understand (a) that they don’t have the money and (b) putting them in jail helps no one.

But Fisher’s not just a complainer who’s entirely ignorant of his subject; he’s a complainer who’s ignorant of his subject with a solution to the problem he doesn’t understand.

The current laws need to be changed to correlate the timely payment of child support with rights to visitation.

That’ll fix ‘em!  You see, child support enforcement isn’t nearly harsh enough.  Jail, the loss of drivers and other occupational licenses, passports, etc. isn’t enough.  Yes, the OCSE itself has recognized for many years that those draconian measures not only don’t do the job, but make matters worse.  That’s why it’s given states the ability to craft other ways of enforcing child support orders.  And that’s why states are doing just that.

But for Fisher, we’ve got to get tough on those kids who are so irresponsible as to have a parent who can’t support them.  Wait, what?  That’s right; Fisher figures that the way to make parents pay what they owe is to deprive the child of his/her relationship with the non-custodial parent.  Does Fisher know anything about parent-child attachment?  Is he aware of the trauma visited on kids by the loss of a parent?  He’s a “mental health professional,” so he should, but he either doesn’t or his antipathy for fathers has overshadowed his interest in children’s welfare.

This is who Virginia courts rely on to advise them about child custody?

Fisher’s so misguided I need another post to deal with him.

February 22, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Senator and presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, has trotted out her proposal for kids and their care in the unlikely event she becomes president.

(Full disclosure: I worked with Warren back in the early 80s when I was an adjunct law professor teaching legal research and writing to first-year students.  Warren was the full-time faculty member whose job it was to oversee the program and, by extension, the adjuncts.  I liked her.  She was charming, bright and funny.  Her main drawback was that her relationship with her shampoo was, shall we say, distant, even cold.  Her hair was often an oily mess and her forehead didn’t benefit from the fact.  I’m happy to say she’s addressed that particular problem in the ensuing years.)

Her proposal is a bad one (National Review, 2/20/19). 

Under it, every parent earning up to twice the poverty level would receive free daycare, i.e. the taxpayers would foot the bill.  Parents earning over that amount would see their daycare payments capped at 7% of their income.  So, in all likelihood, taxpayers would pay some for them too.

As purely a financial matter, the proposal is a non-starter.  There are about 15.5 million children living under the poverty line now.  If there are twice that number in households up to twice the poverty level of income, that would mean 31 million kids.  Now, the cost of daycare varies from place to place.  It’s more expensive in New York and California than in Alabama and Iowa.  According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average range is between $4,000 per year and $22,600.  Of course infant care is significantly more expensive than that for older kids.  The lure of free daycare would hugely increase the number of parents opting for it.  Warren says her proposal would require $1 trillion over a decade, which looks to significantly underestimate its cost.

That’s the more so because the price of daycare, already high, would skyrocket under Warren’s plans.  It would do so because the promise of free care would lure many parents into the market who otherwise make do with parental care, kinship care and that of friends and neighbors.  When Quebec tried something far less comprehensive in the 90s, the number of kids in daycare increased by a third. So demand would greatly increase. 

So would regulations.  If Uncle Sam is paying the bills, Uncle Sam gets to say what he pays for and he’s not about to pay for substandard daycare if he can help it.  Ergo, a mass of new federal regulations would crop up on daycare operators and their facilities with which everyone will have to comply. 

But that’s just the economics of the proposal.  Far worse than the cost in dollars is the cost to families and children.  First, every increase in daycare is a decrease in fathers’ ability to care for their kids.  Indeed, the growth of the daycare industry has come hand-in-hand with the growth in divorce and single-mother childbearing.  Courts that hand out divorces like candy and routinely kick fit fathers to the curb necessarily abet the growth of daycare.  How could they not?

So if we offer free daycare, the impetus for mothers to include fathers in the lives of their children can only decline.  Given that there are seldom any consequences for a mother who ignores a father’s parenting time order, it’s all but a certainty that Warren’s proposal would give a big boost to the number of children who don’t see their dads.  They already amount to about 30% of all children, so it’s not as if we need to do more in that regard.

What about the kids?  Serious studies of kids in daycare are troubling, as I’ve written here and elsewhere.  In a nutshell, they have higher stress levels than do kids who spend the day with Dad or a relative and that stress can impact their emotional and behavioral well-being for years – even decades – to come.

Here’s some of what I wrote in 2016.  Back in 1997, the province of Quebec introduced heavily-subsidized daycare for four and five-year-olds.  One result was a 33% increase in the number of kids in daycare.  It also provided an excellent opportunity for researchers to study daycare.

The first award-winning study came in 2009. It concluded that,

We report striking evidence that children’s outcomes have worsened since the program was introduced. We also find suggestive evidence that families we study became more stressed with the introduction of the program. This is manifested in increased aggressiveness and anxiety for the children; more hostile, less consistent parenting for the adults; and worse adult mental health and relationship satisfaction.

A second study, conducted in 2014, found daycare to be particularly detrimental to younger children.

These researchers (like others) uncovered widespread negative consequences, but they emphasized that earlier exposure to the child-care system resulted in larger problems. They wrote:

The estimates indicate that on average, children who gain access to subsidized child care at earlier ages experience significantly larger negative impacts on motor-social developmental scores, self-reported health status and behavioral outcomes including physical aggression and emotional anxiety.

Finally, a 2015 study found the detriments of daycare lasting well into children’s teen years.

While the researchers found that the introduction of the Quebec daycare program had “little impact on cognitive test scores,” they found that the program’s negative effects on non-cognitive skills appear to strongly persist into school years, and in many instances grow larger as children get older. Problems such as anxiety, aggression, and hyperactivity were worse in older children than younger ones exposed to the Quebec system. Moreover, there was “a worsening of both health and life satisfaction among those older youths exposed to the Quebec child care program.”

The study’s most startling discovery is that the program appears to have driven an increase in criminal behavior among teens.

Nice.  This is what Senator Warren wants, mostly for America’s least affluent kids. 

Warren of course will present this as a boon to working women and will cite all sorts of dodgy data for the proposition that this society does them dirt and must improve.  That’s a bogus defense.  We need to encourage married childbearing, especially to adults at the bottom of the pay scale.  After all, they’re the ones having kids without being married.  Just 8% of adults with a college degree or more have kids out of wedlock.  Upwards of 50% of those without a degree do.  If you want to know where poverty comes from, start there.  And don’t try to solve the problem by encouraging more out-of-wedlock childbearing and the further sidelining of fathers.

The solution is for Mom and Dad to raise kids together.  The kids do better and so does the economy. 

Senator Warren’s idea belongs in the waste bin of history.

February 21, 2019 

While it’s not surprising that most children of divorce say they want to spend quality time with both parents, studies show that the majority of parents want an equitable custody arrangement, too.

In spite of this, just one state in the nation, Kentucky, has a true shared parenting law in place, and that took effect less than a year ago. Family court practices vary from state to state, and too many remain bound to outdated policy and rote resolutions. After all the filings and legal finagling, fit and able Dads often get every other weekend and as little as one day a week while many moms handle the lion share of child rearing responsibilities while often juggling careers while struggling to maintain life balance.

Today, the stereotype of Dad as the sole bread-winner and Mom as the nesting nurturer couldn’t be further from reality.

Given that mothers are the default parent in most custody battles nationwide, the burden of single, or near-single parenting weighs heavy, giving little alone time, bearing the load of homework help, preparing meals and more. It’s easy to think – appropriately – that the father loses out on helping to raise the child/ren, but it’s important to look at the penalty moms often pay for getting such a disproportionate amount of parenting responsibility.

What does this mean? Our nation’s family courts and judges should put both fit and able Moms and Dads on equal footing during the divorce process, and then adjust by agreement as needed to a comfort level that suits both parties – and most of all, the child.

The National Parents Organization is about best-case scenarios for children and parents following separation and divorce, and a true and equal division of labor and love – both the giving and receiving of each. State lawmakers should resolve to help all parties realize that, and revise their unfair custodial precedents and parameters accordingly. Fairness for all parties gives children of divorce their best odds, and makes shared parenting more meaningful and manageable. And that’s a Win-Win-Win.

February 21, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

In the U.S., some 41% of children are born to single mothers.  Our custody laws assume all children to have been born to a married couple.  That means stark inequalities between unmarried mothers and fathers.  In every state, mothers have parental rights solely by virtue of their biological connection to their children.  Fathers have a biological connection too, but must spend significant sums of money and jump through various legal hoops in order to establish their rights. 

Combine all that with the fact that, although we have, for the first time in human history, the ability to know to a certainty the father of every child, no state performs genetic testing on every child when it’s born.  Some 30 different tests are performed on newborns, but not the one that would benefit dads.

And of course no law anywhere on the planet requires any mother to inform the father that she’s given birth to his child.

The upshot is that state laws perpetuate pro-mother and anti-father bias.

Now a bill before the Arkansas Legislature seeks to take a baby step toward rectifying some of that (KATV, 2/19/19).

“If there’s a father that wants to be involved in their child’s life – this bill seeks to put those fathers on an equal footing and have a fair playing field,” said Rep. Jimmy Gazaway (R-Paragould).

Gazaway filed HB1486 last week, which aims to amend the law concerning the custody of children born out of wedlock. In cases where paternity has been established, fathers and mothers would be subject to the same custody laws that divorced parents are already subject to.

“It’s 2019 and it’s time we have laws that reflect equal rights for both mothers and fathers,” said Gazaway.

HB 1486 would do two things.  First, it requires that custody laws that govern married couples also govern unmarried ones, assuming paternity has been established.  The linked to article underlines why that’s so important.

Mary Anne Parsley, a grandmother from Conway, said she believes her son’s fight to gain sole custody of his daughter would have ended years ago if state law didn’t favor the mother.

Custody wasn’t an issue to start with Parsley’s son – in essence he was already his daughter’s primary caregiver as the child’s mother battled addiction problems. But Parsley’s son wanted to make sole custody of his daughter official and petitioned the court to do so.

“That’s when after a couple of court hearings they were referred to a mediator and the mediation resulted in this temporary custody,” said Parsley.

Parsley’s son has had temporary custody of his daughter going on almost five years now.

“The temporary custody being changed was contingent on the child’s mother meeting some requirements,” said Parsley. “Those requirements have not been met. So he still has custody of her, but it’s still temporary.”

It’s crystal clear that, despite Parsley’s son having been the child’s sole caregiver for essentially all its life, he’s still a second-class parent in the eyes of the court and the law.  Given that changing custody only awaits Mom’s addressing her addiction problems, we can conclude that, once she does, custody will be hers.  HB 1486 would change that.

Second,

(c) If a court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that a parent has demonstrated a pattern of willfully concealing or withholding a child from the other parent, the court:

(1) Shall not find that the other parent has failed to establish a parental relationship with the child; and

(2) May find that there has been a material change of circumstances.

So when a mother refuses to inform the father that he has a child, a court may not use the fact against him.  That is, his right to custody and parenting time will not be diminished by her having kept the child from him.

Plus, her having done so may result in a judicial finding of changed circumstances, permitting a change of custody to him.

All in all, it’s a pretty good law.  It won’t dare disturb the universe, but it’ll make life a lot better for unmarried fathers and their children in the State of Arkansas.  And no move to make parental rights more equal is a bad thing.

February 20, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Sometimes courts get it right – even Nebraska courts.

In the case of Alberts vs. Alberts, both the trial and the appellate court made the right decisions.  Thomas and Joan Alberts were married in 1997, had two children, separated in 2011 and Joan filed for divorce in 2013.  There were multiple issues at trial about marital property and of course about child custody.  Predictably, the trial court’s temporary orders gave Joan primary custody and allowed Thomas only every-other-weekend visitation.

But during their separation Thomas always cared for the children at Joan’s house after she left for work and after the kids returned from school in the afternoon.  Thomas was a fit, loving and caring father.  His provision of care for the children allowed Joan to work long hours and pursue continued education that enhanced her earning potential.

But post-separation, Joan entered onto a campaign to alienate their younger child, Isaac, from his father.  This the court duly noted.

It is the court’s strong conclusion that Joan has actively worked to alienate [Thomas] from his children. It believes just as strongly that [Thomas] puts the interests of his children before anything else. While [Thomas] is not a perfect parent, the Court reposes significantly more trust in his parenting abilities. Given the strong history of discord between these two, the fact that Joan has chosen to disregard the Court’s previous directions aimed at establishing a coparenting relationship between [the parties], and the parental alienation instigated by Joan which is obvious from the record, the Court chooses to award legal custody of the minor children to [Thomas]. Physical custody will be shared on a rotating weekly basis.

That was the right thing to do and both the trial and appellate courts understood the fact.  The two exes were at each other’s throats.  They seem to have hated each other, but loved the children.  Joan actively tried to alienate Isaac from his father, but Thomas did nothing of the sort.  Therefore, giving sole legal custody to Thomas made sense.  He had the children’s best interests at heart and, since the two adults couldn’t work together, reposing sole legal custody in one facilitated the child’s healthy upbringing.

Likewise, equal physical custody was probably the right approach.  A week-on/week-off schedule makes parental alienation difficult or impossible.  As soon as the alienating parent begins to convince the child that the targeted parent doesn’t love them, is violent, crazy, or whatever fiction the alienator chooses, the child returns to the targeted parent and learns once again that the fiction is just that.  It’s one of the great virtues of equal parenting that it all but obviates parental alienation.

While a joint physical custody arrangement might seem at odds with the district court’s award of sole legal custody to Thomas and the court’s emphasis on the “strong history of discord” between the parties, the evidence shows that a physical custody arrangement involving fewer parenting time transitions and a regular, predictable schedule was best for Alika (the older child).  (Parenthetical mine.)

In short, both courts did the right thing by these children and their parents.

Are Nebraska courts starting to “get it?”  Certainly, equal parenting forces in the state have made it hot for those who oppose a child’s right to maintain meaningful relationships with both parents post-divorce.  That’s included a number of initiatives that have by turns embarrassed and brought into disrepute various anti-shared parenting entities in the state.  The decertification of the bar association was one such incident and the public humiliation of its then-president Marcia Fangmeyer for blatantly lying about a shared parenting bill, in which I was a happy participant, was another.  The multiple revelations of the Saini analysis of custody decisions undercut essentially every argument against shared parenting.  Likewise, the lawsuit against the Administrator of the Courts that forced the publication of the “education” received by family court judges in the matter of children’s welfare and parenting time has been of great importance.  That “education” was so at odds with the truth and the shenanigans engaged in by state employees to ensure that judges didn’t hear the truth about the matter couldn’t have set well with the judges themselves, the legislature or the public.

But perhaps the most important factor has been the steady drumbeat of opinion pieces published in all the prominent state newspapers by shared parenting advocates.  That, plus the fact that anti-shared parenting forces have nothing with which to counter those arguments and, at least to a great extent, have stopped trying, just may have pushed Nebraska judges in the right direction.

Whatever the case, a win’s a win and Alberts vs. Alberts is a win.  It’s a win for Isaac Alberts and a win for sanity in the process of deciding custody and parenting time.  And it’s a win for all those who know that parental alienation is a form of child abuse and that alienators must be held to account by the judges in whose courts they appear.