Author: Super User

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

This article begins with this sentence (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/27/18):

It boggles my mind that last year in Illinois, parents owed almost $900 million in child support.

Here’s what boggles my mind: experienced writers who choose to write about subjects about which they know little.  Such a writer is Mary Mitchell, author of the linked-to piece.  Not only does she know almost nothing about child support, she’s not interested in learning.  If she were, she’d probably have done certain obvious things to educate herself. 

My crazy guess is that she has a computer and access to the Internet.  With those two handy things, she could have checked out authoritative sources regarding child support and learned some very interesting facts.  But she didn’t, and, having read her article, I think I know why.  I think she’s more interested in denigrating fathers and in recruiting her readers to the anti-father cause than in educating them about the facts of child support.

I say this because she lets us know about several non-custodial parents who are way behind on child support.  Indeed, they’re so far behind and so clearly have the money to pay that they almost certainly deserve the moniker “deadbeat.”  And of course, they’re all fathers.  So Step One on Mitchell’s ignorance agenda was to stay carefully away from acknowledging that non-custodial mothers are in fact less likely to pay what they owe than are their male counterparts.  That information is about a minute and a few mouse clicks away on the website for the U.S. Census Bureau, but Mitchell never got around to going there.

And while Illinois officials boast that to date it has collected more than $2 million from deadbeat dads, that’s just a drop in the bucket when compared to what children are owed.

Right, and does Mitchell let on about why that is?  Does she even know?  Did she take five minutes out of her busy day to find out?  No, no and no.  For her, outrage is sufficient unto the evils of the day.  Information?  No.  Indignation?  She’s got that in spades.

Of course had she done a bit of study on the site for the Office of Child Support Enforcement, she’d have learned that there are many reasons why huge amounts of child support haven’t been paid and never will be.  For example, child support is routinely set at levels non-custodial parents can’t pay.  Also, the system makes it all but impossible to obtain a downward modification. Interest on child support debts has been charged in the past at usurious rates of as high as 12% per annum.  Those rates are of course reflected in the figures on unpaid support, and rates today are still at junk-bond levels.

Then of course there’s the fact that 63% of those who are behind earn less than $10,000 per year.  So Mitchell’s righteous wrath is directed at the poorest of the poor, whether she knows it or not.  Nice.

Additionally, child support obligations automatically become judgments, and a deadbeat’s driving privileges can be suspended when child support is more than 90 days past due.

But enforcing these laws takes legal representation and a lot of persistence.

In Illinois, the minimum amount of child support for two children is 28 percent.

But for many custodial parents, when they factor in the time they have to take off work to go to court, legal fees, and child care costs, pursuing a deadbeat hardly seems worth it.

Right again, but in all my reading on child support, I’ve never seen anyone have the audacity to suggest that the state insufficiently suspends driver’s licenses for failure to pay.  Everyone else on the planet, including the OCSE, now understands that doing so makes the situation worse not better, that a dad without a license to drive becomes hamstrung in the task of getting a keeping a paying job.  Not Mitchell.  She’s so incurious the obvious simply never occurs to her.

And what’s this about the hardship on custodial mothers in using the legal system to help get the money they’re owed?  Did Mitchell contact the Illinois Office of the Attorney General?  Silly me, of course she didn’t.  Had she done so, or indeed had she read any of the reams of information on child support enforcement, she’d know that custodial parents have the long, strong arm of the state on their side while non-custodial ones have to fend for themselves.  The U.S. government spends a whopping $5 billion per year on child support enforcement nationwide and zero to help payers.  Mitchell hasn’t a clue.

But the ignorance just keeps on coming:

Court-ordered child support isn’t about providing for an ex-partner’s lifestyle.

It is about providing children with the same level of financial support they would have had, had their parents stayed together.

I’ll try to keep this simple for Mitchell.  If the goal of child support is to maintain the child’s lifestyle the same as if there’d never been a divorce, it’s to maintain the custodial parent’s lifestyle as well.  It can’t be otherwise, so in fact, child support is very much about providing for an ex-partner’s lifestyle.

Needless to say, Mitchell never stops to ask herself or anyone else why that should be the goal of child support.  After all, it costs less to make ends meet when two parents live together with their children than when they live apart.  This is not a difficult concept.

So why should the system pretend that nothing financial should change when parents split up?  By engaging in that pretense, we’re lying to children.  We’re telling them that divorce changes nothing monetarily when we know that’s not true.  Are children really so fragile and so incapable that they can’t understand that Mommy and Daddy have split up and they’re going to have to tighten their belts a little?  Of course not, but the child support system isn’t having it.

Sun-Times readers deserve better than this.  Our child support system is deeply flawed and in desperate need of radical reform.  But Mitchell’s article is the exact opposite of what we need to help bring about that change.

There is an article in The Daily Independent on Kentucky’s first in the nation shared parenting law. A recent poll by Public Policy Polling shows that Kentuckians favor the new law, with 84% of respondents agreeing that a child would benefit from equal time with both parents. The author spoke with Matt Hale, Chairman of the Kentucky chapter of National Parents Organization, and Senator Robin Webb of Kentucky on how this bill has been one of the most popular passed this year.

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

Another day, another boatload of tax money spent for no good reason (Reason, 8/22/18).  It’s the inimitable Lenore Skenazy again with another tale of bureaucratic overreaching, this time on the part of a Wilmette, IL child protective agency.

What were they investigating this time?  An eight-year-old girl walking the family dog.  In her own neighborhood.  Within sight of her mother.  That most normal of situations was anonymously reported to the police who paid a surprise visit to the girl’s mother, Corey Widen.  They left without further ado, but soon the Department of Children and Family Services showed up.  And they didn’t leave the matter at just a quick interview of Widen.  No, they interviewed Widen’s other children, various relatives and the girl’s pediatrician.

Eventually of course the whole thing was dropped.  But it should never have reached the investigative stage.

“This case should have been screened out immediately and not sent for an investigation,” Diane Redleaf, a long-time family defense attorney and author of the forthcoming book They Took the Kids Last Night: How the Child Protection System Puts Families At Risk, told me.

Right.  Widen’s case should have been put where 80% of reports to CPS agencies end up – in the round file on the floor.  As of 2016, the Administration for Children and Families reported about 3.4 million allegations of child abuse or neglect, of which 676,000 were found to have merit.  Widen’s should have been dealt with on the telephone.  It was a huge waste of DCFS (and police) resources, to say nothing of the consternation it undoubtedly caused Widen, her kids and everyone who came into contact with investigators.

And, as I’ve said before, that overreaching isn’t just a waste.  It’s far worse than that.  After all, every CPS agency in the country is strapped for funds, and has too few caseworkers to handle the real cases, the cases in which a child is truly at risk or already being harmed.  Utterly useless complaints take up time that should be used helping children who need it.

But of course the system we’ve set up absolutely guarantees exactly that.  We’ve created a huge network of “mandated reporters,” e.g. the police, school administrators, teachers, fire fighters, doctors, nurses, etc. – who are required by law, and at the risk of their jobs should they fail, to report the slightest suggestion of abuse or neglect.  Unsurprisingly, the system over-reports.

Add to that the fact that we’ve also created a culture of fear for children’s safety that everywhere encourages our friends, neighbors and complete strangers to report what they believe to be child abuse or neglect.  That many of those reports can be made anonymously, as was the one against Widen, tends to embolden those seeking revenge for some perceived or actual slight.

In short, the system we have ensures over-reporting and that’s what we get.  We get that at the expense of increasing the danger to children who need the attention CPS exists to provide.  They often don’t get it because understaffed agencies are too often running down non-existent cases.

But it’s actually worse even yet.  It’s one thing to say that our child protective system is woefully inefficient, which it is.  It’s another to realize that that’s the good news.  Far worse is the fact that the culture of fear we’ve produced actually ends up harming kids.

It does that by strongly encouraging overprotection of them.  We often hear overprotection defended as “erring on the side of caution,” but it’s anything but.  The simple fact is that human beings and human society are extremely complex.  Children are born very immature and therefore need long years of socialization in order to become responsible, productive members of society. 

Protecting them from every harm would, therefore, be bad for them even if we could do it, which we can’t.  Overprotection produces children who are perennially dependent, unable to “launch” as adults, because they’ve never had the opportunity to experiment and fail, experiment again and learn.  With Mom, Dad or Big Brother forever shielding them from harm, kids never learn either their possibilities or limitations.

And that, my friends, is child abuse.  It’s not just healthier for children to allow them age-appropriate freedoms, it’s unhealthy for them not to.

Those are well-known truisms, but alas, we’re far from establishing the sort of sensible policies that would reflect them.

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

The National Parents Organization is looking to catch a wave. For some years now, NPO has been the largest, strongest and most effective organization in the country and possibly the world for family court reform. As the arguments in favor of shared parenting grow ever more numerous and stronger, and those against it become weaker and less coherent, NPO believes the wave will continue to grow. Every year, up to half of state legislatures consider bills to make parenting time more equal between mothers and fathers. This past year we saw Kentucky pass the first ever presumption of equal parenting time. Other states, like Arizona, Utah and Missouri have passed less explicit laws that still move us toward equal parenting.

In short, it looks like the momentum for shared parenting will only continue to increase. And of course NPO will be leading the charge toward more just and equitable family courts across the country.

To that end, NPO is proud to announce the purchase of the domain name sharedparenting.com. Board of Directors member Matt Hale explains:

“NPO’s acquisition of sharedparenting.com adds further legitimacy to the equal parenting time movement and our place in it,” said board member Matt Hale.

“I made the initial recommendation to obtain the website so that it wouldn’t be acquired by an anti-shared parenting group or a business looking to get new customers”, Hale continued. “NPO’s board unanimously approved the motion and Executive Director Petra Maxwell moved quickly to purchase the domain.”

“The address currently simply redirects to nationalparentsorganization.org. NPO is considering all options, one of which is to expand the address into its own website. We just want to use it in the best want to help shared parenting become the national standard,” Hale concluded.

Given the growing enthusiasm for shared parenting and NPO’s strong belief that more and more states will pass shared parenting legislation in the coming years, making this purchase was the obvious thing to do.

I’m also glad to report that our new Executive Director, Petra Maxwell, has taken the bit in her teeth and is leading NPO with vigor, intelligence and strength.

I’ll continue to report on NPO’s progress as the weeks go by. For now, though, we’re bigger, stronger, more active and better positioned to push reform than ever before.

Hey, what’s not to like?

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

In this case, it’s taken one mother and two courts in separate countries to deny a child a relationship with her father (Marilyn Stowe Blog, 8/22/18). It looks to have been hard work, but they managed the feat. And of course, the ever bland and gob-smackingly dense John Bolch agrees. Where would we be without Bolch to pillory in the internet town square to the delight of the crowd that actually knows something about family courts and children’s well-being? John, it’s good for a man to have a purpose in life and that appears to be yours.

An American man and a Latvian woman seem to have been married in England and had a daughter in October of 2015. They separated about three months later.

After they separated the father suspected that the mother intended to remove the child from the jurisdiction, because she wished to return to Latvia with the child. Accordingly, on the 9th of February 2016 the father issued an application for an order prohibiting the mother from removing the child from the jurisdiction. An order in those terms was made by the court on that day.

Mom ignored the order that obviously was made without the stipulation that she turn over her passport to someone designated by the court. She took the child to Russia where her parents live and the two have been there ever since. Understandably, the father filed a petition, pursuant to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, in a Russian court. Apparently that petition is still pending.

He also filed an action in a British court asking that it issue an order enforcing its own order prohibiting the mother from fleeing with the child. Amazingly, the British court refused to do so.

Mr Justice Keehan accepted that the child was well cared for in Russia, where she had been living for two years and four months at the time of the hearing. On the other hand, he was concerned that the father, who was not represented, was “focused, indeed obsessed, on the rights – his rights of parental responsibility, on [the child’s] rights to live in Russia or her rights to live in this jurisdiction.”

Yes, because the father was “focused, indeed obsessed” with his parental rights and the child’s rights to both parents, he was considered by the British judge to be undeserving of having any relationship with his child and indeed, no parental rights at all, at least none he can exercise.

First, if a father can’t be focused on his rights in a court of law, where should he be? Neither the judge nor Bolch appears to understand that courts are where rights are adjudicated and, not assisted by counsel as he was, the man probably felt the need to assert those rights as strongly as he could. Somehow that redounded to his detriment.

And of course the hook on which the court hung its hat was – you guessed it – the best interests of the child. Equally predictable, Bolch, who’s never met a court’s decision of which he disapproved, fails to even question the court’s thinking.

Most obviously, parental child abduction is child abuse as many mental health professionals have said and common sense agrees. So, as we so often see in abduction cases, the court that tells us it’s acting in the child’s interests ignores not only the indisputable fact of child abuse, in this case by the mother, but as well the fact that the child continues to live with her abuser. The same judge who failed to take the passport from a mother who was known to be a flight risk now rubberstamps her doing exactly that and all under the magic formula of the “best interests of the child.” Amazing.

And, also as we so often see, the Russian court has taken something like two years to do what the Convention requires to be done far sooner. In the meantime, it’s created a fait accompli – the child living peacefully with her abductor and grandparents. Who would interrupt such an arrangement just to comply with and international convention to which one’s country is a signatory?

As I’ve said before, it is precisely the reason that the Convention exists that (a) these cases be handled expeditiously and (b) whatever the temporary upset to the child at being returned to her father, the law is the law and should be enforced.

This of course is where Bolch is apparently willfully blind. When a court allows a parent to violate its order without consequence and cloaks its doing so in the mantle of the best interests of the child (or any other for that matter) it signals loudly and clearly to other parents that it doesn’t mean what it says, that court orders are just meaningless words. The British court’s refusal to enforce its order, and on the slimmest of pretexts, is an open invitation to future parents to violate future orders. The message is this: “Keep the child long enough and we’ll give you precisely what you wanted all along – the removal of the other parent from the child’s life.”

When the BIC is used in such a way, it accomplishes the opposite, not just in the case at bar, but in future cases. Bolch claims to have been a lawyer, but his invariable failure to grasp that simplest of legal concepts calls the matter into question.

August 23, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s a bit of good news (IFS, 8/16/18).  And indeed it is just a “bit.”  But good news is good news, even if there’s not a lot of it.

The rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing is declining.  It’s dropped to under 40% of all births, the first time that’s been the case since about 2004.  It rose steadily from 1960 to about 2008 and has declined until 2015, the last year for which we have full data.  The declining trend is the more remarkable because adults of childbearing age are getting married later than ever and the incidence of cohabitation is greater.  Those two things would tend to militate in favor or greater non-marital childbearing, but instead the rate is coming down.

Needless to say, this is good news that I hope will continue.  Children born to and living with single parents tend strongly to do worse than children living in intact families.  The evidence for that has been developed over decades and is overwhelming.  But at some point in the late 60s and early 70s, we as a society got the bright idea that fathers were expendable, that all children really needed was a single primary caregiver.  Unsurprisingly, that person was all but invariably Mom.

It took us some 40 years to relearn what our parents and grandparents could have told us – kids need both parents.  During that time, much science – both social and biological – has developed to the benefit of all.  We now know that humans are a bi-parental species and have been probably for hundreds of thousands of years.  That means that, in order for our offspring to be properly socialized, they need strong inputs from both their female and male parents.

And of course the social science on the children of intact families, divorced families, never-married families, adoptive families, step-families and single-parent families demonstrates that the children of married parents have the best chance of positive outcomes on a range of measures of well-being, both as kids and as grown-ups. 

It was always wrong to pretend otherwise, but alas, pretend we did.  Now perhaps we’ve learned our lesson.  So far, a few surveys of young adults find a commonly-expressed attitude among them being “We grew up without a father or mother, we didn’t like it and we aim to do better.”

So one cause of the decline in single-mother childbearing may be the experiences of those kids who are now adults.

Another, as the linked-to article points out, is the continued increase in total education received by Americans.  Somewhat weirdly, in every category of educational attainment, “High School diploma or less,” “Some College” and “Bachelor’s Degree or Greater,” there continues to be an increase in rates of non-marital childbearing.  So how can the overall rate be declining?

It’s doing so because the more education a person receives the more likely he/she is to wait until marriage to have children.  So the average rate for those with a bachelor’s degree or more is about 6% while the rate for those with only a high school diploma is over 50%.  Therefore, the more people there are in the higher-educated category, the lower the overall rate of non-marital childbearing.

And that apparently is what’s been happening.  More people are completing college, and they’re the ones least likely to have children outside of marriage.

It remains to be seen if this mini-trend will continue, but for now the news regarding single-parenthood is improving.

August 22, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

We can now add New Hampshire to the list of states whose child welfare agencies are performing abysmally (Union Leader, 8/17/18). There it’s so bad that the state’s Division for Children, Youth and Families failed in all seven categories considered by the federal Department of Health and Human Services as necessary to a functional child protective agency. That’s right, every single one.

“None of the seven outcomes was found to be in substantial conformity,” according to the report, released on Friday.

Among the report’s findings:

• The quality of risk and safety assessments was concerning in both in-home and foster-care cases. The agency needs to ensure that children are seen consistently, including observing children in their home environments.

• DCYF needs to meet with all children in a family and with all of the children’s caregivers, especially fathers.

• Too many safety plans rely on informal agreements with parents on what they would do to keep children safe. Monitoring of safety plans also was found to be insufficient and was not adapted to new safety threats.

• High staff caseloads affect quality of work and the staff’s ability to meet frequently with children, parents, and foster parents, conduct risk assessments, safety planning and monitoring, complete comprehensive needs assessments and provide services.

Of course, each of the first three is a function of the fourth. Once again, a state is paying caseworkers too little, overburdening them with cases and expecting them to do an acceptable job of protecting at-risk children. How high are those caseloads?

[DCYF Director Joe] Ribsam advised lawmakers earlier this year that the state should aim for the national standard of 12 cases per social worker, but when lawmakers saw the $5 million price tag, they declined.

Current caseloads stand at about 40 per social worker, below the high-water mark of nearly 95 but still well above national standards.

Yes, current caseloads average 3.3 times industry standards, i.e. an impossible demand on caseworkers. The fact that they once averaged a mind-boggling 95 cases doesn’t obscure the fact that caseworkers can’t handle that load. Unsurprisingly, they don’t, leading to the disgraceful performance assessment by DHHS.

More amazing is the fact that the state’s known for years how bad the situation was but did little to address it.

Newly appointed director of DCYF, Joe Ribsam, predicted to the Union Leader in May that the federal review, the first since 2010, would not be favorable.

“When you compare the system in the 2010 review to 2018, you are going to see significant declines across all categories,” he said at the time.

“You can attribute some of that to the opioid challenges, but also to the state of the system around staffing, case loads and the lack of providers to help support families and keep kids safe at home in the first place.”

So what’s it doing now?

“The first and most important step we’ve taken together with the governor and the Legislature is to increase staffing at DCYF. But, there is more work to be done.”

DCYF will be submitting an improvement plan this fall to address caseloads and improve outcomes for children and families involved with the child welfare system, Meyers said.

Priorities include new services for children and families, more engagement with families, better recruitment and retention of foster and adoptive parents and more specialized training for both DCYF staff and providers.

That’s nice. I’m eager to see how they accomplish all that without money.

The Legislature in the past two years has approved $1.1 million for foster care adoption programs, rate increases and services and $1.5 million for voluntary services for families at risk, while increasing funding for social workers.

New Hampshire’s a small state, but that kind of funding will do little even there to ameliorate the problems of a dysfunctional agency. As of 2013, costs to run the DCYF ran to about $63 million per year. The addition of $2.6 million to the budget of an agency that is nowhere near to meeting the needs of kids simply won’t do the job. The state legislature knows it, the agency knows it and now the federal government knows it.

So, along with all those plus Granite State residents, we’ll wait for the other shoe to drop. That’ll come in the form of a series of horrible tragedies followed by office-holders rushing to microphones to impress voters with their deep concern for kids and their pro-active stance toward solving the problem.

Remember, you read it here first. But truly, I’m no prognosticator. I’ve just caught this act too many times in too many states to believe for an instant that the same thing in New Hampshire will go any other way.

Robert Franklin, Member of our National Board of Directors, has an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle you can read here. It highlights how surveys and polls around the nation have shown that Americans overwhelmingly support shared parenting and that laws need to be enacted to reflect the will of the people. 

August 20, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Returning to the California Supreme Court case begun yesterday, the allegations of Bianka M. are worth remembering.  She claimed that her father, Jorge L. was violent to her older sisters and had abandoned her, i.e. failed to act as a father to her despite being able to do so.  Now, those claims didn’t relate to her request for a court order establishing a parent-child relationship between her and Gladys M. who everyone seems to agree is in fact her mother despite not having been in her life for seven of its first 10 years. 

No, those claims relate to Bianka’s “SIJ” (special immigrant juvenile) petition.

Under the law as amended, a child is eligible for SIJ status if: (1) the child is a dependent of a juvenile court, in the custody of a state agency by court order, or in the custody of an individual or entity appointed by the court; (2) the child cannot reunify with one or both parents due to abuse, neglect, abandonment, or a similar basis found under state law; and (3) it is not in the child’s best interest to return to his or her home country or the home country of his or her parents.

So, in order to attain status as an SIJ under federal immigration law, Bianka had to allege “abuse, neglect or abandonment” by Jorge.  Why would she want SIJ status?

Once granted, SIJ status permits a recipient to seek lawful permanent residence in the United States, which, in turn, permits the recipient to seek citizenship after five years.

In short, for Bianka, SIJ status was of incalculable value.  Wearing the label “SIJ” means she travels a wide and straight road to becoming a citizen of the United States.  So what did anyone do to investigate whether her allegations were true?  Apparently no one did anything.  Sufficient unto that inquiry were Bianka’s allegations and her mother’s concurrence.

As an initial matter, should the court to which the case is remanded order SIJ status for Bianka, the matter of abandonment would become res judicata, i.e. a judicially decided matter.  Any future attempts to overturn that finding would come to naught because of that.  As a practical matter too, that finding would void Jorge’s parental rights due to his judicially-established abandonment of her.  Indeed, that’s exactly what the two lower courts held.

Bianka, the Court of Appeal reasoned, “has placed Jorge’s paternity squarely at issue by requesting an order containing a factual finding that her father abandoned her.”

Amazingly, the Supreme Court again and again states that Bianka’s application is nothing more than a request to establish a legal relationship with her mother and her SIJ status.  It does so as if there could be no other consequences to so finding.  But the simple fact is that the matter of abandonment will be unassailable in any forum should the SIJ finding be made.

That of course returns us to the astonishingly minimal “due process” afforded Jorge by the trial court.  Essentially, two mailings of documents written in English and two telephone calls sufficed for the Supreme Court to conclude that he wants no part of the case.  He may not, but there are plenty of other possibilities, such as a financial inability to do so.

Neither I nor anyone reading this blog knows the reality of whether Jorge gives a tinker’s “damn” about Bianka.  Her claims may be the solid gold truth.  What’s more important though is the precedent this case sets.  Depend on it; in the future, enterprising attorneys will cite the case of Bianka M. vs. Superior Court as standing for the proposition that it’s legally acceptable to extinguish a father’s rights if he’s not a U.S. citizen and he’s received a couple of telephone calls informing him of a legal action underway in the U.S.  Plus of course mere allegations of abandonment, abuse and the like will be sufficient to establish SIJ status.

Finally, this gets close to a judicial rubber stamp of international child abduction.  The difference between Gladys M.’s departure for the U.S. in 2005 and her daughter’s following her seven years later, and a mother’s simultaneous removal of a child seems to be of no legal import.  Why not simply take the child to California, claim abuse and, if Dad doesn’t have the money to contest the matter, then – presto! – permanent residency leading to citizenship is all but guaranteed.

It’s interesting to remember that, just three weeks ago, the country was up in arms about immigrant children separated from their parents.  But, as the saying goes, that was then, this is now.