Author: Super User

December 2, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

When shared parenting bills come before state legislatures, members are usually faced with opposition from two groups – family lawyers and gender feminist groups.  As I’ve written many times, their arguments don’t make sense.  They recycle old, worn-out tropes, all of which have been debunked countless times.  The simple truth is that equal parenting is best for kids and good for both mothers and fathers as well.  Large amounts of social science demonstrate the fact and, faced with that, opponents arrive at the legislative battlefield unarmed.  Briefly, they have no argument on the merits to make.

But, since the issue before any given legislator is whether to vote for or against a shared parenting bill, there’s always another consideration – how will it affect him/her at the polls?  Now, we all know that elected officials would prefer to do the right thing in any given situation, not just about shared parenting.  But in the mental struggle between doing the right thing and getting re-elected, often enough, the latter prevails. 

And so it is with shared parenting bills.  Proponents can and do present all the arguments on the merits of shared parenting, but if a legislator fears that a ‘yea’ vote will present a problem come next election day, he/she may find it hard to do the right thing.

That raises the question of whether voting in favor of shared parenting constitutes a threat to legislators’ political well-being. 

Now we know the answer: it not only doesn’t harm his/her chances of winning, it powerfully enhances them.  Indeed, a ‘no’ vote may be the kiss of electoral death.

This past year, Kentucky legislators passed the first law anywhere containing a presumption of shared parenting.  That is to say that, sensible as that vote was in terms of children’s welfare, it was going out on a limb politically.  And of course three weeks ago, voters went to the polls.  How did shared parenting supporters and opponents in Kentucky fare?  NPO’s Matt Hale has analyzed the impact at the ballot box (Daily Independent, 11/29/18).

There was a direct correlation between winning percentage of contested races and lawmakers’ support of the bill. Of the contested House races, 100 percent of the sponsors won, 90 percent of those who voted yes won, 80 percent of those who did not vote won and zero percent of those who voted no won. In fact, every sponsor of the bill running won despite 14 seats changing parties. 

There was only one shared parenting opponent, Linda Belcher, on the ballot. She was crushed by 20 points after her vote against the joint custody law even though she easily won her last election by 37 points.

Belcher even had a large fundraising advantage as of Sept. 17 of $39,695 to her opponent, Thomas Huff’s, $15,369. Worse yet, Belcher was the only incumbent educator to lose in the year of unprecedented teacher energy. Belcher’s unforced error on the shared parenting bill appears to have cost her dearly…

Webb sponsored a shared parenting law herself in previous years. She met with shared parenting advocates repeatedly and spoke out in committee meetings in support. She even appeared on the front page of her local paper (which officially endorsed the shared parenting law) supporting joint custody a few weeks before the election.

[Democrat Robin] Webb was the only Democrat to win a contested Senate election this year. One final senate note, the only open senate seat was won by, you guessed it, a shared parenting supporter. Matt Castlen won Senate district 8 by a comfortable 16 points after voting for the law.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that.  This was an election year of considerable change at every level of the electoral hierarchy.  Incumbents were in greater danger of losing their seats than usual and of course challengers had greater opportunities for success.  But in Kentucky, there was a new dynamic at work – the vote for or against shared parenting.  Voting in favor appears to have been a boon to a legislator’s chances and voting against had the opposite effect.

That is no surprise.  After all, when surveyed, huge percentages of Kentuckians across every demographic category, expressed their support for shared parenting.  They repeated that support in no uncertain terms at the ballot box.

Apart from its many benefits for kids, shared parenting is a winner among voters as well.  Plus, its appeal is strongly non-partisan.  Republicans and Democrats alike support shared parenting.  So do blacks and whites and people across the whole range of income and education.  In an era that longs for civility and agreement, shared parenting is that rarest of issues that affords both.

So now we know.  Not only do opponents of shared parenting fail on the issue itself (we’ve known that for years), but they also have nothing with which to threaten lawmakers.  Quite the contrary, shared parenting is ballot-box gold.  You can bet that, in the next legislative season, NPO will be making that point again and again, right beside shared parenting’s benefits for kids.

Please join us tonight on our Facebook page at 6 pm EST for an important shared parenting development! We can’t say anymore right now but remember to set your alarm for 6 pm EST tonight, November 30!

November 29, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The Washington Post is at it again (Washington Post, 11/26/18).  In a bid to further erode the institution of the family, the WaPo offers an article entitled “UN Finds Deadliest Place for Women is Their Home.”  The only problem with that headline is that the UN did no such thing.  Indeed, the intellectual distance between the headline and the UN study on which it pretends to report tends to produce vertigo in the reader.  It’s a complete misrepresentation.

What the UN study actually reports on is the number of women and girls killed each year in domestic violence incidents worldwide.  That number is about 50,000.  This being the UN, the number of men killed in DV incidents goes unmentioned.

When the study gets to rates of victimization we learn that, in Africa, homicide victimization of women and girls in DV incidents is about 3.1 per 100,000 women.  In “the Americas,” it’s about 1.6 per 100,000 and in Europe, it’s 0.7.

To pretend, as the Post does, that those figures mean that the home is the most dangerous place for women and girls is nonsensical.  It’s of course utterly untrue.  As but one example, here in the U.S. about 1,600 women and 690 men were killed in a DV incident in 2016.  By comparison, about 33,000 people were killed in automobile accidents.  If, say, one-third of those were women (based on their lower use of motor vehicles), that’s 11,000 killed on our roads and highways, about seven times the rate of DV deaths.

Needless to say, similar data from other parts of the world give the lie to the WaPo headline.  And, also needless to say, the UN report nowhere makes such a claim.

That raises the question of why the paper would print something that’s not only false, but obviously so.  

From the late 70s to the early 90s, it wasn’t uncommon to read claims identical to the one in the WaPo headline.  That was when we were frequently told that the family was the seat of the oppression of women, so, to destroy that oppression, the family should be either done away with or radically marginalized.  As veteran DV activist Pamela Johnston told journalist Cathy Young for her 1998 book Ceasefire!, the DV establishment assumed that “the nuclear family, as the primary unit of patriarchy, is inherently oppressive to womyn.”  People like Anna Quindlen and Bob Herbert at the New York Times claimed much the same thing as today’s Post headline.

But then reality intervened, as it has a way of doing.  Someone once said that reality is what holds true whether you believe it or not.  Those who sought to destroy the family found that to be the case.  Large sets of data revealed that, in fact, women and children are far safer in their nuclear families than anywhere else.  Boyfriends are far more likely to injure both than are husbands/fathers.  And of course lesbian relationships are much more violent than either heterosexual or gay male ones.  (That last was once again revealed by the most recent data out of Canada that found lesbians reporting twice the incidence of DV as male-female relationships and over three times that of gay males.

So, the WaPo piece falls within a definite historical context and not a positive one.  At a time when many people are trying to rectify the wrongs of the past, i.e. solidify the family as an institution that’s best for men, women, children and society generally, a return to the bad old days of using flagrant untruths to attack that core institution of society is the worst of ideas.

But it’s not only bad for us generally, it’s bad for actual victims of DV.  Domestic violence is a genuine problem, but the idea that the way to deal with it is to undermine the family verges on the insane.  Face it, people form relationships, whether married or not.  Within those relationships, sometimes violence occurs.  We could destroy the family completely and do nothing to eradicate DV.  Indeed, we’d make it worse, not better.

What to do?  We could begin taking a sensible, constructive, non-gendered approach to the problem of DV.  The simple fact is that those who perpetrate DV can be, in most cases, treated successfully and their perpetration either end or greatly diminish.  That would require us to take DV for what it is – a personal pathology, usually rooted in having been victimized or witnessed DV frequently as a child.  That would mean we’d have to start acknowledging facts like men and women perpetrate DV equally, that women are more likely than men to initiate intimate violence, that mothers abuse children more often than do fathers, that women tend to be more controlling in relationships than are men, that because women commit DV, they need services to help them stop, etc.

In short, we’d have to admit that most of what we’ve done to combat DV is wrongheaded and hasn’t worked.  Sadly, as ever, we’re not likely to do that in the current political atmosphere.  By intentionally misrepresenting the reality of DV and by suggesting a cure (destruction of the family) that would be far worse than the disease, articles like the one in the WaPo make the matter worse.  It belongs in the ash heap of history along with all the rest.

November 28, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

A new study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science finds bias in judges’ rulings in child custody cases (Science Daily, 4/3/18).  Now, it’s worthwhile to note that this is a study, not of judicial behavior in the courtroom in actual cases, but in hypothetical ones.  Still, the methodology of the case suggests the pro-mother/anti-father bias we’ve come to know all too well.

The study was conducted by Andrea Miller, who’s an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  Miller accomplished one amazing thing; she got 500 state court judges to take part in the study.  They did so anonymously due to the fact that the results could be embarrassing for the state and the judiciary thereof.  So we don’t even know which state the study took place in.  Miller also received the participation of 500 lay people.

The judges and lay people analyzed two mock court cases, including a child custody case and a sex discrimination lawsuit where the plaintiff was presented as either a man or woman. The participants also completed surveys about their beliefs in traditional gender roles, such as stereotypes that women are more interested in raising children than in their careers and that children are better off if their fathers are the primary breadwinners for the family…

In the divorce case, the father and mother both sought primary custody of their two children. Both spouses worked full-time jobs and sometimes had conflicts with caring for their children. Judges and lay people who supported traditional gender roles allocated more custody time to the mother than to the equally-qualified father, but the judges were even more biased in favoring the mother than were laypeople. Only three percent of the judges in the sample gave the father more custody time than the mother.

“In both of these cases, support for traditional gender roles was associated with decisions that encouraged women to engage in more family caregiving at the expense of their careers and discouraged men from participating in family caregiving at all.” Miller said.

What’s most interesting about those findings is that the judges tended to be even more anti-father than were the lay people.  I’ll be fascinated to read the study itself to flesh out that finding.  But whatever the details, the reality is as we’ve known for decades: even in the face of significant change in the behaviors of men and women, judges seldom manage to abandon the notion that mothers’ place is in the home with the kids and fathers’ is at work earning a living.  And the idea that children need both parents, regardless of their marital status, gets lost entirely.

Now, the Science Daily article’s quotations of Miller are freighted with the language of social justice.  So we learn from her that,

“This state court system has become a leader in the search for evidence-based solutions to the problem of implicit bias.”

The notion of implicit bias is among the most dubious in all of current public discourse (City Journal, Autumn, 2017).  In the area of race, for example, it assumes that, although demonstrable racial bias or discrimination has much decreased in the last 40 years, it still exists in all of us, hidden deep within our unconscious selves.  As Heather MacDonald said here,

The need to plumb the unconscious to explain ongoing racial gaps arises for one reason: it is taboo in universities and mainstream society to acknowledge intergroup differences in interests, abilities, cultural values, or family structure that might produce socioeconomic disparities.

Given that taboo, the academy searched for and claimed to have found implicit bias.  The problem being that the methodology used to do so was laughably unsound.  I won’t go into the details, but read the MacDonald article linked to for a taste.  In brief, the methodology used to supposedly reveal implicit bias is both scientifically unreliable and invalid.  Even the originators of the “science” of implicit bias now abjure its findings as scientifically unsound.

Greenwald and Banaji now admit that the IAT does not predict biased behavior. The psychometric problems associated with the race IAT “render [it] problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination,” they wrote in 2015, just two years after their sweeping claims in Blind Spot. 

So, despite Miller’s reference to implicit bias, I suspect that the reality driving the judges’ decisions is far more explicit than implicit.  Put simply, judges see women doing the lion’s share of childcare, were probably cared for mostly by their mothers and know that the human race has forever had mothers as our primary caregivers.  It wouldn’t be unusual for them to conclude that mothers should be primary caregivers to children post-divorce.

The problem with that of course is that it ignores the children, specifically their best interests.  Yes, mothers have always done most of the childcare, but children still need their fathers too.  We’re a bi-parental species, so, whatever the proclivities of men and women, if we’re paying attention to children’s needs, we’ll make sure that they maintain real, meaningful relationships with both parents following divorce.  Children attach to both parents very early in life; damaging that attachment is the source of much emotional/psychological damage to the child.  Sadly, that’s what family court judges do every day.

However wrong she is about implicit bias, Miller certainly gets one thing right.

“The significant expertise that judges possess doesn’t inoculate them again decision-making biases, and we can’t expect much change until we see policy reforms that address decision-making procedures in the courtroom.”

One of those policy reforms of course would be to ensure that judges learn the science on what parenting arrangements are best for kids when the adults split up.  I strongly suspect that, once that’s done on a consistent and regular basis, we’ll start to see far greater equality in parenting time than we do now.

November 26, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Canada is not poised to make meaningful change to its divorce and custody laws.  As I mentioned here, it’s poised only to make trivial changes to the wording of existing statutes.  And Barbara Kay isn’t happy about it (Post Millennial, 11/23/18).

Kay of course has for many years been a redoubtable champion of equal parenting, so, when the Canadian Parliament once again simply punts the issue, she’s right to complain.  So is everyone else in the country.  After all, as Kay points out, it’s now been 20 years since the task force specifically appointed to make recommendations for reform did so.  And in those 20 years, essentially nothing has been done.

Everyone agrees that government reforms on divorce law were necessary, as Canada’s Divorce Act has not been re-evaluated since it was passed in 1985.

Yes, you’d think that, with something as important as child well-being hanging in the balance, the august members of Parliament might want to actually do something.  And they’re about to.  They’re about to change the words “custody and access” to “decision-making responsibility” and “parenting time.”  Just think: it only took them 20 years to accomplish that.  Such a flurry of activity positively makes the head spin.

If they’d only take about 10 minutes and read Kay’s article, they’d have everything they need to make the right decisions about family law reform.

Shared parenting should be the default for custody

The elephant will only go away with a presumption in law of Shared Parenting – also known as Equal Parenting – as the default for custody (rebuttable in cases of abuse).

Shared/Equal Parenting means children spend literally equal, or near-equal time with each parent, unless a parent is a demonstrable risk to the child…

Winner-takes-all mentality around divorce litigation.

In family court litigation, mothers are overwhelmingly favoured to win sole custody. Everyone knows of this court advantage, which motivates women to refuse compromise and motivates fathers (especially those without the deep pockets to take an odds-against chance) to pre-concede defeat (i.e. they make this decision “in the shadow of the court”), and become visitors in their children’s lives.

That last is a vital point.  Opponents of shared parenting occasionally claim that fathers don’t really want equal time with their kids post-divorce.  They point to the fact that the huge majority of child custody cases are agreed to by the parents.  “If Dad wanted equal custody, why isn’t that reflected in his agreement?” is the argument.

Kay’s point is the answer.  Family judges’ pro-mother bias is well known and the great majority of fathers don’t have the money to fight out the matter in court, particularly since they figure the outcome will be the same whether they do or don’t.  That commonsense approach by fathers is backed up by the still-important study by Maccoby and Mnookin called “Dividing the Child.”  In it they found that, even when fathers request custody, they only get it in about  9% of cases.

And of course,

Canadians support shared parenting

Every credible government survey on this issue, going back to 2000, indicates that Canadians strongly support Shared Parenting as the fairest and most child-friendly model. A 2017 Nanos poll indicated very firm support for Shared Parenting, regardless of age, gender, region and political affiliation.

That support generally runs between 70% and 80%, but Parliament casually ignores the will of the Canadian people.

And of course it ignores the science on shared parenting.

In a 2012 article published in The American Journal of Family Therapy, Kruk offers 16 evidence-supported Arguments for an Equal Parenting Responsibility Presumption in Contested Child Custody. Amongst them, Kruk shows how and why equal parenting:

preserves children’s relationships with both parents and vice-versa (about 30% of children have no contact with their non-custodial fathers);

reduces feelings of insecurity and rejection in children;

decreases parental conflict (40% of first-time incidence of family violence occurs after an adversarial separation);

respects children’s wishes (70% of children of divorce approve equal parenting, as do 93% of the 8% of children raised in ESP homes);

reduces incidence of ignorance- or bias-based judicial decisions;

reduces the risk of parental alienation that can and does flourish under sole custody conditions;

guarantees what should be children’s and parents’ Charter rights to each other’s love and companionship, as enunciated in the United Nations declaration regarding the rights of children.

Many other social scientists have studied this subject in depth, and the evidence is in: Shared Parenting by fit parents promotes the best outcomes in child well-being measured on multiple axes.

A meta-study including findings by 110 experts concludes that Shared Parenting is the best model, even for toddlers and infants, and even in instances where there is high conflict between parents (but no abuse of children by either).

But Parliament isn’t interested.  What interests the members isn’t children’s well-being, it’s, well, self-interest.

This [winner-take-all] model is supported by two groups, both of whom are stakeholders and not disinterested: most family law lawyers who benefit financially from litigation, and feminist groups who frankly advocate for the paradigm that tends to reward women, in the belief that fathers are less important to children than mothers.

I must quibble with that last statement.  Sole custody doesn’t “reward” women; far from it.  It limits their earning ability and increases their stress.  With so much of their time spent on childcare, they’re unable to save as much for retirement or advance as much in their careers.  It keeps them financially dependent on their ex.  The only “reward” they receive is the obligation of 80-100% of the childcare responsibility.  All else is negative.

Here in the U.S., the move toward sanity in family courts is very much under way.  Canada does many things that can be considered better than what we do in the U.S.  Sadly, family law and practice aren’t among them.

November 24, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization 

Two days after the fact, I thought I’d take time to mention a few of the things for which we have to be thankful.  By “we” of course I mean the movement for family court reform.  ‘Tis the season, after all, and, since we have so much for which to be thankful, it would seem to be inappropriate to let it go by without a low bow and a sweeping doff of our plumed hats.

First can only be the fact that so many people have gotten our message.  That children need both parents throughout their childhoods and even after is such an obvious truth that so many people know, if not consciously at least intuitively, has finally gained critical mass.  Does anyone even argue otherwise?  If they do, I certainly don’t see it.  Yes, there are a few organizations fighting a rearguard action against equal parenting, but they invariably need to disguise the fact.  So the DV establishment opposes shared parenting in the guise of opposing domestic violence and radical feminists do so in the guise of an imaginary “war on women.”  Family lawyers claim that the system works just fine.  More threadbare and patently untrue claims would be hard to imagine.

Second is the wave of science that grows larger and stronger with every passing year.  All but invariably, that science demonstrates the necessity for shared parenting.  According to some 62 studies, kids do better in shared parenting.  Any expert providing testimony in court who has the least integrity must acknowledge not only that fact, but its poor relation – that essentially no science supports sole or primary custody when both parents are fit to care for their children.

Third is the press.  Over the years, the press has slowly (too slowly) and often grudgingly gotten the message.  Enough organizations, enough letters to the editor, enough shocking court cases, enough op-eds and other writings and enough agitation by countless people in every imaginable forum have moved the press to the point that we rarely read the type of scurrilous and unfounded anti-shared parenting nonsense that used to be commonplace.

Fourth, and somewhat related, is advertising.  The days of the doofus dad aren’t yet gone with the wind, but the most common depiction of fathers in ads is now that of a caring and competent parent.  On those rare occasions when an advertiser reverts to the form of the 1990s, it finds itself besieged by complaints pointing out the error.  Often enough, the ad is either altered or withdrawn.

Fifth is the bankruptcy of the opposition.  They have no facts on which to base their opposition to shared parenting, so they openly resort to the most transparent excuses.  Family lawyers are the most influential opponents of shared parenting, but theirs so clearly grows out of naked self-interest that they’re becoming harder and harder to take seriously.  When we passed sweeping shared parenting and alimony legislation in Florida, it was despite the state bar’s resistance and by overwhelming margins in both the House and Senate.  The same was true more recently in Kentucky.

Sixth, speaking of Kentucky, the first bill ever to establish a presumption of shared parenting passed there and was signed into law last year.  That’s not just a victory in one state; it should provide the impetus for passage of similar bills in other states.  Why?  Because all of the doom and gloom predicted by family lawyers will prove unfounded, knocking the props out from under their only argument against equal parenting.  The National Parents Organization will, in due course, be tracking results in family courts in Kentucky and will report back on what we find.  The lawyers’ claims of an upsurge in conflict, like the DV establishment’s claims of greater violence, will prove to be without merit, or such is my prediction.  When that happens, what will those two opponents have to say to justify their unjustifiable opposition?

Finally, NPO itself has never been in better shape to help achieve the single most important of society’s goals – keeping both parents in children’s lives.  We have a new and excellent executive director, greater backing than ever before, half a dozen new state affiliates and are poised to increase our social media presence.  What’s not to like?

And what’s not to be thankful for?

All of us at National Parents Organization wish you and your family a joyous Thanksgiving holiday!

Linda Valdez is on to something (Arizona Republic, 11/19/18).  Arizona’s child protective agency, the Department of Child Safety seems to be hoping no one will notice a particular bit of information.  More specifically, it hopes We the People won’t notice that an important bit of information is missing from the reams of data DCS routinely maintains.

The state’s legislature requires that DCS go to court and get a judge’s order before it removes a child from its parents.  That of course is standard procedure throughout the country.  What’s also standard procedure is that states give their CPS authorities an out.  If the child is in imminent danger, then the state can request an emergency hearing based on “exigent circumstances.”

That of course makes sense.  No one wants to see kids dying because the judicial system couldn’t grant them a hearing in time to prevent it. 

But what makes sense also can be misused.  We’ve seen that before in Houston where Judge Michael Schneider once ordered two CPS caseworkers to write essays proving to him that they understood parents’ constitutional rights.  Judges don’t do that the first time caseworkers claim an emergency when there was none.  They don’t do it the second time or likely even the tenth.  Schneider had obviously seen enough of CPS’s version of “emergency” conditions that just happened to allow them to bypass parents’ rights to a hearing.

Now it looks like Linda Valdez suspects the same thing to be going on in Arizona that Schneider found to be true in Houston.

A law that adds a court review before DCS can remove children from their parents’ custody went into effect this summer. But DCS doesn’t keep track of how often the agency uses an emergency clause to sidestep the process.

You’d think it would be easy enough to do, but DCS doesn’t.

From July 1 to October 31, there were 1,938 children removed from their homes after a judge agreed to issue a court order, Pitzl found…

There were a total of 3,175 removals from July to October, according to data DCS does report.

That would suggest that, in about 38% of cases of children taken by DCS, the parents didn’t get a timely hearing due to “exigent circumstances.”  But that’s not quite the case.

DaRonco told Pitzl the difference includes more than just the cases where DCS used exigent circumstances to avoid going to court.

For example, it can also include cases where parents voluntarily surrender their children, where the court itself initiates the removal and where the child is also involved with the juvenile justice system.

OK, so how many of those cases were claimed to have “exigent circumstances” by DCS?  DCS doesn’t know.  It doesn’t know because it doesn’t keep track of that information.  Why not?  DCS doesn’t say. 

That leads Valdez to ask obvious questions.

Is it because DCS doesn’t know the importance of keeping the right data?

Or is it more convenient not to know?

My money’s on the second alternative.  Why? Because throughout the country, time and again, CPS agencies act in all but complete secrecy.  And organizations that operate secretly come to like doing so.  And then they come to depend on it.  Secrecy allows all sorts of bad behavior like incompetence on the part of caseworkers, like taking children into care who don’t need it, like failing to protect children at risk, like running roughshod over parents’ rights, like lying to courts about the need for emergency hearings, like having law clerks stamp orders for removal that were written by the agency and that no judge ever saw and for which no evidence was ever offered (the Maryanne Godboldo case in Detroit), like simply losing files on children in the system (Richmond, VA).

Far too often, when We the People do manage to learn something about what’s going on inside our child protective agencies, we’re appalled.  We see incompetence, disregard for the rights of parents and children and an arrogance that would shame a king.  Yes, Arizona should keep the data Valdez wants to see, but beyond that, it should open the doors of DCS so that the press and the people know in a timely manner just what public employees are up to.