Author: Super User

March 25, 2020 by Ned Holstein, MD, MS, Founder and Chairman Emeritus, National Parents Organization

As of Tuesday, March 24, far more men than women had died from Covid 19. Yet this has barely been mentioned in the public discourse on the pandemic, and comprehensive data on the subject could not be obtained by CNN reporters.

In almost the only public airing of this issue, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, stated at the White House press briefing last Friday, “From Italy we’re seeing another concerning trend, that the mortality in males seems to be twice in every age group of females.” CNN reached out to Dr. Birx for further comment, but without response to date.

Such a sex difference is very large and carries crucial implications for control of the pandemic. For instance, based on Chinese data, the overall case fatality rate  —  the probability of dying if one contracts the virus  —  is 14.8% among those in their 80’s and older. This statistic has been widely reported and has assumed central importance in discussions on how to control the pandemic.

According to my calculations, this overall number masks a huge sex difference that has been ignored. The case fatality rate for women in their 80’s must be about 8%, while that for men in their 80’s must be about 26%  —  more than three times higher. The risk of death for men in their 80’s who contract the virus is thus considerably higher than the risk of death for people with heart attacks who make it to the hospital.

This is because there are far fewer men in their 80’s than there are women to contract the virus in the first place. Only 38 percent of people in their 80’s are men (U.S. Census Bureau), so it is extraordinary that a minority of the population in this age group can provide two-thirds of the deaths (according to Dr. Birx).

According to CNN reporters Katie Polglase and Gianluca Mezzofiore, the CDC has not responded to CNN’s request for actual numbers of deaths by sex.

Sarah Hawkes is professor of global public health at University College London and co-director of Global Health 50/50, a research institute examining gender inequalities in global public health. She has stated that across many countries, “…there is between a 10% and 90% higher rate of mortality amongst people diagnosed with Covid if they are men compared to if they are women.” She emphasized that the problem is most certainly not an absence of the data, but the failure to collate it.

Hawkes’ colleague, Dr. Kent Buse, co-founder of Global Health 50/50, stated, “What Covid-19 reveals is a classic case of failing to use data for decision making.”

And distinguished bioethicist Arthur Caplan at New York University told CNN, “All data establishing risk, ability to recover, infectivity is crucial in a pandemic.”

The large sex difference in Covid 19 mortality must immediately become part of the public and academic discussions on how to minimize the effects of this pandemic.

Thanks to Katie Polglase and Gianluca Mezzofiore of CNN for quotations 

March 24, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, Board of Directors

I’ve been known to bemoan the fact that there’s so little hard data on custody outcomes in family courts.  What we have is a patchwork of different studies using different methodologies in different states, each of which of course has different laws.  And we have the data maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau.  Now, all those point in one direction.  They all suggest that equal parenting time orders are pretty rare, that mothers are far more likely than fathers to get meaningful time with their kids and that how kids are treated in court depends to a great degree on where they live.  As an NPO study of family courts in Ohio demonstrated, a child in one county may have a good chance of seeing his/her parents equally post-divorce, but the child’s friend three miles away in another county has almost no such chance.

What’s needed is a larger study done in several states with differing laws, differing demographics, differing political inclinations, etc.  As a practical matter, such a study would take a lot of money to conduct because it would require a lot of people pulling and coding a lot of files in family courts.

Still, until such a study is conducted, we make do with what we have, which brings me to this data from Wisconsin Fathers for Children and Families.  All in all, it’s pretty encouraging.

Now there’s no data past 2010, but there’s hope that the state will update the figures this year.  But, as of 2010, 35% of custody cases resulted in an even 50/50 split of parenting time.  That’s up from 16% in 1998.  In 2010, dads received sole custody in 6% of cases, got 25%-49% parenting time in 15% of cases and less than 25% in 42% of cases.  In short, the upside for fathers is pretty good, while the downside is pretty bad.  As many as 42% of fathers receiving less than 25% of parenting time is not a good situation and cannot be justified by their unfitness or bad behavior.  Face it, there’s no way that 42% of the state’s fathers in divorce cases can be that deficient as parents.

I’d like to see that 25%-49% category broken down into at least two and preferably three parts.  When it comes to children’s welfare, the difference between 25% of the time with a parent and 49% is enormous.  So if the majority of the kids that fell between 25% and 49% of their time with their fathers got 25%, then the system of custody and parenting time is deeply flawed.  If, by contrast, they got close to 49% then the system and the kids are much better off.

Meanwhile, those are the numbers for married fathers.  Since about 41% of kids are born to unmarried mothers, that means a lot of fathers are unmarried too.  Unmarried fathers in Wisconsin (as elsewhere) do much, much worse when it comes to parenting time.

So, for example, just 9% of unmarried fathers got 50/50 parenting time while a whopping 81% got less than 25%.  In other words, not being married to the mother of your child is the short route to not having a relationship with that child.  Stated another way, if you’re a man, use the best contraceptive method you can until you get married.

The dramatic difference in parenting time outcomes for married versus unmarried fathers is probably explained by the almost complete control unmarried mothers exercise over unmarried fathers’ parental rights.  In the first place, no jurisdiction requires any woman to inform the father of her child that she’s pregnant with or given birth to his child.  Obviously, married fathers are much more likely to know that information.  And of course the presumption in the law that a child was fathered by the man married to his/her mother makes it far more likely that a family court will grant the father some form of parenting time.

With unmarried fathers, it’s far more difficult to be an active, hands-on dad, and that naturally makes gaining parenting time much harder.  And, without the presumption applicable to married men, unmarried fathers usually have to go through some legal process (depending on the jurisdiction) in order to establish any parental rights at all.  The fact that many men don’t have the money to hire a lawyer, pay the filing fee, pay for the DNA test, etc. in order to establish their rights is just their tough luck.  No jurisdiction requires mothers, whether married or not, to clear those legal hurdles.

Federal and state governments find the money to enforce child support obligations in the most draconian ways.  They should also find the money to help fathers establish and enforce their parental rights.  Until they do, fathers – particularly unmarried ones – will continue to see themselves sidelined in their children’s lives and their children will continue to suffer higher rates of poverty and a range of social and behavioral ills that beset the fatherless.

March 20, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Having misled her readers about the incidence of fathers getting custody of their children in U.K.’s family courts, Guardian editor Sonia Sodha stumbles on to the topic of parental alienation (The Guardian, 3/5/20).  Predictably, she’s no more factual with it than with her previous subject.

Recall that Sodha linked to a study by Harding and Newnham to attempt to buttress her theory that family courts are as likely to give custody to fathers as to mothers (Nuffield Foundation, 5/2015).  The remarkable fact of course is that it does the opposite.  The two researchers were very clear that, overwhelmingly, when fathers got some form of child custody, it was because the mothers with whom they were involved were so deficient as parents that social services organizations all but ordered the dads to seek custody. 

It also shows that, in over half the cases studied, the judges ordered that the fathers should have no overnight time with their children at all.

According to Sodha, that constitutes gender equality in family courts.  Amazing, but true.

And so it is with her take on parental alienation.  As with custody, Sodha has nothing new to say.  Hers are the standard tropes of the anti-father movement that crop up like toxic weeds now and then.  So naturally she elides the differences between parental alienation syndrome and parental alienation.  And of course she’s at pains to pretend that claims of alienation are only made by fathers against mothers and never vice versa.

That of course is simply untrue, as even a cursory glance at the science on PA would have revealed had she bothered to do so.  Or, if reading’s to hard for her, she could have just picked up the phone and called a mental health expert who’s schooled in diagnosing PA.  But needless to say, Sodha didn’t do that either.  Her aim is to mislead, not to learn and disseminate facts.

Then there’s Sodha’s refusal to admit that PA even happens.  Never mind the fact that mental health professionals all over the world have seen it, diagnosed it, testified and published about it.  And never mind the fact that any family lawyer who’s been around for as long as a few years, has seen it and probably more than once.  No, to Sodha the very idea of PA is nothing more than a scheme hatched by clever dads to wrest custody from “protective” mothers.  Nowhere in her article does she admit that some claims by mothers of domestic abuse are fabricated to gain an advantage in the custody case.  Nowhere does Sodha admit that many claims of PA, whether by mothers or fathers, are objectively true.  And nowhere does she admit that PA is what it is – child abuse.

And, speaking of abuse, nowhere does Sodha admit that women sometimes assault their husbands.  For her, domestic violence is a one-way street; only men are perpetrators and only women and children are their victims.

Does Sodha quote a single person with a point of view different from hers?  She does not.  Does she quote from any source of any kind in opposition to her ideas?  Nope.  Does she make even the slightest pretense that her piece is balanced?  Not a chance.

I don’t know if it’s nonsense like this that’s caused The Guardian’s readership to decline to almost nothing over recent years, but my guess is it could be.  Sodha’s piece is so dramatically at odds with well-established facts and so bigoted in its opinions that I can easily imagine readers abandoning the rag as the simple agitprop it so often is.

If we really care about children, we’ll all admit that, sadly, parental alienation exists, that neither sex has a monopoly on the behavior and that courts must be educated in the nature and uses of PA.  We need to do all we can to ensure that judges get right cases in which allegations of PA arise, that they can tell the difference between true PA and PA allegations used only for their impact on the case at hand.  Until we do those things, we’re not doing our best for children.

Sonia Sodha and others like her mislead readers about parental alienation.  As such, they demonstrate that they care little or nothing about the sometimes-terrible damage done to children by PA and, in so doing, make common cause with alienators and child abusers.  It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s an accurate one.

March 19, 2020 by Don Hubin, Ph.D., Chair, National Board of Directors

Parents around the country are struggling with the disruptions to life caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Increasing numbers of schools and daycare facilities are closing—many for the duration of the school year. This poses unprecedented challenges for all parents of young children. And these challenges are magnified when there is only one parent actively involved in the children’s day-to-day lives.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016 more than 60% of families with both parents living together were ones where both parents worked. More than 55% of such families with children under 6 years old were dual income families. This means that, in the majority of such cases, there isn’t the “reserve capacity” of one stay-at-home parent to take on the additional tasks of full-time child care.

These families are scrambling to find ways to manage the novel challenges facing parents around the world. In some cases, these parents will now be working from home which will allow (require!) these parents to juggle child care and work. But many are engaged in work that cannot be done from home. In these cases the juggling of responsibilities presents even greater challenges.

But now consider the plight of children whose parents do not live together. Census Bureau statistics show that more than a quarter of America’s children live in single-parent households. The vast majority of these children are subject to a parenting arrangement that places them in the care of one parent for the vast majority of the time and allows them only weekend “visitation” with their other parent.

How do the parents of these children handle the need to take over fulltime care of their child(ren) and continue to work? Even if they are now working from home, they’re doing double duty. And matters are even worse if they must leave home to work. Schools and other child care facilities are closed, relatives might not be available to take on daily child care work. These parents will face extremely difficult choices.

Some children whose parents live apart are more fortunate. Their parents have been sharing child rearing responsibilities; neither has been sidelined. Both parents have been involved in the day-to-day child care responsibilities that constitute parenting.

Things won’t be easy for these families either. But because they have greater “reserve capacity,” they will have more resiliency. If one parent cannot work from home, perhaps the other can and, for the duration of the current situation, the children’s schedules can be adjusted to allow for this. Even if neither parent is able to work from home, having two engaged parents provides greater flexibility and more options for dealing with the challenge. For example, there is a greater chance that one or both parents can change their work schedule to cover the additional child care time needed.

The disruption in families’ lives caused by the coronavirus pandemic poses challenges to all families with children. But those challenges are exacerbated for those families where one parent has been marginalized in the children’s lives. There are many lessons to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic. But one we would do well to take to heart is that keeping both parents fully engaged in raising their children is protective for children; it provides an extra source of support for the children, the value of which becomes even more apparent in times like these.

March 17, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

This continues from my previous piece on Guardian editor Sonia Sodha’s, article claiming that it’s a “fallacy” that fathers aren’t treated equally by British family courts.  To that threadbare claim she attempts to recruit a 2015 study conducted by Profs. Maebh Harding and Annika Newnham.  Her effort fails miserably on many counts as I described last time.  It also fails when Sodha tries to convince readers that, even when DV is proven against fathers, they still get custody.

Harding and Newnham examined 174 divorce and custody cases in England and Wales.  In a grand total of nine of them did a father who was found to have committed DV get custody.  Is that shocking?  Outrageous? 

Nope.

For one thing, the study’s definition of domestic abuse is, to use its word, “broad.”  It includes physical violence, but also “allegations of any controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour including physical violence, sexual violence, and emotional abuse.”  So “domestic abuse” can mean almost anything.  Did Dad try, on more than one occasion to get Mom to spend less?  To refrain from spending so much time with the heroin addicts down the street?  If so, he’s abusive.

More importantly, the study is crystal clear that the reason Dad got custody over Mom is that Mom was so defective a parent (and a human being), that the courts had no choice.  As I showed last time, that is the same reason fathers got custody in non-DV cases.  It’s also true in cases of abuse.

There were five cases in which a father who’d committed DV got sole custody.  Here’s what Harding and Newnham say about them.

In two of the cases it was feared that the mothers would not adequately protect the children from dangerous third parties, in two cases the mothers had serious mental health issues. In one case, the children had come home and found their mother in bed with another man; they were now staunchly opposed to any kind of direct contact. In addition there was problematic drug or alcohol use in relation to three of the mothers.

In the other four cases, a shared parenting order was issued.  In all those cases, the parents’ relationship was characterized by high conflict and dueling claims of abuse, unfitness, etc.  The courts in those cases opted for shared residence in an effort to ameliorate parental conflict.

Now, in 86 of the cases examined by Harding and Newnham, there were allegations of DV, 69 by the mother against the father, three by the father against the mother and 14 in which each accused the other.  In 45 cases, the allegation was considered to have been proven, although the study makes no mention of which of the cases were and which weren’t.  So it’s impossible to know what the percentage of proven cases against a father also resulted in his gaining sole or shared custody.  Whatever the case, the nine cases in which fathers did get some form of parenting time, despite a finding of DV, are hardly cause for alarm.

In short, virtually the only way fathers got custody in the Harding/Newnham study is if Mom were extremely deficient as a parent or a person.  Needless to say, mothers bore no such burden in achieving custody.

In fact, the most robust finding of the study, the one the authors call the best predictor of custodial outcomes, is the status quo ante.  That is, whoever the primary caregiver to the child was before the application for custody/parenting time was filed is the parent to whom the court gives sole or primary custody.  That of course is usually Mom.  That also fails to conform to the dictates of the science on children’s well-being and parenting time post-divorce.  The simple fact is that mothers tend to do the lion’s share of parenting and fathers the lion’s share of paid work.  For this, mothers are rewarded and fathers punished by family courts, regardless of the science on the child’s best interests.

Harding and Newnham correctly point out that the courts are about equally likely to give custody to primary-caregiver dads as to primary-caregiver moms, but the facts remain that (a) the practice contradicts applicable science and (b) fathers still end up with far less custody than do mothers.

Finally, there’s the fact that the researchers candidly admit that the study is in no way representative of Britain’s family courts.  That’s because the cohort studied was too small and no effort was made to ensure that it was representative of fathers, mothers, what they request of British courts or how the courts respond to those requests.  This study just is what it is and nothing more.  It can’t be relied on to describe British family courts or whether fathers do or don’t get a fair hearing in them.

But that’s precisely what Sodha does.  Of course she does.  She takes a study that’s inapplicable to the population at large and assumes it is.  She uses a study that demonstrates how unequally fathers are treated by family courts and cites it to show they’re treated equally.

She’s not the first.  That was one of my points back in 2015 when the study first came out.  The article reporting on it then did what Sodha does now – pretends that the Harding/Newnham study shows that fathers and mothers are equal in family courts. 

I suppose that’s what people do who oppose shared parenting, but who don’t have real arguments to make to support their cause.

But Sodha’s still not finished misrepresenting what fathers face in family courts.  More on that next time.

March 16, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

When I first opened this article, at the bottom of the page there appeared a highlighted box with the title “When Disinformation is Rampant…” (Guardian, 3/5/20).  To me it read like the punchline to a good joke; I literally laughed out loud.  Of course the box is The Guardian’s way of trying to drum up donations for its rapidly declining brand, but, given the article that preceded it, it was hilarious.  That article, by Guardian editor Sonia Sodha, is as good an example of disinformation as you’re likely to find.  Sadly, the box – and the punchline – now seem to be gone.

The title says it all – “The idea that family courts are biased against men is a dangerous fallacy.”  After that, those of us who toil in the family court reform vineyard know what’s coming, and Sodha doesn’t disappoint.  First she denies that family court outcomes disproportionately treat fathers worse than mothers.  More on that later.  Next she claims (of course she does) that, when mothers allege domestic violence by fathers, the fathers are given custody.  And finally we’re informed that parental alienation syndrome is “junk science.” 

In short, Sodha repeats the usual talking points the anti-dad crowd have been relying on for years.  Nothing new here.

So, let’s return to that first point, i.e. that really fathers get an even break in family courts.

[A] review of published court decisions found that they promote as much contact as possible with fathers, even in cases of proven domestic violence. 

Notice the weasel words “as much contact as possible.”  That of course can mean anything.  Is one day per year of contact between a father and his child all that’s “possible?”  If so, the court did its job, according to Sodha, if no one else.

But her real dishonesty comes from her use of the link.  It’s to a study conducted by Profs. Maebh Harding and Annika Newnham of the universities of Warwick and Reading respectively.  I posted about that study here and here when it first came out in 2015.  Put simply, it gives the lie to anyone who claims fathers in the U.K. get an even shake from family court judges.

Harding and Newnham want to convince readers that courts treat fathers and mothers equally, so they resort to a couple of remarkable intellectual conceits to accomplish the task.  First, they look at what fathers and mothers ask for in family courts and compare that to what the courts order.  That would be sensible except that their definition of “success” in court, i.e. the court’s ordering something requested, is so absurdly broad as to guarantee them their preferred finding.

So, if Dad asks the court for 50/50 parenting time and the court gives him every other weekend, according to Harding and Newnham, he won.  According to Dad and most sensible people, he lost, but not to the two researchers.  The fact that the fathers in their study got any form of overnight contact with their kids in fewer than half the cases qualifies as “success” according to the authors.  Here’s a piece I wrote on that and that links to an excellent article by Glen Poole eviscerating Harding and Newnham’s work.

Second, the two researchers quite honestly note that, on the occasions when dads get sole or primary custody, it’s because Mom is clearly unfit for the job due to a variety of shortcomings such as mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, incarceration, violence, etc.

As highlighted in Chapter 2, there was a clear correlation between the presence of very serious child welfare concerns and applications by fathers for residence orders. 26 out of 32 applications by fathers for residence orders featured alleged child welfare concerns. There was what we classified as significant Local Authority involvement in 15 of these cases. This included 10 cases in which the fathers sought residence orders on the advice of the Local Authority who had placed the child with them and 4 cases where the fathers sought residence at their own initiative but the Local Authority approved of the proposal.

In short, Harding and Newnham’s (and now Sodha’s) claim that fathers are treated equally in custody cases founders on the researchers’ own findings.  Fathers dared to seek custody only when they knew they had an almost certain probability of winning.  They were so certain that, in 15 of the 26 cases, local authorities basically told them they needed to have the child.

So the claim that fathers succeed well in family courts is entirely an artifact of the methodology used by Harding and Newnham.  They “define” “success” so broadly that almost anything can qualify and clearly state, but then refuse to notice, the selection bias of their own study.

Needless to say, Sodha isn’t interested anything that would contradict her thesis, so she ignores the facts that make the Harding/Newnham data a nullity as regards equality in family courts.

But Sodha is far from done.  More on that next time.

March 11, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

As two equal parenting bills make their way through the Florida Legislature, this article came out against reform of child custody and parenting time (Sun-Sentinel, 2/28/20).  And guess what.  It’s written by a family lawyer.  Of course it is.  Mark Sessums is the President-elect of the Florida chapter of the American Association of Matrimonial Lawyers.  That means he gains pretty close to all his income from family law cases, which in turn means he profits from clients who fight.

Unsurprisingly, Sessums has nothing new to say about child custody or parenting time.  All his arguments are retreads and not a one of them withstands even casual scrutiny.

First, he trots out the tired old claim that existing law is all about the best interests of children, but HB 843 puts parents first. 

What utter nonsense.  Let’s take the first part of his argument first.  It’s true that Florida law, like that of every other state, requires judges to act in the best interests of children when deciding custody and parenting time.  The problem is that they don’t do it very often.  Why?

In the first place, judges aren’t trained in what forms of custody and parenting time are beneficial to kids.  Judges are lawyers, not child psychologists.  Doubtless they try to get their orders right, but the sad fact is that they don’t know the science that strongly militates in favor of equal parenting post-divorce.  Tellingly, in other states, family lawyers have strenuously objected to judges being taught that science.  So it’s no surprise that judges often make orders that aren’t in kids’ interests.

Second, as economist Paul Millar has pointed out, the single best predictor of any custody case is the sex of the parent.  Mothers get custody and fathers don’t is about as hard and fast a rule as exists in American law.  And, as Millar also points out, there’s no correlation between the sex of the parent and better outcomes for the child.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there has been no statistically-significant change in child custody for at least the past 27 years.  In 1993, 84% of custodial parents were mothers and today it’s about 81%.  So no Mr. Sessums, judges aren’t acting in children’s best interests, irrespective of what the law says they’re supposed to do.

And then there’s the fact that the “best interests of the child” is such a legally vague concept as to probably be unconstitutional.  After all, who has ever defined it or even tried to?  I defy anyone to come up with a definition that could serve as a reasonable guide to making custody and parenting time orders.  And if the very concept of the child’s best interests is that hard to pin down, how does Sessums figure that family court judges in the state are getting it right in all the custody cases they hear?

And then there’s his threadbare claim that equal parenting is all about parents.  It’s not.  It’s about children.  It’s also about science.  It takes cognizance of the fact that, as long as both parents are fit and non-abusive, equal parenting time is the best arrangement for children.  Some 62 different studies demonstrate the fact, including massive studies done in Sweden that conclude that equal parenting is second only to two married biological parents at promoting child well-being.

Equal parenting is good for kids, fathers and mothers.  The only ones who suffer are family lawyers who see their earnings diminished by the reduced conflict equal parenting time tends to engender.

Sessums was already scraping the bottom of the barrel when he came up with this outworn and much debunked claim.

A study in Massachusetts found that fathers who actively sought primary or joint custody obtained it more than 70 percent of the time.

Yes, and guess why they did.  When fathers get custody it’s usually because the mother in question is so deficient for one reason or another – she’s in prison, on drugs, alcohol-dependent, violent, abusive, mentally/emotionally unequal to the task, etc. – that they figure they have a chance.  In short, the study suffers from selection bias on a grand scale.  The same held true for a similar study done in the U.K.

Having failed so miserably, Sessums moves on to just making stuff up.

Additionally, this bill will roll back important protections against abusive or controlling former spouses.

No, actually it won’t.  The bill makes precisely zero changes to existing law regarding the impact of domestic violence and child abuse on custody outcomes.  That of course is as it should be.  Equal parenting is the right arrangement as long as parents are fit for duty.  When they’re not, other arrangements must be made.  HB 843 in no way hinders that.

I can only hope that Mark Sessums makes better arguments in court than he does in the newspaper.

March 9, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

The Supreme Court of Ohio has ruled that a father’s consent to the adoption of his child is not necessary if he has missed as much as a single child support payment, or even a partial one.  In so doing, the majority of the court ignored the plain wording of the applicable statute, a fact noted by two dissenting justices.

The child’s father and mother divorced in 2013.  She received sole custody and he was ordered to pay support for the child who’s identified only as A.C.B.  In 2015, the mother married another man who wanted to adopt A.C.B.  The stepfather filed a petition to do so, alleging that A.C.B.’s father’s consent to the adoption wasn’t necessary.  The salient portion of the applicable Ohio statute requires the father’s consent unless a court

finds by clear and convincing evidence that the parent has failed without justifiable cause to provide more than de minimis contact with the minor or to provide for the maintenance and support of the minor as required by law or judicial decree for a period of at least one year immediately preceding either the filing of the adoption petition or the placement of the minor in the home of the petitioner.

Apparently, the “de minimus contact” part of the law wasn’t at issue.  So the only question was whether the father had provided support for the child within the year preceding the filing of the petition for adoption.  And that question was answered in the affirmative.  In fact, the father had made a child support payment within the week prior to the petition’s filing.

The plain wording of the statute and its interpretation in previous cases therefore required that no adoption could go forward without the father’s consent, which he refused to give.  That should have closed the case, but it didn’t.  The majority found a way to ignore the obvious requirements of the law and ruled that the father’s consent wasn’t necessary.  How?  By ignoring the plain words of the law and the rule of stare decisis that requires a court’s adherence to precedent.  As one dissenting justice pointed out,

The majority, however, reads that one-year duration requirement out of the statute when it holds that a parent does not preserve the right to withhold consent to an adoption unless he or she strictly complies with the child-support obligation and makes each and every child-support payment throughout the year.

And, as the other dissenting justice made clear, the law in Ohio now is that, if a non-custodial parent misses a single support payment or even a part of one, his/her child can be placed for adoption and the parent will have no power to object.  Child protective caseworkers and adoption agencies are, I assure you, taking note.

Now, it must be admitted that the facts of this case encouraged the justices to rule the way they did.  In the first place, it’s a stepparent adoption, not one by a stranger.  Therefore, the adoption system isn’t forcing adoption on one child who doesn’t need it while denying adoption to a child who does.  More importantly, shortly after their divorce, the father moved back to his home country of Kosovo.  He had a good job and could easily have made the support payments, but didn’t, a failure even he called “inexcusable.”

Still, the law is the law, or should be.  This is a case in which the justices decided what outcome they wanted to reach and did so, irrespective of everything else.  The real problem of course is that, as a state Supreme Court case, it’s binding precedent on all lower courts.  Next time, the facts won’t so clearly militate in favor of adoption, but trial courts will be encouraged to do what the Supreme Court did, i.e. ignore the statutory language that clearly requires an entire year with no support before a parent’s consent can be dispensed with.

Meanwhile, a very wise person (whom I just happen to know) points out that, for ages we’ve been hammered by the concept that child support and child access are two separate things, that failure to pay support doesn’t impact one’s right to see one’s child and that the denial of access doesn’t mean the non-custodial parent can suspend support.  That’s all fair enough and sensible.

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that the Ohio Legislature and the Supreme did just the opposite when it comes to adoption.  When adoption’s at issue, then a non-custodial parent’s rights are entirely bound up in their payment (or lack thereof) of support.  The parent’s rights depend entirely, not just on paying child support, but on paying all of it and on time.

Which thimble is the pea under?  Who knows?  Ohio keeps us guessing.

March 6, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an 8,100-word essay in The Atlantic (The Atlantic, 3/2020).  In response, the Institute for Family Studies sponsored a symposium to discuss Brooks’ work (IF Studies, 2/10/20).  There were eight respondents, including Brad Wilcox, Kay Hymowitz, Andrew Cherlin and others.  All put together, their responses totaled more words than Brooks’ original piece.  Then Brooks took about 1,000 words to respond to the symposium’s responses to his article (IF Studies, 2/24/20).

With that small blizzard of words, you might think the august writers would have covered the waterfront.  You might think that they’d have pretty well exhausted Brooks’ thesis that “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.”  But if you thought that, you’d be wrong.  Completely wrong.

That’s because not a single one of those nine, highly intelligent, highly knowledgeable people noticed the proverbial elephant in the room.  Oh, they know plenty about the sociology of the nuclear family and something about its history and their writings are well worth reading.  Plus, some of the symposium members agree with Brooks and some, like Hymowitz and Wilcox, pointedly do not.  So, taken all together, the original article, plus the symposium, plus Brooks’ response produced a healthily wide range of thought and opinion.

And yet the elephant is still there, unnoticed by the lot of them.  Amazing but true.

The elephant of course is law and public policy.  If the nuclear family is under fire, it’s because we’re the ones shooting at it.  If we were to stop doing so, maybe it could stand up and march forward as the single most valuable asset any civilized society possesses.

But the scientists who diligently track the trends in what our families consist of, who lives in poverty and who doesn’t, what benefits children and countless other things all (along with Brooks) seem to accept on faith that whatever is happening regarding the nuclear family is some sort of natural phenomenon, like the weather.  The idea that our elected representatives and policy-makers produced the decline of the nuclear family and continue to do so on a daily basis, plainly never occurred to any of them.  The closest any of them got to that screamingly obvious fact is this from Hymowitz:

The disaster confronting less prosperous Americans is not the nuclear family, but the erosion of socio-economic conditions that help them sustain lasting pair bonds. To do something about the disconnection and instability infecting American life, we need to start there. 

Yes, dear reader, that’s the extent of it.  That fly-by is the nearest thing Brooks and the symposium authors got to identifying a cause of the problem and suggesting ways in which to address it.

How is it possible that not one of them managed to consider public policy and legal initiatives like no-fault divorce, child protective services, the adoption industry, child support, alimony, popular culture and more that daily, consistently militate against nuclear family formation and maintenance?  How did they fail to notice the dogged resistance, by family lawyers and the DV industry, to healthy alternatives like equally shared parenting?  How could they miss the fact that, year after year, state legislatures stymie shared parenting reform?  Brooks said he’s spent the last three years travelling the country talking to people about his subject.  How did he manage to not speak to a single person who’s concerned about family courts?

I can’t say exactly what our society would look like if we made a few sensible, science-backed reforms aimed at buttressing the nuclear family, but I can say that, at the very least, we need to make those reforms and find out.  Until we do, people like Brooks need to open their eyes and notice that huge grey beast that takes up so much space.  Nothing about the decline of nuclear families is inevitable.  We created it and we can do something about it.

Brooks calls himself a Conservative, but there was a time when conservatives valued taking responsibility for one’s wrongful behavior.  Well, our public policy elites have been behaving badly for a long time now.  They’ve unleashed their dogs on the family and the family has suffered.  Any conservative worth his salt would excoriate those elites for the widespread damage they’ve done to kids, parents and society generally.  Not Brooks.  His “solution” to the problems faced by the nuclear family is to wanly propose that other forms of “family,” i.e. groups of unrelated people coming together to try to do what families always have, are an acceptable substitute.  They’re not and never have been, as the many attempts over the centuries at creating Utopia amply demonstrate.

The nuclear family may be under fire, it may even be retreating, but it’s not going far.  That’s partly because of biology.  The biological attachments between biological parents and their children are what make the nuclear family and what mean it’s here to stay.  Children do better with both biological parents caring for them and most parents know it.  Plus of course, humans are pair bonders, a fact noted by Hymowitz.  That, plus their parent-child bonds mean the nuclear family is now and will continue to be the bedrock of society.

The only remaining question is how to make society more conducive to the formation and maintenance of those families.  A lot of people have a lot of good ideas about how to do that.

Too bad David Brooks isn’t one of them.