Author: Super User

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

In one of the most astonishing and disturbing opinions in a long time, the California Supreme Court has ruled that a father’s custodial rights to a child can be voided by a court without even minimal due process of law. Do I overstate the matter? You be the judge.

Jorge L. and Gladys M. lived together unmarried in Honduras. They had four children of whom Bianka, born in 2002, was the youngest. In 2005, Gladys moved to the California. In 2012, Bianka traveled to California to be with her mother.

In a family court action naming her mother as the respondent, Bianka asked for an order placing her in her mother’s sole custody.

In short, Bianka was asking the superior court to rule on her father’s right to custody of her and find that it was in her best interests to be exclusively in her mother’s care. Needless to say, as a legal matter, Jorge’s interests were at risk. The superior court, later affirmed by the Court of Appeals, said that it couldn’t make such a ruling without Jorge being joined as a party to the case.

The Supreme Court overruled both lower courts saying that Bianka’s father was not a necessary party to the suit, that his parental rights could be infringed without his presence or ability to be heard. That is, the most basic aspects of due process of law were to be ignored regarding Jorge and his rights decided without his consent or evidence.

Here is what the superior court afforded Jorge in terms of due process of law and that was expressly approved by the Supreme Court:

After filing her petition, Bianka requested the appointment of a guardian ad litem to represent her interests; she served both Gladys and Jorge with the application via mail. (Fam. Code, § 7635, subd. (a).) Bianka’s counsel also notified Jorge by telephone, in Spanish, and informed him of the hearing date. Bianka later submitted a request for order, asking the court to grant sole custody to Gladys and to issue findings relevant to SIJ eligibility. Bianka’s counsel served Jorge by mail with a copy of the petition, the proposed order of custody, which contained the SIJ findings, and supporting documents. Counsel again called Jorge to advise him of the upcoming hearing on the request for order. Jorge neither responded to the petition nor participated in the hearing, which took place more than a month later.

So, in Jorge L.’s case, American due process of law consisted of receiving in the mail a copy of Bianka’s petition written in English, a verbal notice of the hearing date and a second phone call of another hearing. That done, the California Supreme Court assures us that Jorge was entitled to nothing more. The fact that Jorge is likely too poor to travel to the U.S., hire a lawyer and contest the matter in court was ignored entirely. Indeed, the Supreme Court made no mention of this more-than-likely fact.

The nut of the matter to the superior court was that, as a necessary party to any action that involved the diminution of his legal rights, Jorge had a right to take part in the litigation if only through counsel. Since he was in Honduras, the court had no personal jurisdiction over him, so it couldn’t proceed. That’s obvious enough, but the Supreme Court managed to decide that basic concepts of law (e.g. in personam jurisdiction) were unnecessary.

Now, what the superior court could have done is simply appoint for Jorge an attorney ad litem. That person could have contacted Jorge, gotten his version of the facts of the case and presented them to the court via a deposition if necessary. If Jorge agreed to Bianka’s living in Gladys’ custody, then the ad litem could have so informed the court. If not, he could have contested the matter. In that way, the court would have lawfully asserted jurisdiction over Jorge and Jorge would have had an opportunity to be heard.

But that’s not what the superior court did and the Supreme Court has now ruled that a father’s rights can be legally diminished despite the fact that the court doing so has no jurisdiction over the man and the man has no ability to make his case.

So, did I overstate the matter?

More on this tomorrow.

August 17, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This article is about as good as it gets on child support (St. Louis Public Radio, 8/15/18).  It’s a conversation with two St. Louis attorneys, Stephanie Lummus and  Michael-John Voss, both of whom do their best to defend non-custodial parents behind on their child support.  It should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the everyday realities of those parents and the child support system.

When Stephanie Lummus first entered nonprofit legal work, she didn’t expect that her efforts to represent homeless people and help them exit poverty would so often revolve around child support. But she estimates that at least three-quarters of her homeless clients are dealing with that issue – and it’s not a simple one.

Isn’t that interesting?  Some 75 percent of Lummus’ homeless clients have problems with paying child support.  That reminds me of the Office of Child Support Enforcement’s data showing 63 percent of parents in arrears on child support report earning under $10,000 per year.  How many of her clients were actually put on the street in the first place by family courts and their child support and alimony orders?

“The enforcement mechanisms in place in the state of Missouri for those folks that have resources and just don’t feel like supporting their children are usually appropriate … [but] what we’re talking about is the vulnerable and the disenfranchised,” Lummus said on Wednesday’s St. Louis on the Air, “the folks that have run into difficulty or catastrophe in life and need modification, and they can’t get it.” 

Right again.  Child support enforcement assumes, as Lummus says, that every father who doesn’t pay can pay, but simply refuses to.  The laws on child support enforcement were born in an era that assumed that dads were deadbeats, so the most draconian measures were appropriate to force him to pay.  After all, he could pay, right?  If Dad didn’t pay, slap a 10% or 12% interest charge on what he owed.  If he still didn’t pay, take away his driver’s license.  And if he still didn’t pay, toss him in the slammer.  All of those might make sense for someone who has the money to support his kids but simply refuses.

But that doesn’t describe most parents who fall behind.  Overwhelmingly they don’t pay because they don’t have the money.  And of course, if they don’t have the, say, $200 per month to support the child, they also don’t have the $5,000 to pay a lawyer to get them a modification, so the arrears just go up and up indefinitely.

“…So if you can, as a low-income person or someone who is vulnerable, figure that system out, then you’re fine. But most of my clients – they can’t even begin to understand. They’re trying to figure out where their next meal is coming from.”

Failing to understand the court system or what evidence a hostile judge might consider sufficient to prove one’s inability to pay typically means the loss of a license, even steeper child support payments and possibly jail, all of which make keeping up even harder or impossible.

Meanwhile, Michael-John Voss added this:

“We’ve criminalized poverty in the United States in various forms, and one of the main ways that we’ve done that is through child support,” he said.

Indeed.  City after city is now making it a crime to sleep on the street, in a public park, etc.  Where homeless people are supposed to go given the lack of housing for them is anyone’s guess, but municipal governments want their cities to be attractive and that means getting the homeless out of sight. 

And of course Voss is correct to connect the criminalization of poverty with child support.  Child support orders are routinely set at levels the parent can’t pay, modifications are hard-to-impossible to come by and interest ratchets up the arrears.  Loss of licenses and time in jail only make matters worse.  For many non-custodial parents, falling behind and ultimately going to jail are inevitable outcomes.

He explained that after 12 months of missed payments or $5,000 owed, the noncustodial parent then faces a felony charge.

“Then they’re looking at jail time and incarceration,” Voss said, “so what you’ve done is instead of helping somebody make those payments and care for the child, you’ve removed them. You’ve – one – suspended their license, and – two – locked them up in prison because of their inability to pay.”

Naturally, making failure to pay a felony deals a crushing blow to whatever chance an already poverty-stricken parent has of finding a job.

“And what [state attorneys] usually request is that you pay the current plus some of the arrears. So if your current [payment], say, is $200 a month, and you’ve got $10,000, $12,000 in arrears, maybe more, they add another $150 on that. So you couldn’t pay the $200 to begin with – and now they want you to pay $350? It doesn’t make sense, but that’s what they require, and that’s what the state looks for when they prosecute these cases.”

One alternative is impossible for the parent and the other is a felony conviction and jail time.  This is how we think we’ll get the poor to support their kids.  Really, I’m not making this up.

And let’s not forget that, when the money is paid, often enough, the child doesn’t see a dime of it.

Voss noted that while some custodial parents work with the respective noncustodial parent to figure out a workable repayment strategy, it’s often a more complex problem.

“If the child’s ever received state benefits, some of those arrears are assigned to the state,” he said. “So no matter whether or not the custodial parent or former custodial parent wants to forgive and forget, if the state is entitled to those arrears, they’re going to come after them.”

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

The State of Arkansas has finally wised up (Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 8/11/18).

Nearly 10,000 people whose driver’s licenses are suspended for failing to pay child support will get their licenses back if they reach agreement to resume payments under a new program this month.

Stated another way, the state is finally admitting that suspending drivers’ licenses for failure to pay child support was a bad idea in the first place. That of course is exactly what countless commentators have been saying for decades now. Suspending drivers’ licenses makes obtaining and keeping gainful employment vastly harder than it otherwise would be. That makes paying child support harder not easier. This is not hard to figure out, but it took the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement about a decade to finally tell states that they could opt out of that particularly nonsensical program. And it’s taken Arkansas even longer to get around to doing so. Better late than never, I suppose.

The program will allow those with suspended licenses to work with their local child support office to reach an agreement to resume their payments, the department said in its news release. If they reach an agreement, the Office of Child Support Enforcement will release any related holds on the individual’s driver’s license.

Now, that might sound like the state won’t accept just any agreement with a parent in arrears, but don’t believe it. My guess is that state officials will do just about anything short of dropping to their knees to beg to get one of those agreements. Face it, they’re under no allusions about the inefficacy of the program or about whether most of these people can actually pay what they owe.

Asked if the department has a goal regarding how much it expects to collect through the program, [state finance department spokesperson Scott] Hardin said, “Our hope is not to reach a certain amount, but to engage as many of these parents as possible, hopefully resulting in ongoing payments.”

That of course means that the state expects no significant influx of support payments. That’s only realistic. After all, we often see states such as New Jersey conducting “sweeps” of parents in arrears. That means the police arrest them and then release them if the parent comes up with any money or promises to. They routinely bag between 1% and 2% of what’s owed. In other words, the parents who haven’t paid overwhelmingly can’t pay, a fact that accords nicely with the OCSE’s own findings that parents in arrears tend strongly to be poverty stricken. According to OCSE, some 63% of parents behind on their payments report earning under $10,000 per year.

That’s one thing the state is admitting. The other is that suspending drivers’ licenses doesn’t improve matters for anyone.

“With a driver’s license suspended, the parent may have issues pursuing new employment while also likely limiting the time spent with a child due to lack of transportation,” he said. “Through ‘Back in the Driver’s Seat,’ the parent demonstrates he or she is committed to getting back on track, receiving this important tool, [a] driver’s license, in return.”

There’s not a lot about the child support system that makes sense and suspending drivers’ and occupational licenses is about as senseless as it gets. That such a policy was ever put into effect flew in the face of basic commons sense. That it took so long to be abandoned is the same.

Still, doing so is a step in the right direction, albeit a short one. But hey, as long as Arkansas and other states are giving back drivers’ licenses, why not take another step? Why not, say, start setting child support orders that parents can actually pay? That’s one the OCSE started recommending 12 years ago. Maybe I’m just feeling daffy, but if we can do one, we can do the other, right?

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

It looks like the State of New Hampshire is again going to pay out large sums of money due to its failure to contact a father when his daughter was in dire jeopardy (Union Leader, 8/14/18). Almost three years ago, Katlin Paquette murdered her daughter Sadee. She pled guilty to second-degree murder for which she’s serving a 21 – 42 year sentence.

Sadee’s father, Christopher Willott has sued the state due to its Division of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) ignoring the danger Paquette posed to the child and its own protocols, all of which allegedly resulted in the 21-month-old’s death.

Case workers from the Division for Children, Youth and Families had visited the home on multiple occasions before the fatal incident but failed to take appropriate action, according to the lawsuit…

Despite those warnings, according to [Willott’s Attorney Rus] Rilee, “DCYF failed in its fiduciary duty when it knew of allegations concerning behavior and emotional and physical neglect and abuse by Katlin of Sadee, and further failed to properly investigate these allegations.”

As a result, the lawsuit states, “Sadee was the subject of multiple separate incidents of serious physical and emotional abuse and neglect, including but not limited to beatings that caused serious bruising and broken bones.”

Of course those are nothing but allegations in a lawsuit. But it looks very much like they have merit.

Manchester police interviewed caseworker Samantha Nolin in December 2015, at which time Nolin reported that she did two assessments of the case, one in May and one in July.

She told police she knew from coworkers that there had been previous DCYF investigations of the family, but did not review them, despite a written DCYF policy requiring reviews of prior assessments. 

She also stated that during her investigations, she did not contact anyone outside of the family or hospital staff, nor did she implement any written safety plans.

The lawsuit quotes Nick Willard, Manchester police chief at the time, who told the New Hampshire Union Leader in September 2015, “In the Willott homicide, DCYF failed to protect Sadee.”

Needless to say, it appears that, despite the obvious risk to Sadee, DCYF caseworkers failed to offer her father an opportunity to provide a safer home for her. That of course is in keeping with the findings of the Urban Institute when it investigated state CPS agencies. UI found that in fewer than half the instances in which a child was taken from an abusive or neglectful mother was any effort made to locate the father as a possible placement for the child.

In this case, it looks like that failure resulted in Sadee’s brutal death.

I say it looks like New Hampshire is going to pay not only because of the facts of the case, but because the lawyer filing it looks like he knows what he’s doing. Rilee obtained a $6 million verdict in another case in which a child’s death resulted from the negligence of DCYF. Plus,

In 2016, Rilee won a precedent-setting case before the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which allowed him to file his lawsuits against DCYF publicly, over the objection of the attorney general.

“I think these lawsuits are shining a light on the various systemic problems within DCYF,” he said. “We remain hopeful that these public lawsuits will continue to bring accountability and change in the system.”

Yes, the agency whose actions are kept almost entirely secret from the public anyway sought even greater secrecy. It asked the courts to keep revelations made in court under wraps so DCYF’s conduct could remain safely away from the inquiring eyes of the press and public. That of course is utterly disgraceful and Rilee’s right to bring as much light on them as possible. State agencies that operate in secret will never change. When children’s lives and health are at stake is when We the People need more information, not less.

Oh, DCYF seems to take very seriously its own interest in secrecy.

The lawsuit reveals that employees of DCYF were “either detained, arrested and/or criminally investigated themselves related to their failure to cooperate with the criminal investigation into Sadee’s death.”

The usual excuse offered by CPS agencies is that publicity would be too traumatic for a child who’s already been abused or neglected. I don’t buy that, but in this case the child was already dead and yet caseworkers still refused to cooperate.

More power to Rus Rilee and his campaign to (a) hold DCYF accountable for its incompetence toward Sadee Willott and (b) let the public know what its paid employees are up to. With a lot of both, maybe the State of New Hampshire will change how it treats kids who are in danger. And maybe that’ll mean contacting fathers when mothers are deemed a risk to their kids.

National Parents Organization of Virginia Chair Christian Paasch has an op-ed in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. This op-ed connects the child separation issues at the US-Mexico border with the separation of families that occurs every day in our family courts. 

Christian writes: 

A growing uproar in this discussion highlights the inconvenient and uncomfortable truth that the policy of forced separation has existed and been applied to American children for decades in our family courts. Obviously in certain circumstances, whether at the border or in families across the country, there may be instances where children should be separated from parents for their own safety, but those are in the minority of cases and are not what we are talking about here.

Read the article here.

August 13, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

August is Child Support Awareness Month, so let’s all be aware of child support, shall we? Yes, let’s. Now, to be aware of child support, one might read this article or one similar (This Week News, 8/11/18). After all, it’s Child Support Awareness Month, so there are plenty of articles on the subject. But if you do, don’t figure you know all there is on the subject. You don’t. Indeed, the linked-to piece and the others tend to avoid mentioning many salient (and often uncomfortable) facts about child support.

Maternity is established through the mother giving birth. Paternity is established several ways.

Or, stated another way, Mom gets her parental rights via her biology, but Dad, unless he’s married to Mom, must do more. He can sign an acknowledgement of paternity form at the hospital, but if he does and he’s not the dad, he may be stuck paying for a child who’s not his. Of course if we simply utilized the technology we’ve had available for the past 35 years and tested the child’s DNA at birth, we’d all know who Dad is and who he isn’t, and he wouldn’t have to jump through legal hoops to either prove or disprove his paternity. We currently subject newborns to a welter of tests, but not that one.

The amount of support a parent must pay is determined by using the “Ohio Child Support Guidelines.” Both parents must provide verification of their incomes or provide their most recent income tax returns.

To learn the many deficiencies of the Ohio guidelines, please read Don Hubin’s blog here.

As to Dad’s income, the process can get a lot more complicated than the article suggests. After all, if Dad just got laid off, injured and is unable to work, took early retirement, quit one career and begun re-training for another, etc., his actual income will be ignored by the court. He’ll be assumed to be doing nothing but trying to reduce his child support obligation. So the court will impute income to him. It’ll do that by looking at what he’s made in the past, when he hadn’t been laid off, wasn’t injured, etc., and set his support based on that. Never mind that he’s not earning that much, never mind that he’ll immediately fall behind, possibly lose his house, his driver’s license, various occupational licenses, go to prison, etc. “Verify” your income all you want, but the purpose of child support is to make you pay as much as possible and often more.

Does the article mention that, in establishing paternity, it may not matter whether Mr. X is the actual dad or not. If the state enforcement agency sends its notice of hearing to the wrong man or the wrong address and Mr. X doesn’t appear, he may be tagged with supporting a child who’s not his. Due process of law is tissue-thin in child support court.

Does the article mention that, if Dad falls behind and is threatened with jail, his “hearing” in which he’s supposed to convince a judge of his inability to pay may last only five minutes or even less? Nope. If Dad’s not well educated and is unable to understand what the system demands of him, his chances of going to jail are much higher than not. Child support courts process fathers like so much meat on a conveyor belt. It begins in court and ends in jail and the journey from the one to the other is short.

Does the article mention that there is no obligation anywhere that “child support” be used to, you know, support the child? No. Many a father has complained that he pays on time and in full, but when he visits with little Andy or Jenny, the child is underfed, dirty and badly dressed. Meanwhile it doesn’t look like Mom’s alcohol habit has much decreased. Dad begins to suspect that his money is going not to the child, but to the liquor store on the corner and he’s probably right, but the system allows him no avenue to seek justice. His job is to pay; once he’s done that, the child support system cares not a bit about what Mom does with the dough.

That’s true despite the fact that it would be simple enough to ensure that Dad’s money actually goes to support his child. We could treat child support like food stamps, i.e. limit it to items pre-determined to be either for the child, like diapers, or things like food that can be used by or for a child. Mom could then receive a debit card for an account that Dad would fund. Dad would have access to the records of expenditures made out of that account. In that way, he would know that Mom was using his money for the child and not her boyfriend, her heroin habit, her gambling addiction, etc. We could do such a thing, but we don’t.

Does the article mention the federal government’s massive funding for child support enforcement or its massive failure to fund Dad’s visitation rights? Again, no. Does it mention that, if it supported non-residential fathers even half as much as it does custodial mothers, that fathers would be far more inclined to pay than they are now? It’s pretty certain that enforcing visitation tends to beget enforcement of child support, but Washington would rather fall on its sword than assist fathers, even if it means making child support enforcement harder, less efficient and more expensive.

What about the apparent anti-father bias in awarding child support? No, the article didn’t get around to that. But for decades now, a vastly lower percentage of fathers with custody than mothers receive a child support order from a judge. The fact that mothers are generally less likely to pay than are fathers also goes unmentioned.

Yes, child support is quite the complex and interesting topic. So by all means, this August, let’s all become aware of the realities of our child support system. Just don’t rely on the usual boilerplate articles to tell you any but a very sanitized version of the truth.

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

Proceeding with Trinder, et al’s 2013 study of British family courts and their approach to applications by non-resident parents (86% were fathers) for enforcement of contact orders.  Transparently, it was the authors’ goal to find that courts were doing an acceptable job and that little or no changes need be made.  That’s made all the clearer by the fact that the authors failed to notice the clear implications of their own findings.

Most notably, in the 205 cases studied, not one judge either ordered a change of custody or simply handed the child to the non-resident parent for a period of time to make up for the refusal by the resident parent to comply with the visitation order.  The authors break down the judges’ orders into five categories, none of which includes those methods of enforcement.

Those five categories are:

Settlement (39 cases, 19%) a new/revised court order setting out when and where contact is to occur (the contact timetable).

Coparenting support (95 cases, 46%) a timetable for contact plus measures to encourage parents to work together, including handovers through third parties, trial periods and review, referral to mediation or parent education (sPIP).

Protective (35 cases, 17%) assessing risk, e.g. by a drugs testing regime, and managing risk by restricting contact (supervised or indirect contact) or seeking to change behaviour of perpetrators (e.g. referral to domestic violence programmes).

Participatory/child-led (20 cases, 10%) the court elicits and then largely follows the views of older children, often for less or contact.

Punitive (18 cases, 9%) – the court seeks to ensure one party complies with (a) the index order and/or (b) the court process. The court may order an assessment for unpaid work requirement, make an order that one party undertakes unpaid work requirement (community service), or threaten or order imprisonment for contempt of court. 

In short, the harshest thing a court may do is threaten or imprison for contempt the resident parent.  Everything else is hortatory except when the court accepts the wishes of older children.  That raises an obvious question: What do courts do to actually enforce their orders, i.e. to ensure that Dad gets to exercise the minimal parenting time he was given by the original order?  The answer is little or nothing.  Yes, imprisonment for contempt may accomplish the task, but, if that were done in any of the 205 cases, the authors don’t mention it.

What they also don’t mention is that the entire point of filing an application to enforce an order for contact is not to put the other parent in jail or to force them to do community service.  It’s to see the child.  And yet so unimportant is that goal – the only goal important enough for fathers to file applications – it’s not only ignored by the courts but by the authors as well.

Possibly even more astonishing is the fact that Trinder, et al conclude that the courts are doing a fine job of enforcing their orders, but they never followed up to find out the results of the courts’ actions.

The research design did not include interviews with parents. Thus we have only limited file data on whether and how orders are being implemented.

That the research design didn’t include ascertaining whether the courts’ orders had any effect is quite the large omission given that the study supposedly measures exactly that.  And yet it does no such thing.

Trinder, et al cite the relatively low rate of parents in these cases returning to court with renewed applications as indicating that the orders were effective, but it’s painfully obvious that it may indicate the opposite.  If Dad tries once to get Mom to comply and all he receives from the judge is an order whose “focus is on clarity rather than an attempt to address any underlying issues,” can we pretend surprise when he doesn’t try again?

Plus, the application fee alone was £200, a hefty sum for many fathers.  Add to that the cost to hire legal representation and, if he receives an order that does little or nothing to help him see his child, his refusal to throw good money after bad in the future is all but inevitable.

It’s almost as if the authors judged the courts, not on whether their orders functioned to bring about greater contact between non-residential parents and their children, but on whether proper procedures were followed.  That such an approach comes to us wearing the disguise of an actual study to guide policy-makers boggles the mind.

The research team independently rated each case on two criteria: robustness and safety. On robustness we rated the court’s approach as ‘about right’ in the great majority (96%) of cases.

Yet how can they possibly know?  They explicitly constructed their study to avoid talking to parents after the court’s order.  That means they have no idea whether the order improved contact or not.  And yet they conclude that whatever the courts did was, in all but rare instances, the right thing.

That’s a frank acknowledgement that the authors decided what they wanted their study to demonstrate, constructed it accordingly and – surprise! – now tell us that it did so.  On the foundation of such fake science is the British system of family courts built.

August 10, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The study linked to in this blog is dated 2013. I write about it now because it’s emblematic of the pushback family court reform advocates receive from some quarters. It’s a British study and transparently an effort to convince readers that family courts are generally doing a fine job, ergo, no change is necessary. Here in the U.S., we get the same claim about shared parenting from family lawyers who sometimes stoop to say that we don’t need new laws because hey, courts are already ordering shared parenting without them. The fact that there’s no evidence for the proposition and plenty to rebut it hinders the anti-reform crowd not a whit.

Seeking to succeed where the Yanks have failed, the British study is an effort to manufacture evidence where otherwise there is none. It’s fails miserably.

The topic under consideration is whether British courts do enough to enforce their orders for access to the child by the non-resident parents. The authors’ conclusion? Of course they are. Nothing to see here, move along.

The first indication we have that this is a defective study comes from the fact that it was paid for by the Nuffield Foundation and conducted by veteran anti-reform advocate Liz Trinder. Readers may recall that back in the early days of the Cameron/Clegg administration, there was some thought that perhaps British family courts should be required by law to treat fathers and mothers equally. Thus Nuffield plunged into the fray with a white paper opposing such a dangerous notion. So intellectually bankrupt was that publication that it didn’t cavil at citing the oft-debunked work of Jennifer McIntosh for its support.

The second indication comes in the definitions fashioned by Trinder, et al. They divide cases in which the non-resident parent seeks court enforcement of its access order into four categories, Conflicted, Risk, Refusing and Implacably Hostile/Alienating.

Conflicted means roughly that the parents can’t get along, Risk means that one party has alleged some form of violence or risky behavior such as domestic violence or child abuse. Refusing means the child refuses contact for a legitimate reason. Finally, Implacably Hostile/Alienating means that the resident parent can be described as such.

So what’s the problem with those categories? Well, most obviously, they’re in no way exclusive, i.e. the behaviors in one can occur in another or even all three others. Therefore, the authors’ most urgent conclusion – that few mothers are implacably hostile or alienating – may or may not be true. Mothers involved in cases in the other three categories may well be exactly that.

Consider the category of “conflicted.” “Intense competition or chronic levels of mistrust between the parents mean that they are unable to work together to implement the court order. Both parents have greater or less responsibility for the conflict.” In other words, the conflict that results in an inability to co-parent may be all or mostly the fault of one parent. If Mom dogmatically refuses access and Dad gets angry about it, there’s conflict, but it’s unilaterally brought about by one parent. Does Mom not qualify as implacably hostile or alienating? She certainly could, but the authors want us to believe that each of these categories comes hermetically sealed off from the others.

Much is conveniently left to the authors’ interpretation. For example, when the child refuses contact with the non-resident parent, “The resident parent may be neutral or negative about contact but the child’s decision appears genuinely to be their own opinion rather than a simple reflection of the resident parent’s position.” Of course the people to whom the child’s decision “appears genuinely to be their own opinion” are lead author Liz Trinder, et al. If they wanted a particular outcome, that’s one good way to get it.

More importantly, the key to figuring out whether parental behavior constitutes alienation is whether the child’s response is appropriate to the situation. If the child’s refusal to spend time with one parent is an appropriate response to an unfit or abusive parent, then he/she hasn’t been alienated.   If there’s no legitimate reason for refusing access, the child may well be alienated.

The point being that even mental health experts, educated in parental alienation and able to personally interview parents and child alike often have difficulty telling appropriate refusal from alienation. But Trinder, et al tell us they can do the job simply by looking at the files in a few cases. They can’t and they probably know it. They just hope readers don’t.

The conclusion that Trinder, et al are simply seeking to validate a preconceived narrative of family courts behaving properly when faced with efforts to get them to enforce their orders is bolstered by the fact that 70% of the cases in which a parent sought a court’s enforcement of access, were due to “contact breaking down completely.” Given that, plus the fact that 86% of all the cases were brought by fathers, we come perilously close to concluding that in fact, Trinder’s sunny outlook on child access is seriously misplaced.

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

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

The Trump administration is urging Congress to “overhaul” child support enforcement practices (Washington Examiner, 8/7/18). The linked-to article is short on specifics, but, from what I can gather, the White House looks like it intends to address some problems, just not those that need addressing.

The White House has called for an overhaul of federal child support enforcement to shift more responsibility for children’s welfare from the government to parents, part of the administration’s larger welfare reform agenda.

In a previously unreported report to congressional Republicans, White House officials recommended requiring parents to cooperate with child support enforcement in order to be eligible for government benefits, including for programs that do not currently have such requirements, such as food stamps and housing aid.

“Cooperate with child support enforcement…” I wonder what that means. I’ll hazard the guess that it means in part cooperating with paternity establishment. The Office of Child Support Enforcement and the state agencies it funds have always been tasked with establishing paternity for children born to a mother who then seeks federal benefits such as those via Temporary Aid to Needy Families. For many years, the rate of paternity establishment was astonishingly low. Mothers simply refused to name the father or claimed they didn’t know.

More recently, rates of paternity establishment have increased, but I suspect there are still mothers who balk at identifying the father of their children. So it looks like the president is arguing that the failure to cooperate in establishing paternity should result in the loss of federal welfare benefits.

What I’d like to know is whether the word “cooperate” includes the concept of identifying the correct father or can it include the behavior we see too often, i.e. that of simply identifying any man as the dad whether he is or not. I doubt that the Administration will require state attorneys general to act ethically in establishing paternity. Again, those AG’s offices all too frequently simply tag some man as the dad and, even when they know he’s not, continue dunning him for money for a child who’s not his. Gabriel Cornejo in Houston is but one example of exactly that.

Given that this move by the Trump Administration looks very much like an effort to cut costs, I strongly suspect that there’s nothing in the move to adequately fund efforts to enforce the visitation rights of non-custodial parents. The paltry $10 million per year currently spent on doing so is entirely inadequate and produces no apparent results.

That’s ironic of course. If the Administration truly wants to “shift more responsibility for children’s welfare from the government to parents,” then enforcing visitation would go a long way toward accomplishing that goal. As Sanford Braver revealed 20 years ago, non-custodial dads who have easy, regular and plentiful access to their kids are far more likely than other dads to pay what they owe. It’s not the money that’s the problem in so many cases, it’s the lack of contact with their children. Rightly or wrongly, those fathers balk at paying a hostile ex to support kids they don’t get to see.

So enforcement of visitation orders would result in more child support paid and fewer mothers asking the federal government for welfare benefits. That would make sense, but if it’s part of the Administration’s plans, the article doesn’t mention it.

There are countless improvements that need to be made to the child support system. Too bad the Trump Administration seems to have addressed none of them.