Author: Super User

October 1, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s an informative piece for the men of Tennessee. It’s a blog post by Tennessee attorney Kent T. Jones about how unmarried fathers are treated by the state’s family laws and how unmarried mothers are. It’s not a pretty picture.

The Tennessee child custody statutes support the mother in cases where the parents of a child are not married. An unmarried mother’s name on a child’s birth certificate is sufficient proof of her custodial rights; however, it is not the same for an unmarried father. Even if he’s named on the birth certificate, this only proves his relationship to the child; it does not assign any custody rights. A mother’s right to custody is automatic under Tennessee law, whereas the unmarried father must initiate juvenile court proceedings in order to gain custody rights.

Stated another way, being named on the birth certificate gets an unmarried man parental obligations, but not parental rights. Anyone who thought the two went hand-in-hand is now disabused of such a notion. This of course is one way in which unmarried mothers can choose which man they wish to be tagged with parental duties. If Mom neglects to mention her pregnancy to Dad, she’ll be at the hospital by herself and the nurses or Bureau of Vital Statistics personnel will take her word for it as to Dad’s identity. We see this in Title IV cases with some frequency.

Should Dad get wind of Mom’s claim that he has a child, he’s required to spend his hard-earned money to hire a lawyer, pay a filing fee, go to court and claim his rights. Mom has no such obligations. If he wishes to contest paternity, that’s his time to do so and his nickel.

Under Tennessee Code Section 36-2-303, an unwed mother automatically gains custody of her child upon birth. No legal action is necessary to assert her custodial rights. She is solely responsible for providing for the child’s needs and making decisions regarding the child’s residence, medical care and education. Unless a court-ordered custody agreement states otherwise, it is her decision whether or not the father can see the child and what part he plays in the child’s life.

As a practical matter, this means that no unmarried mother need inform the father of her child that he’s a dad. If she refused to disclose her pregnancy and broke up with him before he could figure it out for himself, as a practical matter, he has no way to assert his rights. Of course if she, at any time during the child’s life desires his support, she can get it. Never mind that she denied him a relationship with the child and the child a relationship with its father. And of course the child support he’ll be required to pay isn’t just prospective.   There’ll be a hefty lump sum of past support due and owing as well.

In that event, do Dad’s parental rights come magically into being? They do, but asserting them is another matter entirely. Since he’s never had a relationship with the child, he may be denied any access to it or, failing that, such minimal time with little Andy or Jenny as to obviate any chance at a real father-child relationship.

As I’ve said many, many times, fathers have rights, but mothers can decide whether they get to exercise them.

Tennessee’s laws on the subject of unmarried parents and their rights and duties to their children are very 19^th century. They assume that Dad is a cad who heartlessly seduced and abandoned Little Nell. The reality is that women have all the inexpensive and effective reproductive choices. Moreover, those choices are, for the most part secret; a man can’t know whether his partner is actually taking the pill or not but she can tell whether he’s using a condom.

And of course, should contraception fail, women have the morning after pill, abortion and adoption to fall back on. In short, women can generally decide if and when to have a child. For men, it’s much more difficult.

Given all that, it’s remarkable that over 40% of births are to unmarried women. In the overwhelming majority of those cases, the woman didn’t have to give birth if she didn’t want to. Therefore, it’s safe to conclude that, the great majority of those births were wanted by the mother. Again, we can draw no such conclusion about the father.

Similarly, we know all too well that being born to a single mother is, for the most part, the very definition of a bad start in life. Between 33% and 40% of single mothers live below the poverty line. That means their kids do too. Children of single parents are at far greater risk of abuse and neglect than are other kids. And poverty is a major harbinger of bad outcomes for kids. Needless to say, when we add fatherlessness to poverty, a child is in real danger for a wide variety of social and personal deficits.

So we might think that sensible public policy would encourage fathers’ active participation in their children’s lives. Lower poverty rates and healthier, happier, safer children argue persuasively for exactly that. But public policy does the opposite. Laws like Tennessee’s make active paternity by unmarried fathers as difficult as possible. Why? Say, that’s a good question and one for which I have no answer.

Unlike in the 19^th century, we now have a handy technique for figuring out paternity to an absolute certainty. It’s called DNA testing. If Tennessee required all babies to be tested at birth (along with the man/men identified by the mother as the father) then we’d know who every child’s father is. We could then inform Dad and, without any court involvement, automatically accord him his parental rights.

Doing so would erase the anti-male sexism currently existing in the law, it would pair vastly more babies with their true fathers, wipe out most paternity fraud and radically reduce the number of children and mothers living in poverty.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, fatherlessness is the policy of the United States and many other countries. Tennessee’s is but one example of many. That fatherlessness is so actively promoted in so many ways at a time when we know so much about its deleterious effects on fathers, mothers, children and society generally, makes it my candidate for proof positive of a dysfunctional society.

September 30, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

To no one’s surprise, the Nebraska Supreme Court has done it. It’s produced a rule under which materials used to train judges who rule in divorce, child custody and parenting time cases may be withheld from the public. From now on, Nebraskans aren’t permitted to know how their judges are trained.

How does that square with the ruling by the Nebraska Supreme Court in Veskrna vs. Steele that those very records are public under the Nebraska Public Records Act? The state’s highest court sided with Dr. Les Veskrna who wanted to know what education family court judges are receiving. Well, I’m not sure.

After all, the Nebraska Legislature long ago enacted the Public Records Act that unambiguously supports the public’s right to know regarding a very wide range of governmental behavior. The law plainly promotes openness and discourages secrecy. The public’s right to know is, generally speaking, the policy of the state and has been for a long time.

So how does a non-legislative body appoint itself to contradict the legislature? Moreover, how does it do that when doing so involves an apparent conflict of interest? By its new rule, judges are shielding themselves from public scrutiny when law and public policy argue for openness.

My guess is that the Court seeks to accomplish its nefarious goal this way:

(4) Records showing the content of education or training programs or presentations given by outside or private presenters, including all handouts, presentations, and recordings, except such portions of any recordings governed by subsection (C)(7) below, and as long as express written consent is granted by the author for the release of the materials.

That’s No. 4 in a laundry list of items that are public. So the content of training programs for judges are public IF the author of same gives express written consent to their publication. In other words, Bob Emery can refuse that consent and no one anywhere can know what he told Nebraska’s judges.

I suspect the Court wants to warm the winter of potential legislative discontent by that particular dodge. The idea being that the only ones they’re protecting are the ones who produce the content of the training sessions.

Will that work? I have no idea. Certainly, it is well within the power of the legislature to overturn this rule. Members can simply pass a law specifically stating that materials used to train judges are open to the public. Period. And that would put an end to this sorry saga.

Conspicuously absent from the Supreme Court’s recent message on the new rule is any justification for it. Why should the people’s right to know be trumped by a single social science researcher who may not even live in Nebraska? The Court is mum on that subject. And well it might be.

I for one can’t think of a single argument in favor of keeping secret judicial training materials. It’s interesting to say the least that the Court failed to advance one. Interesting too is the fact that, in Veskrna vs. Steele, it batted down every argument Steele (the Administrator of Courts) made in favor of secrecy. It is, therefore, a fair conclusion that the Court has no justification for the rule it so recently promulgated.

At least the Court’s depressing message is leavened by a sense of humor.

It is essential to the public… to ensure the delivery of quality judicial services to the people of the State of Nebraska.

That certainly brought a guffaw from me. This is the crowd that routinely turns fit fathers out of the lives of their children. As the analysis of family courts in the state conducted by Michael Saini showed, despite barely 5% of cases even alleging one parent to be unfit – and certainly vastly fewer actually being so – Nebraska judges granted shared parenting in only …% of cases. And of course a child’s chance of maintaining real relationships with both parents varies radically from one county to another.

If that’s “delivering quality judicial services to the people of the State of Nebraska,” I’ll eat my hat.

The Nebraska Legislature should put a stop to this. The people of Nebraska deserve to know how the judges who determine a child’s relationship with its parents are trained in deciding that all-important issue. It’s past time judges stopped hiding their training from the public. Their disdain for the legislature, their disdain for the people of the state is shameful

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

Will wonders never cease? As part of the recent short-term spending plan recently passed by Congress, the Family First Prevention Services Act appears to make progress in combatting states’ tendency to take children from parents, place them in foster care and then have them adopted.

That of course came about as a result of the 1998 passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act that allowed Washington to pay states for every child taken into foster care or adopted out of it. As former South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli told NPR back in 2011, “When that money came down the pike, it was huge. That’s when we saw a real influx of kids being taken out of families.”

States all of a sudden discovered a zeal for taking children from their parents. One key aspect of the program was that children denominated by states as having “special needs” produced a payments from Washington over twice what the were for other kids. The result? South Dakota simply called every Native American child a “special needs” child, the better to enhance the state’s cash flow.

Now we have the Secretary of West Virginia’s Department of Health and Human Resources, Bill Crouch, echoing Napoli (Parental Rights Foundation, 9/25/18).

“The federal government has always paid us only if we pull children from their homes,” Crouch said according to a report in the (Beckley, WV) Register-Herald, “so this is a huge change in how we’re able to deal with our child welfare problem.”

The huge change he’s referring to is the aforementioned FFPSA. What is it? The Act, that becomes effective in October, 2019, authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services to “make a payment to a state” if the state provides the parents certain services. Those services include “mental health and substance abuse prevention and treatment services provided by a clinician for not more than a 12-month period…”

They also include

In-home parent skill-based programs for not more than a 12-month period that begins on any date described in paragraph (3) with respect to the child and that include parenting skills training, parent education, and individual and family counseling.

The children who are the subject of the bill are as follows:

(A) A child who is a candidate for foster care (as defined in section 475(13)) but can remain safely at home or in a kinship placement with receipt of services or programs specified in paragraph (1).

(B) A child in foster care who is a pregnant or parenting foster youth.

So briefly, the FFPSA channels federal dollars to states to keep kids out of foster care and to help parents of kids who are in danger of being placed in foster care get off drugs and/or learn to be better parents. States can now be less willing to take kids into foster care and still keep the federal largess flowing. They’re also encouraged to do what one veteran child welfare official urged long ago, i.e. put the “services” into Child Protective Services.” What a concept.

Now, I’d be remiss if I failed to point out one obvious thing – the FFPSA directly contradicts the Adoption and Safe Families Act. The one pays states to keep kids out of foster care while the other pays them to place kids in foster care. I can see state officials now, checking to see under which law their state gets paid more.

Or, I can see it another way. Why wouldn’t a state cash in on the FFPSA by providing, say, parenting lessons to parents, declare that the services hadn’t helped the parent and then cashing in again by taking the child into foster care? I’m such a cynic. No state would do such a thing, would it? Would it?

And of course there’s the point raised by the friend of NPO who alerted me to the FFPSA. It’s quite remarkable that, a year from now, we’ll be paying to treat drug addicts so they can keep custody of their kids, but not lifting a finger to encourage state courts to keep both parents in their children’s lives, even when the parents are entirely fit and upright members of society.

Does it get any crazier than that?

That said, the FFPSA is a step in the right direction of discouraging foster care and encouraging parental care. So the law itself isn’t crazy, just the rest of federal policy on kids and parents.

September 27, 2018

The Oldham Era in Oldham County, Kentucky has two articles in its pages on the first in the nation shared parenting law in Kentucky. The first is an op-ed by Chair of the Kentucky Chapter Matt Hale, who had worked on the shared parenting bill since 2012. Read it here.  The second article is about the law’s roots in Oldham County, where Matt Hale is from. It is also the area where the sponsors of the bill Rep. Jason Nemes and Speaker Pro Tempore David Osborne, represent in the Kentucky legislature. The law had bipartisan support and has been popular among those in Kentucky. The hope is that this law’s popularity will convince the rest of the nation to pass shared parenting legislation. 

September 27, 2018 

Dan Deuel of National Parents Organization of Utah has written an op-ed in the Standard-Examiner for Suicide Prevention Awareness Month on the increased risk of suicide in divorced men and how changes in family law and parenting time could help. A highlight: “The University of California, Riverside conducted a study examining marital status and suicide. They found that the risk of suicide among divorced men was more than double that of married men. And divorced men are as much as eight times more likely to kill themselves than divorced women, overall.” Read the full op-ed here. 

September 27, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s a good article about Dianna Thompson’s new organization, Family Reunion (KGET, 9/25/18). Thompson of course is one of the truly fine advocates for shared parenting, reform of paternity fraud laws and family court reform generally. She’s been at this longer than most of us and done more to raise awareness of the many issues confronting fathers, mothers and children when they take the perilous step into family court.

Family Reunion, to its credit, advocates for shared parenting. The linked-to piece offers a brief comparison of two young people, one of whom (Ryan Rust) was raised by parents who shared parenting about equally post-divorce and another (Monisha Hossain) who was stuck with the usual primary maternal custody arrangement.

Former Family Reunion intern Ryan Rust credits the shared parenting model for making his parents’ split a little easier on him as a teen.

“It helped because it made me realize people can have it better,” Rust said. “They can go through a divorce easier with parents help and if parents can come together and truly be there for their child it can really benefit them through a time that’s really hard for them.”

It’s what we try to explain to judges and state legislators across the country: shared parenting makes divorce easier on kids. Truth to tell, it makes it easier on everyone. Dad doesn’t lose his kids and Mom doesn’t take on 80% – 100% of the parenting obligation. What’s not to like?

Sadly, Monisha Hossain has a different story to tell.

Hossain’s parents divorced when she was 5.

“My mother got full custody of me and my brother and she packed her bags and moved to Georgia and she would always say mean things about my dad to me and my brother,” said Hossain. “It was not the best growing up with my mom and I would have preferred to live with my dad and right now I’m not talking with my mom, I’m only talking with my dad.”

Hossain now an advocate for the parenting technique. 

“I just don’t want others to have to go through what I did,” she said.

We’re often encouraged to listen to the children of divorce and rightly so. Well, we should listen to both of these young people who see shared parenting from different perspectives, one on the inside, the other on the outside. But both come to the same conclusion – that for them, a shared arrangement is the best when parents go their separate ways.

Meanwhile, Thompson and Family Reunion are promoting shared parenting agreements between parents that simply bypass the lawyers and judges.

“We currently have a very adversarial court system that often pits one parent against the other and I really firmly believe that children need, want and deserve both parents in their lives and currently that’s not happening in the current system that we have,” said Thompson. “Parents go in and instead of going through the court system, they fill out a jointly agreed upon parenting plan that is submitted to the court.”

The fact is that, when parents submit their own agreed plan for custody and parenting time, if it’s reasonable at all, a judge will gladly rubberstamp it. The last thing judges want to see is hostile parents; they take up far too much time and cause far too much stress. Parents who agree with each other move the docket along more or less effortlessly.

And of course an agreed plan is vastly cheaper for the parents and less stressful than a contested case that inevitably requires the time of attorneys, guardians ad litem, custody evaluators and the like.

Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of parents do just what Thompson urges. Interestingly, when parents agree, they create equal parenting arrangements far more often than do judges. That’s one of the many facts revealed by the analysis of North Dakota’s family courts conducted last year by Leading Women for Shared Parenting. There, 44% of cases that were stipulated by the divorcing parents had an equal parenting plan, while only 10% of cases decided by a judge did.

Thompson of course is onto something. Perhaps the best way to change parenting time orders is to simply take responsibility for deciding them out of judges’ hands.