Author: Super User

November 19, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This continues my response to the National Review article on adoption that I began yesterday (National Review, 11/17/18).  November is National Adoption Month, hence the NR piece.

As I said yesterday, all 14 contributors to the article enthusiastically promote adoption and for the best of reasons.  Many, many children worldwide don’t have parents or close relatives to care for them.  They desperately need good, loving homes and only adoption can provide them.  Adoptive parents are usually motivated to meet that desperate need.  Good for them.

But, however well-intentioned the writers of the NR piece are, there’s a lot they don’t know about the laws on adoption and its practice.  They see the bright side of adoption, but not the dark.  And it’s that dark side that tends strongly to thwart their own good intentions and the good that adoption can do.

Here’s a small sample of the writers’ thoughts on adoption:

[Adoption] is the finest answer to the question of what to do with a child who finds him or herself alone in this hard world, unprotected and unloved…

I don’t know of anything we do that is more important than to give kids a family and a home, a place to belong…

The American people believe deeply in the importance of family, and most view adoption as a beautiful way for a child to become part of one…

Our nation has a duty to care for our children — it comes with being an American. It comes with being a human. Not one of us has been released from our moral duty to love, emotionally and in practice, those that are beaten, abandoned, and abused, even though many of us feel that we should be “called” to foster or adopt a child.  

Who could argue?  Sadly, many children need good homes that, for one reason or another, their parents can’t provide.  That adoptive parents step in to do so for children unrelated to them and often unknown to them, is something we should never stop applauding.

But not one of the 14 writers knows that our system of adoption runs contrary to the very reason adoption exists.  Put simply, our system of adoption daily increases the number of kids needing to be adopted.  It very often forces adoption on kids who don’t need it.  In the process, it denies good adoptive parents to children who need them.  That’s true in the U.S. and worldwide.

In 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act began providing federal funding for states for every child removed from their biological families and placed in foster care and then more funding for children adopted out of foster care.  Those monetary incentives immediately made a huge impact on state child protection agencies.  One North Dakota former state senator said that, “when that federal money came down the pike” an enormous uptick in children taken by state CPS occurred.  In short, kids who previously hadn’t been considered in need of removal from their parents, all of a sudden were deemed at risk.

And of course we often see exactly the type of overreaching by caseworkers that strongly suggests a motivation other than simply a child’s welfare.  Consider, for example, the recent case of Dillon and  Melissa Bright in Houston.  The efforts by CPS caseworkers to shanghai their two children away from them, including committing perjury, were so egregious that Judge Michael Schneider ordered CPS to pay the Brights $127,000, not in damages (those are presumably still to come) but for their bad behavior in court.

Then there are putative father registries whose sole purpose is the removal of unmarried fathers from the adoption process.  PFRs require unmarried men who father children to file a special form with the state.  Failure to do so within the requisite period, usually within 30 days of the child’s birth, means Dad has no right to contest the adoption of his child.  Many of those fathers could provide good, loving homes for their children, but aren’t allowed to.  As with CPS, PFRs serve to put more children on the adoption market than would otherwise be there.

Plus, state child welfare agencies routinely make no effort to contact fathers when a child is taken from a mother due to abuse or neglect.  What if Dad could provide a good home and good care?  We’ll never know because he was never contacted.  Instead, CPS channels those children into costly foster care preparatory for adoption.  Again, public policy and practice increase the number of kids who need adoption.

Why is that a problem?  There are about 425,000 kids in the U.S. at any given time who need to be adopted because their parents are dead, in prison or have had their parental rights terminated.  Needless to say, there are millions of children in other countries in the same situation. 

But only about 125,000 adoptions are completed in the U.S. each year and only about 75,000 of those are “stranger adoptions,” i.e. not step-parent adoptions.  In short, the number of willing and capable adoptive parents comes nowhere near matching the needs of parentless children.

So when public policy needlessly increases the number of children on the adoption market, it simultaneously denies to the same number of children, either here or abroad, the parents they need.

No article on the very real need for adoption is complete without an examination of the many ways in which public policy and law make adoptions of children without parents harder.  Unfortunately, the National Review ignored the dark side of adoption, to the detriment of its readers.  Perhaps more importantly, it missed a golden opportunity to demand reform.  If adoption is so important (and it is), reform of existing law and practice is equally so.

November 18, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The National Review has this article on adoption (National Review, 11/17/18).  Actually, it’s less of an article than a compendium of short pieces by people with various connections to and thoughts on adoption, foster care, etc.  Adoptive parents and adults who were adopted as kids chime in with religious leaders, law professors and the like.  It’s often moving, partly because kids needing adoption are in such precarious positions and those who adopt often do so out of such a strong sense of love and generosity.

And yet, out of the 14 people who contributed to the article, not one knows the dark underbelly of the adoption system in this country.  Each person enthusiastically endorses adoption for all the obvious reasons.  Their statements should be read and internalized.  These are human beings who want to do good for children in need.  Many of them already have and their stories are important.

But their passionate support for adoption needs more.  It needs to be informed by the facts about our adoption system that unwittingly hamstrings the very movement the writers so strongly endorse.

As it happens, I’ve recently been talking to a couple of old friends who adopted an Asian girl 16 years ago when she was a year old and a Central American boy when he was five months old.  The two are 17 and 15 today.  Each is a stellar student and standout musician.  To say the least, they owe their well-being and possibly their lives to their loving, nurturing adoptive parents.

The girl was malnourished, infested with parasites, weighed just 15 pounds and couldn’t sit up when my friends picked her up at age one.  For the first 12 months of her life, she’d lived in an orphanage where she’d never been held, caressed, read to, sung to, cuddled.  She’d been placed in a crib with another child, fed mostly sugar water and left   alone.  To devise a worse first year of life for a child would be a chore.

The couple’s Central American son had a better start.  Essentially, he was fed reasonably well in the orphanage and was held and cuddled daily.  His sister, now 17, still exhibits extremes of emotional trauma that stem directly from her lack of loving care in the first months of her life.  The boy is better adjusted, although he has his own issues.

I recently had the opportunity to introduce my two friends to another friend of mine.  She was adopted by American parents from an orphanage in Viet Nam in the mid-70s.  Strangely, when her father was in Saigon, considering whether to adopt her and talking the matter over with his wife long-distance, their neighbors became interested in adopting as well.  As things developed, four children from the same orphanage came to live in the same neighborhood in the U.S. with three different families.  The four grew up together and now, as mature adults, remain close friends.

None of these adoptees have ever known their biological parents, whether they had siblings or anything about their origins or how or why they came to reside in orphanages.  They will never know.  But what is certain is that their lives have been immeasurably bettered by adoption.  The comparison between what might have been and what has been is astonishing and scary.  The difference between a healthy, productive and happy life and starvation in a cold, uncaring orphanage, no family and possibly premature death was, at one time, balanced on a knife edge.  Would the American adults choose this one or that one?  Would they change their minds and choose none at all?  On such things little lives can depend.

The contributors to the National Review piece all grasp those things well.  They endorse adoption and want to spread the word to others so that the millions of children in the U.S. and around the world will have a chance at the type of good lives my Vietnamese friend benefited from and my other friends have given their two kids.

I strongly agree.

But there’s a lot the writers don’t know.  I’ll write about that tomorrow.

November 16, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The U.K. finds itself in the same pickle as we do in the U.S (The Independent, 11/9/18).

That pickle is the one in which authorities charged with protecting children have far too little money with which to do the job.  There are too many cases and too few caseworkers to handle them.  And the number of cases is increasing, pointing to a potential crisis in the years to come.

A total of 53,790 children were on protection plans in the year ending March 2018, 10,600 more than the 43,190 being monitored at the same point five years ago.

That’s almost a 25% increase over just five years.  By any standard, that’s quite a spike which, if continued, could easily outstrip even heroic efforts to address the problem.

But, strangely enough, no one seems to want to hazard a guess about why there’s such a dramatic increase in cases of child abuse and neglect.  Certainly no one interviewed for the article did so and the writer never addresses the issue, which frankly is the most important one.

Why are there so many more cases?  Are British parents all of a sudden becoming less competent, more abusive?  That sounds dubious unless there’s been a spike in unmarried childbearing, divorce or some other phenomenon that tends to promote single parenthood and therefore greater abuse and neglect of children.  But there’s been no report of such a striking change in behavior among the Brits.

To my mind, the increased caseload likely stems from other factors that we’ve seen in this country as well.  Those include a greater likelihood of reporting alleged abuse or neglect to authorities.  Certainly the issue of child abuse is as much in the news there as it is here.  And that inevitably encourages people to report incidents or suspected incidents to child protective agencies more readily than they otherwise would.  Here in the U.S., 80% of reports of suspected abuse or neglect are deemed unfounded by child protective officials.  That massive over-reporting naturally takes resources away from cases of actual abuse or neglect, which in turn means that existing personnel spend their time chasing non-cases instead of tending to children in actual need.

Is something like that going on in the U.K.? 

Then there’s also the possibility that caseworkers are now calling abuse and neglect behavior that in the past would have been given a pass.  Again, that type of potential overreach is common in the U.S.  Here, CPS officials are encouraged in numerous ways to intervene in families whether it’s warranted or not.  First, their agencies receive increased funding from Washington if they do.  Second, in borderline cases, it’s always easier to intervene than not.  Intervention can always be justified as child protection, being proactive, etc., whereas refraining from doing so can look like negligence, particularly in hindsight.  Finally, there’s the invariable fact that government agencies tend to be motivated to justify the expenditures made on them.  The budgeting process requires agencies of all sorts to “grab for all the gusto” they can and no one in a child welfare agency gets paid for not intervening in families.

How much of that is true in the U.K., I don’t know, but I suspect much of the same is at work.  Indeed, the last point is the subject of the linked-to piece whose gist can be summed up as “there are vastly more cases, so we need vastly more money.”  That of course brings me back to my original question: “Why are there so many more cases.”  Naturally, it’s the one question no one asks and no one answers.

November 15, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The fight for shared parenting in Michigan will be heating up again  in the coming months and this article by NPO’s Linda Wright reprinted in a blog is the opening salvo (KiddieMom, 11/13/18).  Actually, that may have come on Tuesday, November 6, i.e. Election Day, when Jim Runestad won his bid for a state senate seat.  Runestad of course was the force responsible for SB 4691 that would establish a presumption of equal parenting following divorce or separation.

Needless to say, Wright’s piece is, shall we say, right on.

 When children have 2 fit, prepared, and able moms and dads, why not keep both? Even if the moms and dads separate, why are the children forced to choose among them?

Yes, that is the core question, isn’t it?  It’s the question no one in the anti-shared parenting forces has an answer for.  Children bond with each of their parents.  Breaking those bonds is among the most traumatic things to which a child can be subjected.  So why does divorce so often mean the loss of a parent to a child?  And why do courts routinely claim to be acting “in the best interests of children” when they remove one parent from the child’s life?

As Canadian economist Paul Millar wrote in his book The Best Interests of Children: An Evidence-Based Approach, the idea that removing one parent from a child’s life is in the child’s interest “is not only unsupported by evidence, but, worse, appears to promote harmful outcomes for children through the legal support given the destruction of one of the important parental relationships for the child.”  You’d think that would be the simplest common sense, but judges routinely don’t get it.

[SB 4691] is focused on altering the present winner-take-all landscape that requires an excellent parent, generally the dad, nearly completely out of the picture and into a role that more looks like a visitor.

It’s that “winner-take-all” aspect of child custody proceedings that’s so pernicious.  Going into a divorce and custody case, both parents know that one will emerge the “winner” and one the “loser” in the child custody sweepstakes.  Nothing could be better calculated to ratchet up stress, conflict and bitterness than that.  Nothing could more powerfully motivate parents to fight tooth and nail.  After all, there’s nothing of greater importance than a parent’s relationship with his/her children.  No one wants to lose that, so let the donnybrook begin.

And since there has to be a winner and a loser, the process of picking each often resembles that of the Scholastic philosophers arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  The distinctions judges end up making in order to deem one parent better than the other often range into the absurd.  The focus should be on whether a parent is fit and able to care for the child.  The answer in almost every case will be ‘yes.’  If it is, equal parenting time for each parent should be the default order.

And yes, the failure of state legislatures and courts to embrace equal parenting that’s been found to best promote children’s interests post-divorce is a disaster not only for the kids, but for all of us whose tax money goes to try to solve all the problems that fatherlessness creates.

If moms are better for singularly raising their kids, why do federal stats show that these children represent 63 percent of teen suicides? Why are we not outraged that 71 percent of kids who drop-out of high school are from single mother homes? Why should we not resolve the truth that 85 percent of those in prison come from fatherless houses? Why would anyone not desire to repair this crisis?

Of course Wright could have listed countless other areas adversely affected by the scourge of fatherlessness.  But she’d made her point.  Our refusal to do the obvious – reform family law to promote meaningful relationships between kids and both their parents – impacts all of us.  Children suffer the most, but all of us pay a price.  Our society is more dysfunctional, adults and children alike are less happy, less fulfilled and our pocketbooks are lighter and all because we refuse to see what’s staring us in the face.

Next year, Michigan will have the opportunity to, along with states like Kentucky, Missouri, Arizona and Utah, lead us in the right direction.

November 14, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

It’s hard to know how to feel about this CNN piece on fathers and the family court system (CNN, 11/7/18).  On one hand, the writer seems to be sincere about advising men, so he consults family court experts – a lawyer, a judge and a mental health expert – for their tips.  On the other hand, it’s a piece that could have been written 40 years ago, entirely lacking in the long-established realities fathers face.  It’s like writer Thom Patterson is a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, newly awakened from a long, long sleep.

So he seems to want us to believe that fathers haven’t been complaining about their treatment in family courts for those four decades.

Mothers often complain about getting the short end of the stick in divorce cases involving child custody, but so do many fathers.

This is news?  And how is it that, in Patterson’s iteration, it’s mothers who are the main complainers.  They’re not.  They’re not because they’re treated on average far better by the courts than are fathers.  They get about 82% of the child custody and the child support that goes with it, plus 97% of the alimony.  According to a Massachusetts study, 98% of parents jailed for child support are fathers despite mothers being somewhat less likely to pay what they owe.  Some half dozen studies indicate a pronounced pro-mother bias on the part of family court judges.

So Patterson’s “Oh, by the way, Dads complain too” is misleading at best.

Then there’s his assumption that, when divorcing parents can’t sort out their difficulties, courts are there “to help.”

Sometimes disagreements escalate into messy legal battles that require judges, attorneys and therapists to step in and help.

Or they can make matters profoundly worse, making off with vast sums of money, exacerbating conflict and wrongly deciding often simple, straightforward cases.  But for Patterson, all is anodyne in family courts.

Child support?  Patterson’s similarly uninterested.

One is a divorced father who has spent time in jail because he said he couldn’t pay his court-ordered child support.

“I’m currently at $680,000 worth of arrears, at 9% interest,” said Dr. Carlos Rivera. “I will never be able to get out of this hole.” Rivera, a pediatrician, says he went bankrupt, was let go from his medical practice and now makes about $100 per month.

Does it occur to Patterson that the Department of Commerce not long ago said that it takes about $280,000 to raise a child to age 18?  If so, how is it that Dr. Rivera can possibly owe almost 2 ½ times that?  Could it be that child support isn’t entirely for the child?  Could it be alimony masquerading as child support?  And what about that whopping 9% annual interest?  Where does Patterson think he or anyone else can get that type of interest on an investment?  So why is a state charging child support obligors such an extravagant rate?  None of those questions occurs to Patterson, so his readers likely won’t think about the realities of family courts.

Patterson does a bit better in touching on restraining orders and the fact that so many fathers only see their kids four days a month.  But then he wonders if maybe, just maybe, courts don’t treat fathers equally with mothers.

Is it harder for men to get a fair shake in custody cases involving children? Do laws and courts favor women because of a traditional presumption that women are better care-givers for children? 

Indeed they do, as multiple studies have demonstrated.

The rest of the piece is just a series of softball issues addressed by the aforementioned experts.  In a nutshell, their advice to fathers is “Don’t complain, just tough it out.”  Regardless of how unequal, unfair and bad for kids the situation may be, keep a stiff upper lip.  That may be sound advice for not riling an already irascible judge, which is all well and good.

But if Patterson had really wanted to give some good advice to dads, he’d have told them a few additional things.  He’d have told them to contact their state legislators and demand reform of courts that, far too often, create parenting plans that are bad for all concerned.  He’d have told them about the science those fathers can present to courts to prove that equal parenting is best for kids.  He’d have told them about the many organizations that promote equality in family courts and family laws.  And on and on.

But no, his is an article that firmly endorses the status quo – sole/primary maternal custody, large transfers of wealth from fathers to mothers, kids who rarely see their fathers and of course the damage to children that goes with all of it.

You’d think we’d be further down the road toward sensible family policies.  News organizations like CNN are one of the reasons we aren’t.

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

Usually, advice columnist Carolyn Hax is the very soul of good sense.  She rarely misinforms, misleads or misadvises a letter writer.  This, however, is an exception (Seattle Times, 11/7/18).  Hax’s inquirer signs herself “Wannabe Mom, Not Wannabe Wife,” a label that, strangely enough, is only tangentially related to her, her situation and her question.

WMNWW’s question – whether she should, without a partner, adopt a child – could be right out of the 1990s.  That was a time when the “Single Mothers by Choice” movement was in flower.  The women of that movement were intentionally giving birth to or adopting children without the involvement of a man.  It was all portrayed as terribly “courageous” on their part and few people raised their voices to challenge them.  One of course was Vice President Dan Quayle who famously questioned whether TV character Murphy Brown (Candace Bergen) should have been depicted as having a child without a father.  Quayle pointed out that doing so shouldn’t be considered “just another lifestyle choice.”

At the time, he was roundly ridiculed for doing so, but five years later, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead published a lengthy article in The Atlantic whose to-the-point title was “Dan Quayle Was Right.”  He was.  Whitehead made the case in 1993 and she did so without the welter of science that we have today on the subject of single parents and children’s well-being.

So, you might think that questions like WMNWW’s would have died out during the Clinton Administration.  But what exactly is she asking?

She tells Hax that she’s not going to get married and prefers being single.  But she wants to adopt a child.

My family, though supportive of my single life, is very unsupportive of my becoming a single mom. Some of their reasons are reasonable — it’s difficult to raise children alone, it might have negative consequences for my career, harder to get an adoption solo — others less so (what if the baby I adopt is a serial killer?). ..  It would be way better for the child to have a dad, not need so much time in child care, etc.

Sensibly cautious as her family is, they consider the child’s well-being.  But WMNWW has no thought for that.

I feel like they’re saying I’m being selfish for bringing a kid into this life on purpose.

Am I trying to have my cake and eat it, too?

So WMNWW’s question is all about her.  Is she being selfish?  She nowhere considers her family’s main point – that a child might not do well in her care.  Plus of course, whether she marries or not is only tangentially related to whether she has a child.  Yes, data strongly suggest that married relationships are best for raising children, mostly because they’re more stable and last longer than the unmarried kind.  But, as we all know, no one has to be married to have a kid.

Meanwhile, Hax goes off the rails, making something hard out of something easy.  Her “answer” to WMNWW is barely an answer at all.  Its first part is just a series of assertions designed to make it appear that anything the writer wants to do is like any other.

Well sure, it would be better for your would-be child to have a second parent.

And better for you to raise a child with the help of a co-parent.

It would also be better for kids with one terrible parent to be raised solo by the other.

And kids with two terrible parents to be raised by loving other relative(s), friend(s) or foster(s).

Hax goes on and on in the same vein, little of which has anything to do with either the situation or the question.  Eventually she more or less gets to the point.

And so what I wonder is how your family can be so confident their idea of the right way to raise a child will actually turn out right for the child you would have adopted but didn’t because they managed to talk you out of it?

But the idea that her family is saying that if WMNWW raises her child with a father it “will actually turn out right” is nothing but a straw man.  I very much doubt her family is claiming that sort of certainty.  After all, grownups realize that life is full of uncertainties and that anyone who thinks they can be sure about the future is about to take a fall.

But Hax’s response is entirely based on the notion that the writer’s family is claiming that, if she raises the child with its father, all will be well.  As straw men go of course that’s an easy one to knock down.  Predictably, Hax does so, all the while leaving no doubt that she supports WMNWW’s inclination to do parenthood alone.

What if the writer’s family members aren’t claiming certainty?  What if all they’re doing is stating the odds?  What if they’re saying that the overwhelming weight of social science has for decades shown that children of single parents tend strongly to do worse than those with two parents?  What if they’re saying that, while we can’t predict the future, we can take cognizance of the odds and act accordingly and we should.  Yes, a child raised by a single mother may do fine.  It’s also true that, if I step into the street without checking the traffic, I may not get hit by a city bus.  But I do check the traffic.  And so does everyone else.

It’s long past time when someone like Hax should have learned that advising anyone to have a child without a partner is irresponsible and, above all, dangerous for the child.  The answer to WMNWW’s question is “yes, you are being selfish.  Above everything else, the decision to become a parent is the decision to, for the first time in your life, put yourself second.  Tossing aside decades of science on child well-being in order to do what pleases you isn’t doing that most basic of parental things.  That alone means that you need to seriously rethink your inclination to have a child at all.”

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

November 11, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Houston Juvenile Court Judge Michael Schneider has once again unsheathed his judicial sword (Houston Chronicle, 11/9/18).  And once again, Child Protective Services must yield. 

I’ve written before about Schneider.  He shows every indication of being a judge who’s bent on educating CPS caseworkers and their supervisors about how to do their jobs within the confines of statutory and constitutional law.  Several years ago, when caseworkers demanded an emergency hearing because, according to them, a child was in such danger that regular notice couldn’t be given to its parents, Schneider acquiesced.  But, on learning that no such emergency had occurred, he took the unusual step of ordering the pair to write essays demonstrating that they understood parents’ constitutional rights.

This past Thursday, Schneider went himself one better.  In a completely different case, he ordered the agency to pay two parents $127,000 for the wrongful taking of their children, withholding evidence and lying under oath.  He also ordered the Harris County (Houston) CPS to create, within two weeks, new caseworker training to avert such outrages in the future.

Judge Schneider’s actions look entirely appropriate from here.

It was a hot, Texas summer day and Melissa Bright let her kids — 2-year-old Charlotte and 5-month-old Mason — play in the sprinkler outside their Tomball home.

When she put the baby down on a lawn chair so she could help Charlotte strip off wet clothes, she heard a thud. Mason had fallen the 19 inches from the chair to the cement driveway below…

When she heard her baby fall, a panicked Melissa called her husband, then dialed 911. At the hospital, the child abuse prevention team at first told CPS that Melissa’s explanation of the injury was a likely one, according to court records.

But the next day, an MRI revealed that Mason had a second fracture — a smaller, hairline crack — and bleeding in his brain.

CPS concluded that Melissa and her husband Dillon were child abusers and forced the kids to live with their grandmother.  Eventually, medical experts determined that Mason had a clotting disorder that lead to the bleeding in his brain, but CPS ignored the finding.

Not content with breaking up the family for dubious reasons, CPS proceeded to place Mason’s physical well-being in jeopardy.

The head injury didn’t heal as planned, so before baby Mason left the hospital, doctors drilled a hole in his skull to relieve pressure. Afterwards, according to the Brights, doctors warned that if the family wanted to avoid a second surgery it was important to keep the child from crying.

But, the Brights said, that would require nursing, and CPS wouldn’t allow Melissa to live with the child.

The baby went to Baytown, but caring for a medically fragile child eventually became too much for Dillon’s mother, and the Brights asked to move the baby closer to home with an aunt and uncle in Tomball.

Amazingly, CPS dithered and did nothing.  So, with no one responding at CPS, the Brights took matters into their own hands.  They brought Mason home with them.  Caseworkers ignored that too, for 22 days.  Surely, thought the Brights, that means all is well; CPS approves of having Mason with us.

Wrong.

Then, on Sept. 18, [caseworker Lavar] Jones texted to ask how the kids were, and Melissa sent along happy photos and a health update.

The next day, the state — without notifying the Brights — filed a petition asking for emergency custody of the children who, officials said, were in “immediate and continuing danger.” The parents were never told that the court would hold a removal hearing the same day.

Yes, in response to a positive update about the children’s health CPS not only went to court, but lied to the judge claiming the kids were in imminent danger.  That done, they refused to inform the Brights about the hearing despite doing so requiring nothing more than a phone call or text message.  That, as we’ve seen before, doesn’t impress Judge Schneider, who seems to believe that parents have basic due process rights.  No wonder he and CPS are at odds.

Having kept the Brights in the dark about the hearing, Jones lied and withheld material evidence from the court in order to get an order of removal.

Jones didn’t tell the court about the diagnosed blood disorder, which could have explained some of the medical problems. And he didn’t mention that the parents had gotten a second medical opinion that explained the second, hairline fracture.

Of course, had the Brights been in court, they could have provided the judge that information, an eventuality CPS seems to have wanted to avoid.

That night, the children were separated and both taken to foster care. The caseworker didn’t even leave behind a copy of the order of removal as required by law, family attorney Slate said.

A few weeks later, in early October, the parents, their lawyers, CPS workers and county attorneys showed up in court again for a three-day hearing to figure out whether the state had enough cause to keep the kids.

When questioned about the earlier claims he’d made during the Sept. 19 emergency hearing and about the agency’s reasons for removing the kids, Jones pleaded the Fifth, making for a case the judge found thoroughly unconvincing.

“It is not possible,” Schneider said in court last month, “to look at the facts and imagine that the agency actually felt there was any sort of urgent need for protection to remove the children.”

If lying, both in court and out, weren’t enough, if having to plead the Fifth Amendment didn’t suffice to demonstrate CPS’s incompetence, one CPS supervisor drove the point home.

Over the course of five days, the court heard testimony from the Brights, a program director and supervisor Edwards, who claimed so frequently that she didn’t know, couldn’t answer or didn’t understand the questions that Slate eventually asked whether she had any knowledge that made her qualified to make decisions.

But that still wasn’t all.

[Attorneys] Slate and Proffitt laid out a litany of accusations, including claims that workers had altered computer records to match an affidavit, intentionally failed to turn over incriminating text messages, and plowed ahead with the “bad faith” removal to avoid telling their program director they had not checked on the kids for 22 days.

Judge Schneider wasn’t pleased.

In a scathing ruling from the bench on Thursday, Schneider dinged the agency for being “dishonest” and possibly “malicious,” saying the entire removal and subsequent legal battle never would have happened if the agency had told the Brights about the emergency removal hearing and given them a chance to defend themselves at the start.

“We do need to deal with the issue of how we make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said, before ordering the agency to pay $127,000 and giving them two weeks to create the new training program for the Houston region.

Apart from the financial incentives offered by the federal government for taking children from parents and into foster care, it’s hard to figure why an agency that’s charged with protecting children would behave so outrageously.  We see similar conduct all over the country and all too frequently, so whatever the motivation, it’s not unique to Houston.  Only last year we saw an attorney for the child protection agency in California arguing to an astonished court of appeals that CPS caseworkers should be permitted to commit perjury.  Really, that actually happened.

Plus of course CPS agencies across the country conduct their business in complete secrecy.  Only in cases like the Brights or when a child is killed is the veil permitted to be lifted and then, to our shock and horror, we see what goes on in those agencies.  Too often, what we see is a litany of incompetence, dishonesty, agency overreach, agency under-reach and yes, malice. 

State legislatures need to order child protective agencies to open the windows and let the sunshine in.  When that’s done, many heads will roll, many changes will be made, much embarrassment and outrage will ensue.  But once that’s happened, those agencies will do a far better job of protecting children and accommodating parents’ rights than they do now.  They’ll do that because they’ll know that the press and We the People are looking over their shoulders.

It can’t happen too soon.

November 9, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

In my post yesterday, I dealt with yet another strange and badly researched article that seeks to cast aspersions on the Family Bridges program.  Family Bridges is a four-day workshop that attempts to reverse the process of parental alienation, usually in kids with the most severe form of alienation.  It’s been around for 20 years and logged an astonishing record of success.  That success is both anecdotal, as I’ve reported before, and scientific.  Dr. Richard Warshak has conducted two studies of its efficacy and found the program highly successful at reintegrating children with their targeted parents.  No such program could hope to be 100% successful and Family Bridges doesn’t hit that mark, but, all things considered, it seems to work well.  That’s why countless judges, custody evaluators and others have referred/recommended alienated children and their targeted parents to the program over the years.

But that success doesn’t keep incurious, mendacious and virulently anti-dad “journalists” from attacking FB anyway.  Such a piece was the NBC Bay Area one I discussed yesterday.

Now, that article quoted three young adults who, when they were minors, had been referred to Family Bridges for help.  Two had been alienated by their fathers and one by her mother.  Each was referred to by their correct first name.

One of those is named Arianna who was found to have been persistently alienated by her father.  Arianna had nothing good to say about Family Bridges and apparently continues to reject a relationship with her mother.  Accordingly, she seems to have met the criteria for quotation by the article.

But interestingly, Arianna has a sister named Madeleine who’s three years her junior.  Madeleine too was deemed to have been alienated by her father from her mother and, like Arianna, was referred to Family Bridges.  Why would the five authors of the NBC piece interview and quote Arianna but not Madeleine?  Here are some pithy quotations from the Final Order of the Superior Court of King County, Washington, i.e. the trial court in Madeleine’s case:

The court finds [mother] and the GAL’s testimony both credible and persuasive that Madeleine is a child who has been detrimentally impacted both psychologically and emotionally by parental relationship distress caused by [father]. The court finds there was substantial evidence that even after the entry of the modified parenting plan in 2015, [father] made significant and repeated efforts to influence Madeleine to unjustifiably dislike, fear, and reject contact with [mother]…

The GAL determined that there was sufficient evidence to conclude that [father] has committed repeated “psychological abuse of the child” and the court agrees. [Father]’s alienating behavior was severe and his conduct constituted repeated psychological and emotional abuse of Madeleine. The testimony from [mother], the GAL, and [mother’s boyfriend], as well as the documentary evidence offered at trial, showed that while Madeleine was enmeshed within the parental conflict and influenced by her father’s perspectives of her mother, she had ongoing emotional and physical problems, including anxiety, nausea, sleep issues, and school attendance issues…

This court has already made findings that [father] improperly withheld access to Madeleine without good cause from October 31, 2015 to April 25, 2016. The court stands by its previous findings that [father] intentionally refused to comply with the parenting plan and return Madeleine to [mother] in bad faith, despite [mother]’s repeated efforts and the recommendations of the former Case Manager … Such withholding of access was found to have had an adverse effect on Madeleine’s best interest…

Based on a finding of abusive use of conflict by [father] that create the danger of serious damage to the children’s psychological development, the court granted primary custody and sole decision-making authority in many areas to [mother]…

[The case manager] concluded that the children had adopted highly polarized positions. She worried that “black and white thinking is a limiting and not useful trait for these girls as they go forward in the world.” She found that [father] supported the polarized positions that the girls adopted about their mother.’’

Madeline had been living with her father for four and a half months at that point. When reviewing the interview with Madeline, she appeared quite angry and obstinate. Madeline spoke disparagingly of her mother…  [The case manager] concluded that the girls’ views of their mother had become more excessively harsh, critical, unreasonable and disproportionate to the situations at hand.

In May 2015, at the end of the Modification Trial, the Court made findings relative to both parents but specific to the father regarding: “the abusive use of conflict by the parent that creates the danger of serious damage to the child’s psychological development.” Since then it appears that things have evolved from a challenging situation to a very serious disruption and change in the children’s attachment to their mother. The girls appear to be chronically angry at her, which shows up in rejecting, rude, aggressive and provocative comments towards their mother along with denying much in the past that was ever good with her and not being interested in any future visits or repair in their disrupted relationship with her. They express no sadness, guilt, loss or objectivity regarding a reasonable cause or view of what happened.

The court goes on in the same vein for some 16 pages.  Anyone remotely acquainted with parental alienation can see that the situation described is a classic case of a father alienating his two daughters from their mother.  He did so persistently and to great effect.  And the emotional and psychological impact on Madeleine was made abundantly clear by the judge and various mental health experts in court, including the excellent Demosthenes Lorandos.

Given the severity of the alienation, the judge ordered the children and their mother to take part in the Family Bridges program.  Unsurprisingly, that meant the father turned his ire on Family Bridges.

The court notes that [father] has voluntarily decided to neglect his parenting duties and instead he has focused on pursuing a campaign against Family Bridges and professionals involved in this case.

Part of the program was to include “aftercare,” i.e. a program to try to get the father to realize the error of his ways and become a better, more agreeable and more constructive parent.  He refused.

[Father] chose not to participate in aftercare and he was found in contempt multiple times by this court and restricted from having contact with Madeline until he engaged with the aftercare professional.

And what of the two girls?  Arianna, as we know from the NBC article, resisted all help and is to this day (as far as we know) alienated from her mother.  But Madeleine’s was a different story altogether.

In the most recent report dated March 22, 2017, [the GAL] found that “Madeline has transformed from a sad and depressed girl who rarely ventured out into the world, had few friends, and hid behind Goth makeup, to an engaged and active participant in her own life. She loves her school, has many friends, spends lots of time with her music classes and guitar lessons, is doing roller derby, has “a person” (a boyfriend), and is looking forward to the future.”

At trial, [the GAL] testified that Madeline’s transformation has been remarkable. She appears to be a different kid now; she loves school and reportedly attends even when she is sick. She is doing well both academically and socially. She concluded that Madeline has flourished in Portland and is doing better personally, socially and academically than she has in the last 4-5 years.

[The GAL] testified she could only attribute Madeline’s amazing progress to the intervention and not being subjected to the push and pull of the parents, [father]’s alienating behavior and the constant turmoil that had been occurring. The more normalization of the family structure and situation is a stabilizing factor that has really helped Madeline.

She also testified that it has been helpful to Madeline to be outside the sphere of her sister’s influence.

In short, Family Bridges and its requirements (a 90-day separation from the alienating parent) worked wonders for Madeleine.  She changed from hateful, combative and unreasonable into a normal and apparently positive young woman.

And note that her separation from her sister Arianna helped too.  Arianna, who embraces her own alienation from her mother looks very much like her father’s agent as regards Madeleine.  So which of the two sisters did NBC choose to interview and quote and which did it ignore altogether? 

In so doing of course, NBC’s, like all other articles of its ilk, ends up promoting child abuse.  It’s hard to read the court’s findings regarding Madeleine and her father’s alienation of her and not see what the court expressly found – persistent and unapologetic emotional/psychological abuse by her father.  By criticizing Family Bridges in such frankly biased, unbalanced and unfounded ways, NBC promotes the type of child abuse Family Bridges exists to try to correct.

For NBC, it’s a curious side of the debate about parental alienation on which to be, but there it is. 

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

As hit pieces that target the Family Bridges program go, this is one of the most benign and professional (NBC Bay Area, 11/2/18).  Don’t get me wrong, its anti-FB biases are abundantly clear and it’s scandalously badly researched (if it’s researched at all), but even so it’s better than the others.  For example, it quotes Linda Gottlieb who’s that rarest of birds in articles of this type, an expert who actually knows what she’s talking about.  That alone puts it a cut above the other nonsense we read.

The NBC Bay Area piece takes a strange tack in its assault on Family Bridges.  The writers (yes, there are five of them) first located three kids who were deemed alienated by the judges in their parents’ custody cases, went through the FB workshop and are willing to say negative and in some cases untrue things about it.  Much of the piece then consists of quotations from the three who are all now young adults.  For example,

“I do not want this to happen to a single other person,” said Arianna, a 19-year-old from Seattle…

“This is the first time I’ve had a voice,” said Leo, a 24-year-old from Toronto…

“I haven’t been the same since that program,” said Samantha, a 19-year-old from Saskatoon in Canada…

“I feel like I was robbed of all of my childhood when I was 12,” Leo said…

“You can’t force somebody into a relationship,” said Arianna. “You just can’t.”   

And on and on in the same vein.  The statements are generally unconnected to any larger point the article attempts to make.  They sort of float in space, suggesting certain things without actually saying them.  Did Leo not “have a voice” in the FB program?  Of course he did, as anyone who knows about the program can affirm.  So why does he say the NBC piece is his first opportunity to express himself?  The article doesn’t say, likely because it can’t do so without revealing that kids in the program have ample opportunity to express their feelings, opinions, etc.

That body of short, declarative sentences, made by the Samantha, Arianna and Leo, make up one side of the article’s teeter-totter.  Because they’re young adults with no apparent understanding of the FB program, and because their statements are never allowed to make a larger point, the article generally fails in its mission to cast aspersions on FB.

The other side of the teeter-totter is Gottlieb and Samantha’s father who’d been alienated from her by her mother.  Reading the piece that careens from the kids’ remarks to those of a qualified and knowledgeable expert who provides actual scientific information about the program tends to give the reader a touch of mental whiplash.

So, Samantha offers this gem:

“These programs the way they are right now do not, do not work,” Samantha said.

And Gottlieb says this about Turning Point, a program that’s similar to FB:

Gottlieb has collected data from the 40 children who have gone through her program. Her data shows (sic) 32 of those 40 children remain connected to their so-called estranged parent after completing the program. Nine children have a relationship with both parents since completing the program. Gottlieb says the children who failed to remain connected with their so-called estranged parent are those cases where the 90-day no contact period was lifted and the so-called alienating parent was still “engaging in alienating strategies.”

That last of course is a common way in which children who’ve gone through the FB program relapse: they return too early to the alienating parent who resumes his/her alienating behavior.

Then there’s Scott, Samantha’s father.

Samantha’s father Scott contacted NBC Bay Area and said he believes Family Bridges worked to re-connect him with his son, but indicated they are not a cure-all for everyone. 

“These programs are the last option. Everything else has been tried and failed. There is nothing else left to try. It is drastic and tough. It’s better than the alternative. I’ve lived both. I’m convinced I would not have any relationship with my kids at all if not for that program,” Scott said. “It breaks my heart it didn’t work for Sam but it worked for my son.”

Yes, it worked for Scott’s son, but NBC only managed to contact his daughter for whom the program didn’t succeed.  Funny how that works.  Five people contributed to this article and not one of them managed to contact the son.  Indeed, not one of them managed to contact any of the countless kids for whom FB has been a miracle-worker.

More telling is the fact that they never managed to locate Dr. Richard Warshak’s two studies of Family Bridges outcomes, both of which find it to be a resounding, if not perfect, success. 

In short, the NBC article is a more professional job of journalism than the other hit-pieces on FB we’ve seen.  The problem is that that sets the bar far too low.  The others were disgracefully bad; this one’s just bad.

This isn’t the last I’ll write about the article though.  Stay tuned.

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

In Colorado, and seemingly under the threat of a state Court of Appeals decision, state child welfare agencies are starting to try to locate fathers when mothers are charged with child abuse or neglect (Colorado Sun, 11/5/18).  That of course is a good thing, but the new development fairly screams “Why’d it take so long?”

As I’ve written before, back in 2006, the Urban Institute did a study that found that, in over half of cases in which the father’s identity was known, CPS agencies made no effort to locate him.  They preferred foster care to father care despite the fact that the former costs the state significant sums of money and the latter little or nothing.

Now, one of the primary impediments to locating fathers is getting mothers to identify them.

An untold number of kids caught up in Denver’s child welfare system have had a father named John Doe, a practice that went on for decades and made it less likely for children to find permanent homes. When the dad is unknown, so is an entire side of the family that might otherwise step up to care for an abused child.

But of course the dad is almost never “unknown,” or at least unknowable.  The fact is that women almost always know the identity of the man with whom they’re having sex, so they know who’s the father of any resulting child.  Sometimes of course a woman will have sex with more than one man at or near the time of conception, so she can’t know who is the actual father, but she can identify all the possibilities.  The problem being that no one anywhere requires a mother to identify the father of a child.

Yes, if she receives federal benefits under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, she’s supposed to identify the father so he can be dunned for reimbursement.  But if she refuses or identifies the wrong man, there are no consequences to her.  So in fact, she’s free to claim she doesn’t know.

Now, Denver County requires some specific information.

The county, in July 2016, also created a “parentage affidavit” — a document to establish the legal parents. It’s pretty blunt:

It states: “I had sex with the following man/men 45 days before/after conception: (use additional paper if necessary, but included ALL men including the man you believe to be the father of the child).”

Note that the document is called an “affidavit.”  That strongly suggests that it’s signed under oath, which further suggests that false swearing may result in a perjury charge.  Beyond that, however, I see nothing requiring the signatory to tell the truth.  Still, it looks like a step in the right direction.

I haven’t yet located a copy of the Court of Appeals decision that seems to have given rise to the new efforts in Denver to identify and locate fathers.

Now other county child welfare offices are calling Denver for advice on how to remodel their programs, said Jennifer Collins, assistant director of the City Attorney’s Office, human services section. The widespread interest stems from a recent Colorado Court of Appeals opinion that requires lower courts to determine paternity in dependency and neglect cases, which is what Denver began doing in 2016 through its no-more-John-Doe practices.

Hmm.  What the author of the piece refers to as “the widespread interest” in locating fathers looks to me more like a fear of violating the requirements of the law.  After all, if the Court of Appeals is requiring CPS agencies to identify the fathers of abused and neglected kids, that clearly means those agencies are on notice that fathers have the right to be informed of their children’s plight.  That in turn means that the qualified immunity that usually clothes caseworkers has vanished if they fail to identify and locate those fathers.  And that further means that those fathers can sue the state for violation of their civil rights if they’re not so informed. 

In fact, that’s very much what happened back in 2010 in the Ninth Circuit of the federal courts.  I wrote about the case here.  That Federal Court of Appeals ruled that CPS agencies were required to inform fathers of children who’ve been abused or neglected as a matter of those fathers’ fundamental liberty interest in participating in the care, custody and management of their children.  The federal Ninth Circuit is the largest in the nation, but it doesn’t include Colorado, so the 2010 case has no value there as precedent.  But its reasoning can certainly influence other courts and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it did so in the Colorado case.

Irrespective of that though the legal requirement that CPS agencies inform fathers of the abuse or neglect of their child so they can exercise their parental rights seems to be spreading.  It should have happened years ago, but, I suppose, better late than never.