Author: Super User

December 13, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute (DAI) continues from yesterday.

The colloquial term “deadbeat dads” is a common stereotype and colors all aspects of men’s involvement in the adoption process. A Canadian study on attitudes of triad members toward releasing identifying information on adoptees to birthparents found that respondents were much more willing to grant access rights to mothers than to fathers (Sachdev, 1991). The author concludes that members of the adoption community share the prevailing stereotypical views of the birthfather as a “Don Juan” or “phantom father” – that is, little more than a sperm donor.

The “adoption community” of course consists primarily of adoption agencies and lawyers who make their living off of completed adoptions.  Neither gets paid if an adoption doesn’t go through.  It is therefore in the interest of both to complete any given adoption and doing so is made much easier if Dad isn’t involved.  That’s why the “adoption community” pushed so hard for the creation of putative father registries and still does.  Naturally, anyone who views fathers in the negative light referred to by the DAI report is more able to sideline fathers than would be someone more sympathetic.

That same bias seems to extend to mothers and perhaps women generally.

[T]he authors’ analysis of qualitative interviews revealed that women harbor more negative stereotypes and judgmental attitudes about birthfathers than do men. Most adults, but particularly females, also viewed the emotional attachment of a father to his child as primarily learned, whereas mothers were viewed as having an instinctive, biologically predisposed emotional attachment (Miall & March, 2003).

That of course is untrue.  The same hormones that produce parenting behavior in all social mammals, including humans, exist in men and women alike.  Yes, they find receptors in different areas of the brain in women than in men and that produces different parenting behaviors.  And the hormone oxytocin tends to encourage men to be the secondary parent, i.e. to step back and let Mom take the primary role.  But the idea that, in some way, mothers parent “intuitively” while men’s attachment to their children is “learned” has no basis in fact and is contradicted by the known science.

So how does that anti-father bias play out?  Often it results in bypassing him altogether, whether legally or not.

In reality, the extent to which a man can be involved in the adoption process or a parenting decision depends largely on his relationship with the mother at that time. If she has an ongoing, positive relationship with the father, she normally would welcome his involvement; if she does not, however, she may resist his involvement out of fear, desire to control the situation, or for other reasons. The bottom line is that adoption professionals need to work diligently with pregnant women toward the goal of locating fathers, informing them of their rights, and giving them an opportunity to participate in the process.

Doubtless, many adoption agencies do just that.  Just as doubtless, many do not.  Again, the financial incentives are all in favor of removing the father from the process and, as with most other human beings, adoption professionals often aren’t able to resist the siren call of lucre.  Indeed, several years ago, a Utah lawyer, Wes Hutchins, wired up five women and sent them into adoption agencies posing as expectant mothers inquiring about adoption.  The results were unambiguous.  One adoption agency employee explained,

“Birth fathers have zero rights in Utah.”

As I wrote back in 2012,

 [W]hen the women entered the agencies (that remain unnamed in the article), employees with many years of experience blatantly coached them on what to say to make sure the father stays in the dark about what’s going on.  In one case, the employee virtually wrote the mother’s “birth father affidavit” for her, explaining that she should say “he’s not supporting me” and “he doesn’t even tell the truth.”

Hutchins sent women into five adoption agencies, but just two of them did what the DAI says they should regarding fathers.  The other three were plainly in it for the money and would cut any corner to get it.

In some states, mothers’ complete control over fathers’ parental rights in the adoption arena is a matter of explicit state law.

States differ in the extent to which they seek to protect the rights of putative fathers in the adoption process. A fundamental foundation for doing so is identifying the man, locating him, notifying him that an adoption is pending, and explaining his rights. But some states do not even require that a putative father be identified. For example, Idaho’s adoption statute (Title 16, Chapter 15) reads:

The legislature finds that an unmarried mother has a right of privacy with regard to her pregnancy and adoption plan, and therefore has no legal obligation to disclose the identity of an unmarried biological father prior to or during an adoption proceeding, and has no obligation to volunteer information to the court with respect to the father. I.C.,§ 16-1501 A(4)

The assertion, found nowhere in Supreme Court jurisprudence, that a mother’s right of privacy extends to her “adoption plan” that can then, without more, deprive the father of her child of his parental rights, is beyond astonishing.  More blatant anti-father/pro-mother bias is hard to imagine.

Meanwhile,

In New York, the mother can know the father’s identity and state it publicly to adoption professionals and others, but if she does not legally name him in a document or he does not file with the registry, he is not entitled to notice of adoption proceedings. This effectively allows adoption practitioners who want to cut corners to be much less aggressive in their attempts to identify and reach out to birthfathers because it is not required by law.

To be entirely honest, it allows them to ignore the father altogether and to once again artificially and unnecessarily expand the number of children needing adoption, thereby denying other children who do need adoption the parents they so desperately need.  And all of that is accomplished in the name of getting adoption agencies paid.

Adoption – it’s quite a racket.

December 12, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

In my response to the Washington Post’s article on the parental rights of incarcerated parents, I had occasion to skewer claims by two “experts” that taking children from their parents is OK because they can simply be adopted and therefore have a “forever home.”  As I pointed out, the arithmetic regarding adoption definitively refutes that notion.

That encouraged me to consult the best source of information regarding adoption in the U.S., the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute (DAI).  Alas, its website says that DAI has been shuttered since the beginning of this year, but fortunately, its work product is still there.  That means I have the best data available on adoption.

Here are the numbers:

In the U.S., each year there are about 135,000 adoptions completed.  Of those about 13,500 are domestic infant adoptions.  Stepparent adoptions number about 45,000, so non-stepparent adoptions amount to about 90,000.  There are about 53,100 adoptions out of child welfare agencies, i.e. foster care and about 23,400 international adoptions.

As I’ve said before, the paucity of adoptive parents means that there are always far more children needing adoption in this country than are adopted.  Compared to the approximately 425,000 children in foster care who need to be adopted, those 53,100 adoptions don’t look like a lot.  One out of eight kids  finding a home is a far cry from what’s needed.

So to reiterate, we have too many kids who already need adoption and far too few parents to adopt them.  Forcing adoption on kids who don’t need it only adds to the drain on adoptive parents.  From a humanitarian standpoint and from a policy standpoint, doing so makes no sense.

That of course brings me to putative father registries whose primary function is to facilitate adoptions by removing single fathers from the process thereby unnecessarily increasing the number of kids needing adoption.  Ironically, PFRs are invariably described as, in some mysterious way, enhancing fathers’ rights to be involved in the adoption process.  They do no such thing as the DAI report “Safeguarding the Rights and Well-Being of Birth Parents in the Adoption Process” makes abundantly clear.

PFRs require every unmarried man who has sexual intercourse with a woman to file a form with the state claiming paternity of any possible child that may result from the encounter.  Failure to do so means the man waives his right to be notified if Mom places the child for adoption.  PFR enabling legislation invariably justifies such a bizarre requirement by claiming that, well, men are presumed to know that sex makes babies so…

Men of course do know that, but what they don’t know and have no way of knowing is whether (a) conception occurred, (b) abortion or other termination didn’t occur, (c) the child is alive and (d) Mom placed it for adoption.  About all those things, Dad must rely on Mom to inform him.  If she chooses not to, he has no way of finding out if he has a child or not.  As is so often the case, he supposedly has parental rights, just no way to exercise them without her consent.  Or, as the DAI report says it,

In reality, the extent to which a man can be involved in the adoption process or a parenting decision depends largely on his relationship with the mother at that time. If she has an ongoing, positive relationship with the father, she normally would welcome his involvement; if she does not, however, she may resist his involvement out of fear, desire to control the situation, or for other reasons.

Now, he could always file that multitude of forms with the putative father registry, but there’s a catch that I’ve discussed before and the DAI report addresses directly.

There are many problems with the operation of these registries, including that most people do not know of their existence or their specific requirements. Furthermore, some critics maintain it is not in keeping with normative human behavior to expect anyone – man or woman – to register somewhere after every sexual encounter, in case a pregnancy may occur. Their effectiveness has also been called into question because their existence is rarely advertised and they are state-based, so locating a father can be complicated if the mother and father do not reside in the same state or the baby is placed for adoption in a different state.

In my writing about adoption and PFRs, I’ve had many occasions over the years to discuss those points.  For example, back in 2000, when I asked 100 men in Houston (office workers downtown and young men at the University of Houston) if they’d ever heard of the Texas Paternity Registry, not one of them had.  When I asked the state Department of Health what its budget for publicizing the registry was, the answer, like the number of men who’d heard of it, was zero.  Unsurprisingly, just 0.4% of births to unmarried women that year had a father who’d filed forms with the state’s registry.

The point is made far more amusingly here by Erik Smith whose description of his attempts to come to grips with the Ohio PFR in 2003 provide a fine sense of what faces single fathers.  The title of the piece “The Ohio Putative Father Registry – the WHAT?” gives a taste of the whole.

I’ll have more to say on this tomorrow.

December 10, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I return now to the Washington Post article I wrote about last Friday (Washington Post, 12/3/18).

The article’s a pretty long one and it covers an important issue – that of the parental rights of prison inmates.  Put simply, it reports on a Marshall Project finding that many parents lose their children solely because they’ve gone to prison.  That is, there’s been no finding of abuse or neglect, but only that the parent is in prison, regardless of the length of the sentence. 

To the extent that actually bears out, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.  The WaPo piece used some suspicious weasel words that make me want to look closer at the actual findings of the Marshall Project.  Still, parental rights are too important to allow a conviction for a minor offense and a short period behind bars to take away.

But that’s the good news about the article.  The bad news is sadly predictable, this being the Washington Post.  The bad news is that, like the system it criticizes, the Post piece all but ignores fathers.  Worse, in doing so, it thwarts its own mission – the reduction of incarceration as a factor in mothers losing their parental rights.

That’s the more remarkable because in just its third paragraph the article refers to a teenaged girl being taken from her prison-bound mother and given to her father.  Ironically, that simple act would solve most of the problems the article raises.

Recall that, back in 2006, the Urban Institute found that, in over half the instances in which a child was taken from its mother by state child welfare authorities due to abuse or neglect, the father wasn’t contacted as a possible placement.  That preference for foster care over father care on the part of CPS is problematic in several ways, including its frank illegality.

First, fathers supposedly have rights and should be considered the very first alternative when Mom loses a child even temporarily.  It is simply not the prerogative of the child welfare system to decide whether or not fathers are allowed to exercise their parental rights.  Fathers should be contacted every time a mother loses a child.  If one can’t provide an appropriate home then the agency can look further afield.

Second, if Dad is a proper placement, the state’s taxpayers save money.  States don’t have to pay fathers a cent for caring for their own children, but pay foster parents around $700 per month per child.

Third, fathers tend to have blood relatives who have an interest in the child and likely provide a much more familiar environment in which the child can live and thrive than would a foster family.  The trauma of being taken from Mom would be lessened and, generally speaking, kinship care is better for kids than is foster care.

Finally, the Court of Appeals for the federal Ninth Circuit has ruled that fathers have a constitutional right to be informed when their children are taken from their mothers due to abuse or neglect.  Indeed, failure to do so by CPS is actionable under federal civil rights statutes.

What the Post failed to notice is that, when Mom goes to prison, the only reason to address the issue of her parental rights is foster care and adoption.  No child whose parents retain their parental rights can be adopted, so the whole point of terminating Mom’s rights is aimed at one thing – adoption. 

But what if Dad were contacted and provided a suitable home?  There’d be no need for foster care and Mom could do her time secure in the knowledge that she didn’t have to fight a termination suit long-distance.  Once she got out, Dad would still have custody, but Mom could make the necessary efforts to rehabilitate herself as a parent in the eyes of the juvenile court and regain at least some contact with little Andy or Jenny.  Indeed, she might be able to regain substantial parenting time.

What’s not to like about that approach to the children of parents in prison?  It saves the state money, maintains contact between the child and its biological parents and frees up one set of adoptive parents to adopt a child who needs adopting rather than one who doesn’t.  As I’ve said many times before, qualified adoptive parents are a scarce resource, nowhere nearly as numerous as the children who need to be adopted.  Every time we force adoption on a child who doesn’t need it (because he/she has a capable parent), we deny adoption to a child who does need it.

Sensible and straightforward as is the idea of simply contacting the fathers of children whose mothers are headed to prison, it escaped the Post altogether.  It seems that, when it comes to certain major news media, the idea of fathers as a benefit to children – or indeed to anyone – is an anathema.

December 8, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act will be considered by Congress in 2019. The reauthorization bill, H.B. 6545, is dangerously flawed and must be substantially amended. It contains a definition of domestic violence that is almost certainly unconstitutional, makes behavior actionable that non-violent couples routinely engage in and that can be part of healthy adult relationships. It likely would worsen domestic violence by overburdening police and courts with non-serious claims while increasing state intervention into family life.

Here is the definition proposed by H.B. 6545:

The term ‘domestic violence’ means a pattern of behavior involving the use or attempted use of physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, economic, or technological abuse or any other coercive behavior committed, enabled, or solicited to gain or maintain power and control over a victim…

People who commit domestic violence can experience a range of punitive measures. They can be forced to vacate their residence, be separated from their children, charged with a crime, convicted thereof and incarcerated. They can be placed under a court order restricting where they can go and with whom they can associate. They can lose jobs and the right to possess a firearm.

In short, how we define domestic violence can have grave consequences for everyday people.

H.B. defines various forms of protected speech as domestic violence and so runs afoul of the First Amendment. The terms “verbal” and “emotional” refer either explicitly or necessarily to speech, while the definitions of “economic abuse” and “technological abuse” include speech. Given the long history of Supreme Court pronouncements on what constitutes protected speech, there is no doubt that H.B. 6545 violates the free speech provisions of the First Amendment.

For example, the 1971 case of Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe and the 1982 case of NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. demonstrate that even speech that is coercive is protected from prior governmental restraint as long as it doesn’t exhort others to violence. And of course offensive speech is likewise protected. Put simply, spouses can verbally berate each other without fear of governmental reprisal.

Further, H.B. 6545’s definition is constitutionally void for vagueness and overbreadth. Words like “verbal abuse,” “emotional abuse,” “technological abuse,” “coercive,” “enabled” and “power and control” are all subject to a wide range of imprecise interpretations. The Supreme Court has explained the void for vagueness doctrine thus:

The Government violates the Due Process Clause when it takes away someone’s life, liberty, or property under a criminal law so vague that it fails to give ordinary people fair notice of the conduct it punishes, or is so standardless that it invites arbitrary enforcement.

H.B. 6545 would do exactly that.

But H.B. 6545’s deficiencies don’t end there. Even if the bill were constitutional, it still seeks to criminalize everyday constructive interaction between partners and spouses. Does a man, mindful of his family’s limited financial resources, repeatedly plead with his wife to reduce her spending on non-essential items? If he does, he violates H.B. 6545 and can be arrested and barred from his home and family.

Does a woman, suspecting her husband may be unfaithful, open his emails in search of incriminating evidence? If so, she violates H.B. 6545 and can be arrested and barred from her home and family.

Does a mother, in an effort to improve her daughter’s grades, restrict her access to social media? She’s committed domestic violence against the girl, according to H.B. 6545.

Meanwhile, the wife who shoots her husband with a 12-gauge shotgun does not commit DV. Why? Because she’s never been violent toward him before and H.B. 6545 demands a “pattern” of behavior. Indeed, it’s one of the bill’s major shortcomings that, in any court case in which DV is alleged, it would be insufficient for the state to prove a single incident of DV.

Finally, H.B. 6545 stands to make the domestic violence situation worse, not better. By vastly expanding the definition of DV, it threatens to overburden already-strapped police departments, district attorney’s offices and courts. Perhaps worse, it invites ever greater intervention by the state into the family. That can be justified when a family member is truly at risk of harm, but H.B. 6545 opens families up to intervention by the police on the slimmest of pretexts.

The National Parents Organization opposes domestic violence and calls for a sensible, constructive approach to reducing its incidence. Who commits domestic violence, why they do and how to treat perpetrators so they don’t reoffend is by now fairly well understood by the mental health community. We must put aside the ideology that H.B. 6545 embodies and promote the therapeutic treatment of DV offenders while providing safety and security to victims.

H.B. 6545, in its current form, will do none of that. It must be amended to provide fact and science-based approaches to domestic violence that will constitutionally work to reduce the incidence of DV.

December 7, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

As Washington Post articles go, this isn’t bad (Washington Post, 12/3/18).  It raises a real issue – the parental rights of incarcerated parents – and provides readers valuable information.  But of course, this being the Post, it also ignores vast swaths of the issue in order to maintain intact its preconceived notions about parents and those of much of its readership.

Its gist is that state child welfare officials too readily take children into foster care and move to terminate their parents’ rights based solely on the fact that the latter have committed a crime and been imprisoned.

According to the Marshall Project analysis, at least 32,000 incarcerated parents since 2006 had their children permanently taken from them without being accused of physical or sexual abuse, though other factors, often related to their poverty, may have been involved. Of those, nearly 5,000 appear to have lost their parental rights because of their imprisonment alone.

Now, what the article doesn’t go into is that, in the 11 years from 2006 to 2017, that’s about 2,900 kids per year placed into foster care, i.e. a tiny percentage of the whole.  (About 680,000 complaints of child abuse or neglect are deemed founded by CPS agencies each year.)  It also doesn’t mention that, while those parents may not have been “accused of physical or sexual abuse,” neglect is another reason for taking kids into care.  Indeed, about 70% of kids taken by child welfare agencies have been neglected, not abused.  So, just because there was no abuse involved, the quoted figures don’t mean the children were taken for no reason.

Further, the article makes no effort to distinguish between parents serving one-year sentences and those serving 30-year sentences.  That’s a pretty big omission.  After all, a child can spend a year with grandma and grandpa, go to see Mommy in prison occasionally and be reunited with her when she gets out without too much harm being done.  But a child with no alternative parent or blood relative and whose primary caregiver is facing a long stretch in prison realistically needs foster care and adoption.  Permanence and stability are generally good for kids and no child should be held hostage when Mommy or Daddy are truly not coming back for most or all of their childhood.

Still, according to the article and to the Marshall Project, it’s not unusual for a parent facing a relatively short stint behind bars to lose his/her parental rights.  If true, that’s an issue in need of resolution.  As with so much about families, courts and family laws fail to adequately protect the biological family.  We far, far too readily separate children from their parents despite our knowledge that the biological parents are, on average, the best caregivers for children and their home the best place for kids to grow up.

In about 1 in 8 of these cases, incarcerated parents lose their parental rights, regardless of the seriousness of their offenses, according to the analysis of records maintained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services between 2006 and 2016. That rate has held steady over time.

Those quoted by the article who support the current practice need a lesson in the facts about adoption.

To some adoption proponents, immediately finding children a nurturing home should always be the priority. Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that while some parents turn their lives around when they leave prison, their children should not have to wait for a family.

“You never know if they’ll just go right back to a life of crime,” she said, “and kids deserve better than that.”

That’s fine in theory, but not in fact.  The fact is that we complete about 125,000 adoptions in the U.S. each year, but most of those – about 75,000 – are stepparent adoptions.  Only about 50,000 are “stranger” adoptions, i.e. those in which the child is basically unknown to the parents prior to the adoption.  With 425,000 kids in foster care whose parents are either dead or have had their rights terminated, the adoption system can’t find parents for the overwhelming majority of children who need them.  Any unnecessary addition to the number of kids needing homes only makes a bad situation worse.  So every public policy on adoption must take into consideration the paucity of adoptive parents.

To its credit, the article takes to task the Adoption and Safe Families Act that, as I’ve written before, is largely responsible for the tendency on the part of state child welfare agencies to err on the side of taking kids from their parents.

In 1997, with first lady Hillary Clinton’s vocal support, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which mandated that federally funded state child-welfare programs begin termination of parental rights in most cases in which children had been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. The measure’s supporters hoped it would pave the way to adoption for kids who had been languishing in temporary, often unstable homes while their biological parents tried to kick a drug habit or find housing.

The legislation also created bonuses for states that facilitate adoptions. Since 1998, the federal government has doled out more than $639 million in these rewards.

But the law’s largely unintended consequence was to make incarcerated parents, who now spend well more than 15 months on average behind bars because of the tough prison sentences of the same era, more vulnerable to losing their children.

And it gets right the most basic of all concepts about family policy.

Amanda Alexander, executive director of the Detroit Justice Center and a senior research scholar at the University of Michigan Law School, sees the dichotomy between what’s best for parents and what’s best for kids as a false one. The child-welfare system, she said, certainly must find young people a stable home. But it should also help their mothers and fathers stay in their lives in a productive way, along with siblings and other relatives.

“In most cases, kids are better off by all kinds of metrics when they have a relationship with their birth families,” she said.

That’s a message that every judge, lawmaker, CPS employee, mental health expert, etc. should be required to know by heart.  Public policy designed to break up families is bad public policy. 

But that’s the one we have.

More on this next time.

The following by long-time friend of NPO and staunch advocate for family law reform Paulette MacDonald.

Dear Santa,

My name is Paulette MacDonald and I am a Family Law Reform Advocate in Canada and that came to be once I witnessed firsthand the devastation that occurs in the hands of our Family Law System. – And all I want for Christmas is a presumption of equal parenting at the onset of divorce or separation in the absence of abuse, neglect or violence. Tall order, I know but I’m confident together we can do it.

While I am extremely proud to be Canadian; I’m ashamed of our governments Family Law System, one that is profoundly broken and has been for decades – A System that was put in place to help families when they are most vulnerable going through divorce or separation and instead of helping them, it destroys them with its bias “winner-take-all” approach. According to Ontario’s former Chief Justice Warren Winkler, “family law is in a state of crisis. We see a system in disarray – one that is beyond tinkering and that needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up using new concepts and fresh ideas. In short, we see a need for fundamental change.”

That was in 2011 when Justice Winkler was advocating for; free court based, mandatory mediation for family law litigants and in 2010 we had the release of the Law Commission of Ontario in-depth report on the family law system and the report deplores a system that can bankrupt litigants and routinely ignores the wishes and interests of children.

Sadly our Governments Divorce Industry has grown to the size of the Auto Industry so Santa, you can imagine what we’re up against –

We need your help with the Canadian Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights who are currently studying Bill C-78. You see Santa, this Bill is proposing changes to the Divorce Act to reflect the Best Interest of the Child and yet it has no mention of equal parenting what so ever.

Regrettably, Bill C-78 is not intended as the much needed and overdue overhaul; instead it’s targeted as more of a legal housekeeping exercise. Still, through the action of the Standing Committee, I believe that Bill C-78 represents the best opportunity in more than 20 years to make select changes in the Divorce Act demonstrably supported by Canadians and backed by authoritative Social Science research.

Equal parenting is in the best interest of the child. Equal parenting should be the starting point for judicial consideration – if both parents are deemed fit while the marriage/relationship is intact, then both parents should be deemed fit when the marriage/relationship ends. Social science informs us that children do much better with both parents. Conversely, children raised without both parents generally underachieve, are prone to more medical and social problems, and have significantly higher rates of incarceration- all at taxpayer expense.

Continuity of parental and family relationships to the maximum workable extent is what is in the best interest of the child. Hence, fit parents should not have to spend their life savings in family court simply to maintain a pre-existing relationship with their children as is all too often the case.

Equal parenting- is fully endorsed by social science research as the preferred child arrangement post dissolution barring issues of abuse, neglect or violence. In fact, 110 eminent researchers publicly endorsed this scientific conclusion in 2014. Moreover, in a 2018 special edition of the prestigious Journal of Divorce and Remarriage, a panel of social science experts went further by stating the scientific body of research was sufficiently powerful to now justify a rebuttable presumption of equal parenting. I submit this evidence- based consensus should be reflected in Bill C-78.

Not only is equal parenting supported by science, it is overwhelmingly supported in many countries and jurisdictions according to polls, as is the case in Canada. In polls commissioned in 2007, 2009 and 2017 Canadians supported a presumption of equal parenting by a ratio of more than 6:1. Notably, this strong support was generally the same regardless of gender, age, geographical region or political affiliation. This is a non-partisan issue for Canadians.

In 1998, all parties endorsed the equal parenting recommendations of the “For the Sake of the Children” Report” by the Special Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access. Likewise, the Liberal government of the day commissioned a poll in 2002 which found Canadians supported equal parenting even then. The Conservative and Green Parties currently have shared parenting as part of their policies. Now is the time for the other parties to reaffirm their commitment to equal parenting as a non-partisan issue.

I’d like to share with you public perception of equal parenting after its adoption in other jurisdictions. A recent example is Kentucky which became the first US state to adopt an explicit rebuttable presumption of equal parenting in April, 2018. Subsequent poll results of July, 2018 indicate favourable support of equal parenting by a ratio of 6:1- about the same as in Canada. The poll also provides valuable insight on children’s rights vs parental rights. As you know, detractors of equal parenting paint it as a parental rights issue on the erroneous assumption that parental and children’s rights are somehow mutually exclusive rather than overlapping. Here’s what the poll reported. Two questions were asked on children’s rights and two on parental rights.

For children’s rights:

a) It is in the best interests of the child to have as much time as possible with their parents following divorce –a ratio of 12:1 agree/disagree;

b) Children have a right to spend equal time or near equal time with both parents following divorce or separation, or not –a ratio of 16:1 agree/disagree;

For parental rights:

a) Both parents, whether living together or living apart, should have equal access to their children and should share responsibility for raising their children-a ratio of 12:1 agree/disagree;

b) Separating parents should have equal parenting rights vs either father or mother should have more-a ratio of 11:1 agree/disagree;

The results strongly indicate that children’s rights and parental rights are not mutually exclusive but complimentary, oftentimes flip sides of the same coin, while recognizing the primacy of the child.

In that respect, the Minister of Justice was badly advised by her staff for her testimony before the Standing Committee on Nov 5th when she framed equal parenting as a parental issue rather than a child’s rights issue. Social Science research and the public at large are telling you that they are indivisible. To treat them as disjoint is not only scientifically incorrect, it is openly disingenuous. Children’s best interests are served by having both parents actively involved while parental rights are satisfied by allowing fit parents to raise their children. Canada has no better public example of the benefits of equal parenting than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who was raised by Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Sinclair-Trudeau.

I conclude Santa by urging you to tell the Standing Committee to do what’s right, rather then what’s easy – tell them to be a voice for Canadian children and amend Bill C-78 to incorporate presumptive equal parenting reflecting social science consensus and the long standing wish of Canadians of all persuasions.

And please Santa, tell divorcing parents to take their revenge, anger or control issues out on their therapist and not their ex-partner and tell them to love their children, more than they hate their ex.

Thank you Santa and Merry Christmas!

Paulette MacDonald

Leading Women For Shared Parenting

Minden Hills, Ontario

December 5, 2018 by Don Hubin, PhD, Member, National Board of Directors and Chair, National Parents Organization of Ohio

I like Saturday Night Live, even though I’m at an age when it would be more appropriate to call it “Saturday Night DVRed”. Sure, lots of sketches don’t work; some are complete flops; and some make you wonder how the writers ever thought they would be funny in the first place.

But, as they say, “if you’re serving all aces, you’re not serving hard enough”. Good comedy experiments and pushes boundaries; failure is part of the creative process. And, when the writers and comedians of SNL get it right, they can really nail it.

Last week’s show, though, included a truly appalling and offensive sketch demeaning divorced dads. (You can see the “Dad Christmas” sketch, here, beginning at moment 24:55.)

Belittling fathers is, apparently, a go-to solution for advertisers, sit-com writers, and stand-up comedians whose creativity is flagging. But I don’t remember SNL ever sinking to this depth to disparage divorced dads in an attempt to provoke a laugh.

The false and offensive stereotypes flow freely in the SNL sketch: while Mom is a caring, concerned, competent parent, Dad is self-centered, foolish, and completely dysfunctional. His children obviously hate going to Dad’s for Christmas. And why wouldn’t they? The refrigerator has only a bag of restaurant left-overs, ketchup, a carton of eggs and, of course, lots of beer. Dad’s involved with a floozy—apparently one he left his wonderful wife for. Dad is explicitly described as trying to buy the kids’ affection with gifts. Though the kids hate the thought of spending Christmas with Dad, there’s an “uplifting” ending: the kids are told that, when they’re older, Dad will let them do drugs at his house!

I’m sensitive to how fathers are portrayed in popular media but perhaps I was especially offended by this sketch for a personal reason. My entire family, children, step-children, children’s spouses, and grandchildren were just at our house for a holiday my wife and I call ‘Chrisgiving”. We celebrate Chrisgiving as a family during an extended weekend between Thanksgiving and Christmas because we never want to create conflict for our kids about whose house—“other parent’s”, in-law’s, or their own homes—they’ll spend Thanksgiving or Christmas at.

It was a full house. We ate together, played together, and exchanged gifts. The refrigerator was stocked with great food which, in fact, Dad cooked (though one wouldn’t believe that possible from media representations of fathers). And it was shortly after the last of our kids left town that my wife and I settled down to watch SNL. What a contrast between fathers’ lived reality and the way we’re portrayed in the media!

One might say that SNL is an equal-opportunity offender—everyone gets demeaned at some point. I’ll believe that when SNL does a sketch where Mom is a selfish, incompetent, lout and Dad is the competent, compassionate, caring parent. Don’t hold your breath.

Shame on SNL for contributing to a demeaning and destructive false stereotype of fathers.

If you agree with Don’s views, please let NBC know by going to https://www.nbc.com/contact-us. Select the options: I have feedback on NBC programing / Saturday Night Live / I have a Complaint or Concern. And let them know what you think.  

December 3, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

What looks like an excellent non-profit organization in Vermont has issued a report on the state’s child welfare system.  Predictably, the picture it paints isn’t pretty.  This is the first I’ve heard of the Vermont Parent Representation Center, but if its report is any indication, it’s a professionally-run group that produces quality work.

I’ll have more to say about the report later, but for now this article hits the high points (Vermont Digger, 11/26/18).  Writer Lola Duffort is to be commended on a thorough, fair and balanced piece.

In “Bending the Curve to Improve Our Child Protection System,” a report out from the Vermont Parent Representation Center, the nonprofit uses an analysis of more than 70 cases it has worked on over the course of eight years and state data to make the case that the state reflexively removes children instead of supporting parents in need…

“We’ve gotten to this point where we really can’t separate out, in our administrative approach, the children who are being abused or neglected or at serious risk of that happening, from the families that just need assistance,” VPRC executive director Larry Crist said. “There’s really no distinction any more.”

It’s the same story we hear in state after state.  Child welfare agencies are encouraged by a flow of federal dollars to take children from parents.  Those agencies are underfunded, understaffed and overworked.  Occasional cases make the headlines in which children die who should have been in foster care but weren’t due to the agency’s inability to meet the needs of all children at risk.  In turn, those scandal-creating headlines drive policy.  And that policy is to err on the side of taking children from parents so no more children die who shouldn’t.

None of that is the way it should be, but all of it is the way it is.

So now Vermont has an organization that’s working intelligently and responsibly toward reform.

The 117-page report contains more than 80 recommendations, including that the state create a dedicated ombuds office to monitor the outcomes and costs of the child protective system, as well as a parent representation office to offer counseling and legal representation to parents who could lose custody of their children. Currently, attorneys for both parents and children are provided through the Defender General’s office, an arrangement that the report says leads to poor representation for parents.

Those are all fine recommendations, but naturally they all take money.  And, as in so many other states, in Vermont money for children’s welfare is in short supply.  As we’ve seen in Texas and Arizona, if states really want to protect children as they all claim, they’re going to have to budget substantially more money to do so than is currently the case.

Meanwhile, Vermont’s Department of Children and Families is doing what other similar agencies have found expedient. 

The nonprofit also argues that assessments – a voluntary process created to get families access to services – have turned into “investigations by another name, and simply a mechanism by which families are monitored and children removed absent a court order.” It suggests reviewing whether the state should continue assessments at all or substantially reform use of the tool.

Yes, we’ve seen that too.  States have discovered that one easy way to avoid the inconvenience of due process of law, hearings, judges, evidence, lawyers and the like is to simply get parents to sign a “voluntary” plan to assess their kids, homes and selves.  Sometimes in other states that includes temporary placement with other adults.  By entering into a “voluntary” plan, the state is relieved of its obligation to produce sufficient evidence to convince a judge that taking the children into care is warranted.

What’s wrong with that?  The main thing is that sticky word “voluntary.”  The overwhelming majority of parents in the crosshairs of CPS are poor and poorly educated.  They’re also scared of the agency that has the power to take their kids from them.  Who wouldn’t be?  So when the caseworker forks over a document with a plan and tells them that it means they don’t have to go to court and promises that it’s only an “assessment,” many parents agree.

But the upshot is much the same as if it were part of the usual process for taking kids out of the home.  As Crist said, it’s a mechanism to get the kids but without the time and tedium required by due process of law.

Unsurprisingly, DCF Director Ken Schatz disagrees with the VPRC’s findings.

“I know the report takes issue with some of those, but the reality is we do have a system that does actually appoint lawyers for the parents, for the children, separately,” he said.

The problem with that is that, like the rest of the child welfare system, it’s underfunded.  The result is due process is name only.

Crist, for his part, said that lawyers who represent parents are so overloaded and unfamiliar with the child protective system that they effectively tell families to go along with that the state asks for.

“Most parents have an attorney assigned that they never meet until the day that they walk into court,” he said.

Still, Schatz has at least on good idea.

He said he’s most interested in early intervention programs that will help families get the support they need before there’s a need for DCF to get involved.

Of course, for such programs to be effective, they’d have to be administered by an agency other than DCF or, if by DCF, then its culture of “intervene first, ask questions later” would have to radically change.  If parents knew that early intervention programs were just a precursor to the usual DCF process, they’d likely decline to take part, negating the programs’ potential effectiveness.

More on the VPRC’s report in due course.