Author: Super User

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

Here’s yet another story that argues persuasively for requiring women to name the father of a child one gives birth to (NewsHub, 4/9/18).

An Australian man the article calls Kerry and a woman, Julie, had a one-night stand 20 years ago. She had a child and named Kerry the father. He assumed she was telling the truth. She wasn’t. For the next 18 years, he paid child support for the child. For some reason,

Kerry, who lives in the coastal town of Cervantes in Western Australia, was speaking with a child support consultant who told him their records didn’t have a result for a DNA test.

“I said, ‘because I didn’t have one’,” Kerry told Channel 9’s A Current Affair.

“And he pretty much on the phone called me a stupid idiot and to go and get one done as soon as I could.”

He did and it revealed he’s not the father. So Kerry’s out about $58,000 Australian, paid for a child who’s not his. Given that, what’s also true is that some man hasn’t supported his child, nor has he been permitted to have a relationship with the child. And of course the child hasn’t had a father.

All of that is true for one reason and one reason only – we don’t require women to identify the father of their children. We do bizarre and utterly unnecessary things like presuming a married man to be the father of any child born to his wife. That might have made since before we could do reliable DNA testing, but now we can, and we should. We should test every child at birth.

But until that happens, we should require women to identify the father. After all, we in the United States place that requirement on women who receive Temporary Aid to Needy Families, so why not do it across the board. As a practical matter, that would mean requiring them to name every man with whom they’d had sex at or near the time of conception. In Kerry’s case, that would have conferred many benefits on many people – Kerry, the actual father and the child.

Gender feminists argue that a woman’s right to privacy trumps the interests of all those three. But of course U.S. law has never recognized a right to withhold the name of the father of one’s child or, alternatively, all possible fathers. If it did, the requirement that mothers receiving TANF benefits could never exist. But it does.

Plus, the notion that the commission of fraud in order to obtain money from another person should be enabled by the right to privacy finds no place in any sensible national policy.

Predictably, Julie blames Kerry for the fraud she perpetrated on him.

In a statement sent to A Current Affair, Julie denied any intentional wrong-doing, saying instead that Kerry had been offered the opportunity to check the paternity but didn’t take it.

“Over the last 18 years Kerry has had the chance to get a DNA test, but as myself and Child Support could never get in contact with him, it never happened, and now he is coming out with accusations that are unfounded and untrue,” she said.

Kerry’s a commercial fisherman and, I assume difficult to reach when he’s at sea. But what Julie doesn’t mention is the fact that she had sex with another man at or near the time of conception. She didn’t tell Kerry that. She didn’t’ tell the other man. And she didn’t tell the Child Support Agency. If she had, the actual father could have formed a relationship with his child, helped support him/her and the child would have had a dad. The fault is Julie’s; the fraud is hers and hers alone. Kerry’s only fault was in believing her. I suspect he’s learned his lesson.

Julie will likely be required to pay back the support, but as she is not currently employed, she could pay just $49.80 a fortnight.

After feeling hassled “non-stop” by the Child Support Agency, Kerry now feels as though it should be responsible for repaying him.

“They accepted me as the father without any proof.”

Moms repaying fraudulently obtained child support would never happen in the U.S. and I’m amazed that New Zealand requires it. Of course at $100 per month, it’ll take Julie 580 months to pay off the debt. I’m assuming there will be no interest attached to her debt, the way there is to unpaid child support.

But she needn’t worry. Julie can simply name the other man with whom she had sex and he’ll be required to pay “child support” to her for a “child” who’s now roughly 20 years old and, one assumes, out of the nest and on her own. There’s no statute of limitations on child support, so, somewhere there’s a man who’s in for a rude surprise. He’ll get to pay 18 years of support for a child who’s no longer a child and whom he’s never met. And who knows? Maybe he’ll be much better off financially than is Kerry. That would mean he’d have to pay much more and possibly in a lump sum. So our Julie possibly stands to make out like a bandit, potentially receiving a very large sum of money up front, while dribbling out $100 a month to the man she defrauded.

Good work, if you can get it.

This poll taken by Public Policy Polling after the passage of the first in the nation shared parenting law in Kentucky shows that voters overwhelmingly support shared parenting after divorce or separation. The poll results are getting a lot of media attention, which is great news for the shared parenting movement! This article through the Public News Service includes an interview with NPO of Kentucky Chair Matt Hale. We will keep our readers updated on these great results for shared parenting around the nation. 

September 5, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Do I see the next exhibit on offer by those who seek to convince anyone who’ll listen that parental alienation is junk science and a plot by fathers to wrest custody from “protective mothers?” I just may. Richard Ducote and the various journalists who’ve put forward that nonsense may want to take note. Karin Wolf may be just the person for them.

Wolf’s latest shenanigans have involved abducting her 14-year-old child from its father, Edward Crane (North Jersey, 9/3/18). She was apprehended after a nine-day investigation by multiple law enforcement agencies. She’s been charged with interference with child custody and contempt of court in Glen Rock, New Jersey.    

As we so often see, Wolf was given primary custody of the couple’s two children after they divorced in 2007. Three years later, Crane filed for custody claiming Wolf was alienating the children. Apparently the judge agreed because custody was transferred to Crane. That didn’t sit well with Wolf.

At some point, she established the “Women’s Civil Liberties Union,” that looks very much like nothing but a website created by Karin Wolf to air her grievances about anything and everything. If you’re looking for legal advice, don’t take it from Wolf, who’s (a) not a lawyer and (b) has little-to-no concept of the law. For example, she informs visitors that the mere claim by one parent that the other parent is alienating the children constitutes a cause of action under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a claim that’s spectacularly at odds with the truth.

So it’s no surprise that her take on parental alienation itself is just as screwy. Consider:

The segregation of mothers and their children has been achieved via Richard Gardner’s highly-controversial, pseudoscientific theory Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), which has been rejected repeatedly by the American Psychological Association (APA); and fails Daubert and Frye standards.

Gardner was a misogynist who claimed that when the child(ren) do not want to spend time with the father, it is because the mother is alienating him from the child(ren). This is bogus, a bill of attainder against women. It is natural for a child to prefer the mother, it is simply nature. Look at everything from puppies and kittens to cubs and ducklings.

Let’s see how many objectively untrue claims Wolf managed to pack into about 90 words. 1. PA has nothing to do with “segregation of mothers and their children.” 2. PA is not Gardner’s idea having changed considerably from his PAS analysis almost three decades ago. 3. The APA actually included the concept of PA, if not the name, in its most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. 4. PA has met the Daubert and Frye standards many, many times. 5. Gardner’s understanding of PAS was emphatically not that whenever children don’t want to spend time with Dad, it’s necessarily the result of alienation. 6. She has no idea of what a bill of attainder is. It’s a legislative enactment condemning as criminal a specific individual or set of individuals. 7. It is in fact not “natural for a child to prefer the mother.” Humans are bi-parental and the science on children’s attachments is clear that there’s no hierarchy of preference. 8. Puppies and kittens aren’t human beings. Dogs and cats aren’t bi-parental species and humans are. Accordingly, their parental preferences differ from ours.

Not bad. That’s almost one misstatement of fact for every 10 words. I’d say that alone recommends her very well to the protective mother movement as an expert on parental alienation.

But it gets worse, far worse. Wolf turns out to be one of those parents who, when the court does something she doesn’t like, sues everyone in sight. Her suit was a comedy of errors at least for those of us who didn’t have to deal with it. I feel sorry for the federal judge and her clerks who had to wade through Wolf’s 120 pages of legal and factual nonsense.

Now, you may think I overstate the matter when I say she sued everyone in sight. I do, but not by much. She sued something like 58 defendants. Among those were at least one church and its pastor, 12 judges, one superior court, the entire appellate division of the State of New Jersey, lawyers who never represented her, social workers she hadn’t hired and countless court personnel. Many of those people and entities had little or nothing to do with her case. Here’s how Federal Judge Madeline Cox Arleo described Wolf’s petition:

Although Plaintiff’s 120-page Complaint is somewhat difficult to decipher, this action apparently arises out of Plaintiff’s 2007 divorce from her husband, Edward Crane, and ensuing child custody proceedings that ended with the Bergen County Family Court awarding legal and physical custody of the Children to Mr. Crane on August 30, 2013. See id. ¶¶ 86-87. In this lawsuit, Plaintiff names as defendants essentially any person or entity with any conceivable connection to the state court custody proceedings.

And what did she want from her lawsuit? Oh, not much…

Plaintiff seeks declaratory, injunctive, and monetary relief in various forms. See id. ¶ 396. To provide a few examples, Plaintiff asks this Court to do the following: (1) declare the Bergen County Family Court proceedings described above void ab initio for lack of subject matter jurisdiction; (2) enjoin essentially all entities and persons connected to the proceedings from further involvement; (3) order the state entities to provide Plaintiff with free transcripts of the proceedings; (4) temporarily seize all of Defendants’ assets; (5) award $100 million in damages and treble damages under RICO; and (6) award Plaintiff interest calculated from the date Mr. Crane filed his petition for custody in Bergen County Family Court. Id. ¶¶ 396(e), (l)-(n), (s)-(u). In addition, a large number of Plaintiff’s requests for relief are declaratory judgments that call upon this Court to reorganize the New Jersey justice system, create a new federal court for interstate custody disputes, and rewrite New Jersey family law. See id. ¶¶ 396(aa)-(mm).

I particularly like the demand for $400 million in damages and the ones to reorganize the entire state’s judicial system, create a new federal court and rewrite New Jersey family law. Hey, why not think big?

Needless to say, the court dismissed all of Wolf’s claims.

The odd thing is that even someone like Wolf isn’t actually too far out of the mainstream of those who seek to cast doubt on the fact of parental alienation. That’s why I recommend her so highly to them to provide services as an expert. I can see it now – the next article of that sort we see quoting Karin Wolf. After all, didn’t she found an organization with the august-sounding name of the Women’s Civil Liberties Union? She must be an expert, right?

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

Today’s the day we celebrate the contributions of the men and women who work every day to make everyone’s life easier, better, fuller and safer. We probably should do it more often.

A few weeks ago I watched a short Jordan Peterson video in which he pointed out to his interlocutor how fantastically complicated our economic system is. For us consumers to get, say, a fresh head of lettuce in a super market involves so many different moving parts of the economy as to boggle the mind. The fields have to produce, the produce needs to be harvested at the right time, it must be inspected, cleaned and packaged, put on a truck that functions and whose refrigeration system does as well. The driver has to drive the truck to market, there must be fuel for the truck at a place where it’s needed, the produce needs to be unloaded and displayed in a refrigerated area of the store. And of course every single aspect of the system I just mentioned has its own massively complex support system. For example the crude oil that’s the basis of the diesel fuel has to be extracted, refined, etc. Electrical systems have to be maintained and function properly. Etc., etc.

Of course, working people do all of that. They do it every minute of every hour of every day. And all of us benefit.

So we should always remember the people who go about their lives doing the work that makes all our lives better.

And, this being a blog about families, family laws and family courts, I’d be remiss if I failed to point out what working parents provide for their children. After all, without someone earning the money that supports the family, the members thereof would be in a world of hurt. Without that income, there’d be nowhere to live, nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, no ability to buy medicine, etc. In short, the parents who work and earn perform a service for their kids that is more basic, more important, more necessary than any other.

Now, we know to a significant degree, it’s fathers who do that. Yes, mothers are doing more paid work now than before, but dataset after dataset, in the U.S. and all the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, show men and fathers on average do more paid work and earn more than do women and mothers.

Vital as that is to their kids and families, it’s almost uniformly ignored by family court judges who seem to consider the only form of parenting worth the name consists of feeding, bathing, reading to, etc. the children. Important as those activities are and deserving of recognition, earning the money to pay for it all is as well.

So, on this Labor Day, let’s remember the workers of the country and the world. And let’s especially remember the contributions they make to their kids. And let’s resolve to remind family court judges of that obvious fact that’s sadly too often overlooked.

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

Continuing from Friday with the latest Bolch fiasco.

Bolch pretends that, since money is fungible, there’s no way we can ascertain what a custodial parent is spending her child support money on. Of course if we were to take seriously the problem many fathers have with feeling their money doesn’t go to the child but to the mother who wants nothing to do with them except the bi-weekly check, we could establish as system much like our food stamp one. That is, we could denominate certain child-specific items (e.g. diapers) that could be bought with a child support debit card and other items (e.g. alcohol) that couldn’t be.

That would solve the problem at least for the most part. But Bolch is convinced the only way we can conclude that child support isn’t going to the child is if this happens:

And if the parent with care is not properly providing for the child despite being given the means to do so, then that may be grounds for a change of residence (to use the old terminology).

Yes, it may be, and I may be able to fly to the moon. How many times, when he was practicing law, did Bolch see a change of residence ordered based on how child support was being spent by the custodial parent? Once? My guess is he didn’t see it even that often. The reasons are many. First, such a thing is almost impossible to prove. Second, bringing such an action that’s so unlikely to succeed is simply beyond the means of most fathers. Third, even if Dad proves that Mom is misspending the money, how likely is it that a change of residence would be ordered? Answer: not very.

Bolch might refer to the study done by Trinder, et al that the Stowe blog wrote up several years ago. It analyzed almost three hundred post-divorce applications made almost invariably by fathers. In none of them was a change of residence ordered. In short, Bolch’s “solution” to the problem is no solution at all.

Having failed, moves on.

Then there is the ‘shared care should happen in every case, therefore, there is no need for child maintenance’ argument. The problem, of course, with this is that it conflates two entirely separate issues: the issue of which parent, if any, should pay child maintenance, and the issue of how much time the child should spend with each parent. The two issues are actually entirely separate.

Except of course they’re not. Suppose Mom has the child 29 days out of the month and Dad just one. Who does Bolch suppose spends more money on the child? Surely even he can see that Mom fed the child three times a day for 29 days and Dad did so just once. Ergo, Mom spent more and so Dad should pay Mom something to make up the difference.

Now, if Mom has the child for 15 days and Dad does the same, those everyday expenses tend to even out, right? So there should be no need for Dad to pay Mom. Of course not all expenses for children occur regularly; some are one-time or once-a-year things. So health insurance, school clothes and the like aren’t automatically evened out simply by an equal parenting time schedule. For those expenses, the higher earner should bear a bit more of the burden.

But only in a world truly apart from reality are the matters of child support and parenting time “entirely separate.” As usual, Bolch, in the face of the status quo he worships, has abandoned critical thought.

What if, as is likely to often be the case, one parent has a substantially higher income than the other? Would it be fair in such a case that each party pays half of the cost of bringing up the child? Or should the better off parent pay more? 

No, what’s fair is that each parent bear the consequences of his/her own actions. If Dad spent long hours in school, educating himself for a well-paying career and in fact earns a good salary and Mom doesn’t, what’s fair is that, when Mom walks away from the marriage, Dad lives a better lifestyle than does Mom.

Second, if Mom’s so incapable of earning that she can’t even bear the cost of supporting the child she decided to have (not a huge amount of money), then maybe she shouldn’t be the custodial parent.

Third, Bolch fails to notice that the above quotation directly contradicts his earlier claim that child support isn’t spousal support, as so many non-resident fathers allege. After all, if we’ve gone from simply supporting the child to telling Dad to pay more because he earns more, we’re perilously close to telling him to contribute to Mom’s lifestyle.

Let’s say it takes $800 per month to pay the expenses of raising the child. Dad earns $60,000 per year and Mom earns $40,000 and they each have the child half the time. Why not just call it even? Each can afford the $400 per month it takes to raise the child, so if we tell Dad to send Mom, say $500 per month in child support, how is that anything but contributing to her lifestyle?

And as I said, if Mom earns so little that she can’t afford to pay her half of the cost of the child’s upkeep, shouldn’t we seriously consider removing the child from her custody and placing it with Dad? After all, we don’t want the child to live in poverty, do we?

The reason that these perfectly obvious concepts play no part in either custody or child support law is that those laws are aimed at a transfer of income from men to women. That was explicitly made clear in the U.S. in the late 80s and early 90s when state legislatures adopted obviously flawed science to support child support guidelines that sent many a father to the poorhouse. They continue to this day and are doggedly defended by gender feminists for the same reason – the transfer of wealth from men to women.

I suppose I could suggest that Bolch do a bit of reading, but I very much doubt that doing so would have much effect.

August 31, 2018 by Robert Frabklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

No sooner do I deal with the ignorance of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell on the subject of child support than our old friend and punching bag John Bolch chimes in on the same subject (Marilyn Stowe Blog, 8/28/18). Unsurprisingly, the results are much the same. In his invariable zeal to support the status quo and oppose fathers legitimate interests, Bolch gets much wrong about his chosen topic. That said though, I must admit that his piece is better than Mitchell’s. He actually gets a fact or two correct and raises a coherent argument. I’ve never before said that Bolch’s work is superior to anyone’s, but in this case the fact is the fact. Yes, it’s setting the bar at ground level, but there it is.

It seems Bolch has heard various non-custodial fathers complaining that they have to pay to support their kids.

The first issue for the non-resident parent is that they see the money they are paying to support their child actually going to the parent with care.

Well done, John. Non-custodial parents do often raise that issue and with good reason. I’ve read many a complaint that runs something like this: “I pay my child support every time, but when I finally get to see my kid, he’s dressed in rags and hasn’t eaten all day. Meanwhile Mom seems to have plenty of money for gin/heroin/cocaine/methamphetamine/whatever.”

That’s spurred me to recommend an arrangement under which Mom gets a debit card for an account Dad funds with his child support payment. The card could only be used for certain child-related things plus other items like rent. That way Mom would receive her money and Dad would know it wasn’t being used for non-legitimate expenditures.

Needless to say, Bolch has nothing to say about such a simple and obvious solution to non-custodial fathers’ completely understandable complaints.

In their eyes, the maintenance is akin to spousal maintenance, rather than child maintenance. Why should they pay spousal maintenance? 

Right again! (That’s two in a row. Bolch is on a roll!)

But then he blows it.

First, the argument that the money is being used by the parent with care for their own benefit, rather than for the benefit of the child. Well, so what?

Uh, John the “so what?” of it is that child support is supposed to be child support. If it’s used for the child, fine, but if it’s used to support Mom’s heroin habit, that’s not so fine. Surely you agree, right?

Now Bolch’s actual point, poorly made as it is, is that money is fungible and so it’s impossible to separate what the child support is being used for and what it’s not. Fair enough, but to that end, see my recommendation described above. A debit card that can only be used for child-related items all of a sudden renders money non-fungible. Child support funds would go into the child support account and could only be used for, you know, child support.

Now, what about the fathers’ point that in fact what their money does is support Mom, not the child, that it’s spousal maintenance? Bolch ignores that altogether, but I don’t.

As I said in my last piece on the Sun-Times fiasco, we’ve known for decades that the child support system aims at ensuring that the child undergoes no decline in living standards when Mommy and Daddy split up. Well, if little Andy or Jenny’s lifestyle remains the same due to Daddy’s support, then Mommy’s lifestyle does too. It can’t be any other way. So in fact, child maintenance is spousal maintenance. But again, Bolch’s sole aim is to defend the status quo, so he’s not about to think critically about the issue or come up with sensible conclusions.

Does he know that, back in the late 80s, our child support system took as gospel the work of Lenore Weitzman who claimed that mothers underwent a 76% decline in living standards when they divorced? Does he know that that was wrong and known to be wrong at the time? Does he know that, 10 years after the fact, Weitzman herself admitted as much? And yet child support remains aimed at making up that supposed deficit.

What about the fact that, in the early 80s radical feminists in the U.S. and Europe (at least) changed the direction of their movement from urging fathers to spend more time at home so their wives could work more to maintaining the status quo so as to increase the transfer of funds from men to women? Former German feminist Hildegard Sunderhof said exactly that at NPO’s shared parenting conference in Boston last year and of course Weitzman’s fraudulent work was part of that movement.

Does Bolch know that gender feminists now oppose even the most modest reform of spousal maintenance and child support laws for that very reason?

Needless to say, Bolch knows none of the above. And it’s that very ignorance that allows him to assert the patent nonsense he does.

I’ll have more to say about this next time.

National Parents Organization has completed a study—the first of its kind—of the parenting time guidelines of each of Ohio’s 88 county courts of domestic relations. These guidelines are intended to guide divorcing parents in setting a parenting time schedule for their children and, often, are explicitly presented as default schedules, “for parents who cannot agree otherwise.” Because these guideline schedules have a significant effect on the schedules parents agree on and those imposed when parents do not agree, they are important factors in shaping the actual parenting of children of divorced parents.

A large and compelling body of recent scientific research shows that children of separated parents benefit from substantially equal parenting time with each parent. (See “NPO Shared Parenting Research Resources” for citations and links.) This means that the defaults that courts set in place are important in promoting the best interest of children. And, importantly, the research established that this is true even for infants and toddlers and even when parents are in (non-violent) high-conflict relationships.

NPO’s study focused on “ordinary parenting time”, meaning non-holiday/non-vacation time. This is time that’s vital to establishing a true parent/child relationship. Furthermore, it was restricted to the guidelines that courts apply to parents living in close proximity, based on the individual court’s definition of that term.

The results of NPO’s study, reported in the “NPO Ohio Parenting Time Report” are shocking! Ohio Counties vary widely—indeed, wildly—in their parenting time guidelines.

• Sixty-four of Ohio’s 88 counties have a parenting schedule that allows the children only two overnights and 60 hours or less with one of their parents in a two-week period. This means that the children are with their non-residential parent less than 20% of the ordinary parenting time. None of these counties’ schedules provide for the children to be with the non-residential parent on a school night. (One other Ohio county provides a schedule only slightly enhanced from this outdated model, by adding one additional overnight with the non-residential parent in a two-week period. This still accords the children just 20% of ordinary parenting time with one of their parents.)

• Thirteen Ohio counties provide default schedules that allow the children 4-5 overnights with the non-residential parent and substantially more time with the non-residential parent, between 25% and 30%.

• Only three Ohio counties provide default schedules that allow the children equal, or nearly equal, time with each parent.

The wide variation, alone, undermines any claim to Ohio counties’ parenting time schedules being based on research about what parenting arrangements promote child wellbeing. It is just not believable that, for children in Sandyville, Ohio (Tuscarawas County), it is presumptively in their best interest to be with their separated parents equal amounts of time but for children in Magnolia, Ohio (Carroll County)—just four miles away—it is presumptively in their best interest to see one of their parents only every 12 days, and then only for two days.

Ohio counties are also divided over whether children’s interests are served by parenting time guidelines that are age-sensitive or not. Forty-one counties have age-sensitive schedules, though some are minimally sensitive to children’s ages; forty-seven counties impose the same schedules on children of all ages, from birth to 18 years.

Surprisingly, 39 Ohio counties still use the outdated language of ‘visitation’ to talk about all of the time that the children are in the care and physical custody of one of their parents.

Using county population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, NPO estimated that 60% of Ohio families are subjected to parenting time guidelines that allow children just two overnights in a two week period with one of their parents. Only 2% of Ohio families reside in counties whose guidelines allow children equal, or nearly equal, time with both of their fit and loving parents.

Ohio courts are directed to make decisions about parenting time in the best interest of the children. NPO’s study demonstrates that most Ohio domestic relations courts do not have parenting time guidelines that research shows are in children’s best interest.

Ashland, Kentucky newspaper The Daily Independent published this staff editorial calling Kentucky’s first in the nation shared parenting law “long overdue.” We agree and thank the staff at The Daily Independent for joining the shared parenting movement and recognizing what is best for children. Read the entire editorial here.