Author: Super User

March 5, 2020 by Lori Grover, NCM,  Chair of Rhode Island NPO and Divorce Mediator

Read Part I here.
Read Part II here.

For kids, having a high-conflict parent redefines their childhoods and changes their adult lives forever. But even when a non-high-conflict parent understands personality disorders and high-conflict behavior, it doesn’t change who their child’s other parent is, and they and their children are the ones who will need to learn how to manage life with a HCP. 

Divorce may seem like the obvious solution to eradicating the chaos and drama of a high-conflict spouse, but when there are children, it not that easy. I often talk with people who live with on-going abuse from a former spouse for years after their divorce is final and struggle to protect their children from circumstances beyond their control. 

In many cases HCPs use children as tools to control and manipulate their ex. From false allegations of abuse and claims that the other parent incapable of caring for their child, to refusing or limiting the other parent’s time with their child – there’s no limit to how far a HCP will go to intimidate their spouse to get what they want. These parents may wear the mask of a loving and protective parent in public, but the true motive is to use the child for their own needs. These parents don’t want the day-to-day responsibilities of parenting, they want the attention that comes from buying the most expensive birthday gift and an audience to hear their remarkable stories of accomplishments, whether real or perceived. As I explain later in this article, narcissists don’t see their child as an independent person; their child is an extension of themselves.  While this concept may be hard to understand, it explains why high-conflict parents say and do things to their children most of us wouldn’t and why trying to get them to modify their behavior is futile.

While most people know something about their spouse’s behavior isn’t right and may suspect a personality disorder, the depth of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is seldom understood. It’s also important to understand that certain criteria must be met for someone to be classified as having NPD.  The ability to manage any situation requires thoroughly understanding it and Narcissism is one of the most complex disorders that impacts divorce. 

Children are more resilient than we give them credit for, but they have little defense against a disordered parent and the long-term effects can be far-reaching. Children of a narcissistic parent are never seen as who they are. Even before birth, the Narcissistic parent unknowingly projects their flaws onto their child. Once the child is born, the disordered parent sees their children as they see themselves: unlovable and defective, and they criticize and attack the child without recognizing that they themselves are the target.

The long-term effects of narcissistic parent conditions children to please others without healthy boundaries, perceive their own shortcomings or mistakes as something to be ashamed of and believe the only way to be accepted is to conform. Low self-esteem and lack of confidence, co-dependency or unhealthy attachments, delayed stages of development, self-criticism, thinking oneself invisible and difficulty forming relationships are all potential risks to children of a high-conflict parent. In the case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, some children may take on the personality traits of the disordered parent if that parent is the primary influence on the child from an early age. And while every child will be impacted by a high-conflict parent to some degree, the effects will vary based on the support they receive from their other parent, extended family and their external environment. 

The best lawyers and a well drafted divorce settlement will never control the behavior or drama of an HCP, but there are steps that can be taken during the divorce that may better insulate the children from conflict and strengthen the other spouse’s rights and legal recourse in the future.  A parenting plan, which defines parental roles & responsibilities, vacations, how child expenses are paid and other details, is essential whether your family court requires one or not. Every case I mediate involving children includes a parenting plan. When I work with a high-conflict case, the parenting plan is specific, detailed and tailored to the couple’s relationship and level of conflict. My goal is to eliminate as much ambiguity as possible for the high-conflict parent to take advantage of and clearly address details most attorneys and family courts never do.  Doing that can avoid repeated court appearances. Unfortunately, since most attorneys and family court systems aren’t equipped to properly manage high-conflict divorces, most parents never have the opportunity to take preventative and proactive steps to better manage their divorce and their co-parenting relationship with their ex.  

Here are a few things to remember. 

-Divorcing a HCP requires planning and working with qualified professionals, there are no shortcuts and the professionals you hire should have experience with HCPs.

-You don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression if you go to court.

-Never make decisions out of frustration, being coerced or because you just want your divorce to be over.

-Don’t allow details to be worked out after the divorce is final.

-Insist on creating a parenting plan and having it included in your final decree.

The words ‘personality disorder’ and specifically ‘NPD’ are rarely uttered in family court and unless a child is demonstrably at risk of abuse, courts are unlikely to restrict contact between children and parents. Handling your divorce properly and educating yourself are the best lines of defense to help your child handle their relationship with a high-conflict parent.

March 4, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

The final section of David Brooks’ piece in The Atlantic is painful to read (The Atlantic, 3/2020).  Almost every sentence made me want to scream and tear my hair.  For example, he recites that, during the earliest days of our country, when Europeans landed in what’s now New England, some of them went to live with Native American tribes, but essentially none of the indigenous peoples lived with the Europeans.  Brooks’ conclusion?

When you read such accounts, you can’t help but wonder whether our civilization has somehow made a gigantic mistake.

Well, Brooks may wonder that, but the rest of us who value things like Mozart and living beyond the age of 35 don’t wonder at all.  Does Brooks have any idea of how people in hunter-gatherer societies lived?  He should look it up sometime.  If he does, he’ll no longer engage in such nonsensical musings.

But the real point of his second section is to acquaint us with some of the things a few people are doing to attempt to replace the nuclear family.  These are people who, for whatever reason, have decided that they need some sort of community or surrogate family, usually because the one they had doesn’t provide for those needs.  And indeed, there are some interesting projects underway in which mostly unrelated individuals are coming together to forge new living arrangements.

Good for them.  I’m always impressed with human ingenuity, our amazing ability to respond to new circumstances in creative and sometimes very productive, healthy ways.  Maybe some of the ones Brooks mentions will bear the type of fruit they (and Brooks) hope for.

Or maybe not.  After all, none of the groups Brooks mentions has been around longer than a few years.  He eagerly disposes of the nuclear family despite the fact that it seems to be making a comeback and that more people live in nuclear families than not.  The nuclear family has been around in one version or another for millennia; the groups Brooks cites, a matter of a few years.  So what makes him think they’ll have any staying power?  He doesn’t let on.  What makes him think that kids raised in those groups will fare as well as kids raised by Mom and Dad?  Not a word.

That’s no surprise due to the simple fact that, whatever the good intentions of the people in those groups, no one can say whether they’ll last or even be worth the effort.  That Brooks cites these groups as, in some way, an alternative to nuclear families positively shouts that he’s grasping at straws.

Then there’s this:

Nations where a fifth of the people live alone, like Denmark and Finland, are a lot richer than nations where almost no one lives alone, like the ones in Latin America or Africa. Rich nations have smaller households than poor nations. The average German lives in a household with 2.7 people. The average Gambian lives in a household with 13.8 people.

We’ve know this for a long time.  Fertility rates drop as a society’s prosperity rises.  But Brooks doesn’t draw that simple, obvious conclusion.  No, for him

First, the market wants us to live alone or with just a few people. 

No, actually the “market” “wants” no such thing, or indeed anything at all.  That’s not what markets do.  And in any case, they have markets in Gambia too, just like we do here in the U.S.  If the “market” is what living arrangements are all about, why are they different in Gambia than here?  The obvious answer is that, by comparison to the U.S., Gambia is a poor country and poor people tend to live together so that the cost of living is spread among more individuals.  I shouldn’t have to explain this, but apparently I do.

Brooks points out that Africans who come to this country experience a wrenching sense of loneliness.  Gone are the extended families in which they lived, only to be replaced by single-family houses that are mostly empty during the day because the kids are in school and Mom and Dad are at work.  What he neglects to mention is the fact that the flow of people wanting permanent residence between Africa and the U.S. is one-way in this direction.  If our way of life is so alienating and alienated, why do so many people seek it out?

But the main problem with Brooks’ piece is its overarching sense that the decline of the nuclear family is somehow a natural phenomenon, much like the weather.  It’s not.  It’s a product partly of technological advances, but mostly of concrete decisions made to public policy.  Every day we don’t have shared parenting laws is a day we attack the nuclear family.  Every day we refuse to reform alimony and child support laws is a day we encourage divorce and encourage marriage.  Every day we maintain our adoption laws is a day we push fathers further from their children.  Every day we offer child protective agencies cash incentives for taking children from their parents, placing them in foster care and having them adopted is a day we damage families.

And every day that public figures from presidents to priests fail to force the public narrative to address the value of intact families is a day we miss an opportunity to make this society better.

Public policy isn’t the answer to everything that ails the American family, but it’s far more than anything else.  And whatever its contribution, there’s simply no excuse for doing nothing.  If we did everything we could to strengthen and improve families and some of them were still at risk, at least we could say we’d done what we could.  As things stand now, we can’t even pretend that we’re beginning to take on the single most important social problem of our time.

David Brooks passes for a conservative, at least at the New York Times.  There was a time when conservatives valued taking responsibility for one’s own actions.  So it’s remarkable that Brooks, in an article of over 8,000 words, expends not a single one of them on the many things policy makers have done to damage that bedrock of any healthy society – the nuclear family.

March 3, 2020 by Lori Grover, NCM,  Chair of Rhode Island NPO and Divorce Mediator

Read Part I here.

Entitlement. A hallmark characteristic of high-conflict personalities (HCPs) is the belief that they’re entitled to more of everything than anyone else. The assertive or even aggressive nature of these personalities is a mask they wear to hide the deep insecurity and lack of self-esteem that exists at the deepest levels of themselves. Most people in relationships with people with these personalities never understand this deep void in their spouse, parent, sibling or coworker. Instead, their experience is one of confusion, fear, abuse and in many cases, an unknowing enabler. The impenetrable psychological walls they build and their persona of grandeur are mechanisms HCPs use to control and manipulate their environment whether it’s their spouse, child or others. Chaos in the lives of these personalities is as essential to them as having air to breathe. 

When there’s smoke, there’s fire. According to the largest study ever conducted by US National Institutes of Health on personality disorders, about 10 percent of the population have either Narcissistic or Bipolar Disorder or both. Among those who met the criteria for BPD, 53 percent were women and 47 percent were men. Among those who met the criteria for NPD, 62 percent were men and 38 percent were women. Among people who met the criteria for one of these disorders, nearly 40 percent met the criteria for both. Such people may appear charming, quite social and very down to earth with a great personality. This is the same mask most high conflict personalities wear in public, but people close to them live with someone quite different. If you blame yourself for not seeing the signs sooner, don’t. These disorders are difficult to diagnose and their behaviors often aren’t apparent until months after a relationship begins.  

HCPs assess everyone they meet, like auditioning actors for a play, to determine their personality and the value that person can provide. The only attachments they form are to people who are compassionate, sensitive and caring or those who are vulnerable because they are easy to manipulate. What everyone who’s been in a relationship with a HCP understands, is that the person they came to know is not the same person they met at the beginning of the relationship. Once HCP’s are comfortable in a relationship, the mask comes off and their true personalities are exposed. The duality of these personalities is disturbing and makes divorcing a high conflict personality so difficult. 

Dealing with difficult divorces today is less about legal issues and more about handling difficult personalities. HCPs don’t like negotiating because it interferes with the power and control they need to maintain. Regardless of who initiates a divorce, the HCP will always make their spouse the target of their abuse and their behavior will be predictably unpredictable. HCP’s react to divorcing in one of two ways: either they hire an aggressive attorney and begin a full-on assault on their spouse, or they agree to participate in mediation because they believe the lack of legal authority will allow them to control the outcome. In either case the HCP is looking to gain an ally. Since most attorneys lack the ability to recognize these personality disorders and manage them appropriately, most HCPs find the ally they’re looking for which marks the beginning of a long, difficult journey.

In reality, HCPs aren’t as concerned about the financial or logistical outcome of a divorce, as they are about protecting their public persona and hurting or punishing their spouse. This is the intent behind the lies and drama they create, which often works well for them and, unfortunately, to their advantage in court. Just like at the beginning of a new relationship, HCPs display their best personality for the court and when their spouses understandably react to defend themselves, they become the ones who look unreasonable, disorganized and even irrational. These personalities have the energy and will to play out this type of drama for as long as the court will allow. They aren’t concerned about the consequences of their behavior on their own life nor do they care about the impact their behavior will have on the lives of their spouse or children.

As a mediator who works with high-conflict divorce cases, I have seen mediation create much better outcomes in shorter periods of time. My success with high conflict divorces isn’t because I’m special, it’s the result of my ability to understand these disorders and manage them appropriately. But skill and management aren’t the only factors that contribute to making these divorces easier. What’s equally important, yet many spouses of HCPs are never told, is that specific modifications to their behavior can have a big impact on their relationship with their high conflict spouse during and after a divorce.

The behavior of a high-conflict personality doesn’t change, but, changing how you interact with them can make a big difference.

In my next article, I’ll talk about co-parenting with a HCP and the impact of these personalities on children.

Lori A. Grover is a Nationally Certified Divorce Mediator in private practice in Rhode Island.   

March 2, 2020 by Robert Franklin,JD, Member, National Board of Directors

This article by New York Times columnist David Brooks is well worth reading (The Atlantic, March, 2020).  It provides a huge amount of information and a point of view that demands attention.  At the same time, Brooks misses a lot.

His thesis is the family or, more precisely, its decline.  Brooks sketches (very lightly) the history of the family and finds that the typical living arrangement for most people during most times has been that of the extended family.  That of course is generally true.  For countless reasons, extended families – mothers, fathers, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, nieces, nephews, cousins – lived together.  That provided a certain security for all involved.  If one person got sick, there was someone with the time to care for him.  If one person became disabled and couldn’t work, others took up the slack.

Plus, as the social capital theory of child well-being has it, all those relatives made different perspectives on the world, different skills (Uncle John makes really good shoes!) and different resources available to kids and in fact to everyone.

The extended family proved over many centuries to be a pretty stable and competent way of living.

But…

Brooks sets up the extended family and the nuclear family in opposition to each other, as if the one had nothing to do with the other, as if we can have one or the other but not both.  I doubt he actually believes that, but he writes as if he does.  Indeed the title to his piece is “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.”  The simple truth is that, for all times, the nuclear family was, well, the nucleus of the extended family.  Where did all those aunts, uncles and grandparents come from, after all?  They were present because of one thing – their relationship to Mom, Dad and the kids who made up the nuclear family.

More importantly, Brooks nowhere seems to grasp that the nuclear family, of which he’s more than a little dismissive, now exists apart from the extended family because of our great success as an economy, culture and society.  The clear and simple fact is that extended families existed for so long because everything around them was too fragile and dangerous for them not to.  Up until well into the Industrial Revolution, there was too little surplus value to go around.  People generally were poor in ways that we now have difficulty imagining.  People died far earlier than they do today.  The average age at death in England in 1800 was 40 years; today it’s almost twice that.  The prospect of early death strongly militated in favor of extended families whose very size cushioned the blow.

And of course there was the need for labor.  Up until very recently, most people lived on farms.  In fact, it was one of the signal results of the Great Depression in this country that, for the first time in our history, more people lived in cities than did not.  And up until very recently, farming was very little mechanized.  That meant that it was hard physical labor.  And that in turn meant that the more people you had to do it, the better that labor got done.  Ergo, extended families.

The point being that essentially none of those conditions that urged people to live in extended families now exist.  We in the U.S. live in a society that, by historical standards is almost unimaginably prosperous.  Labor-saving technology means that there’s comparatively little “heavy lifting” to do.  Medical science prolongs life to previously unheard-of lengths.

In short, the decline of the extended family precisely mirrors our success in essentially all the ways in which people have always wanted to succeed.

To his credit, Brooks isn’t calling for a return to living in extended families.  He understands that that’s not going to happen.  What he is concerned about is what we do next.  He’s right to do so.

If people have always lived in extended families with the nuclear family at the core, and if our many advances have knocked the props out from under that tradition, what’s to be done?  It’s a good question and one that needs an answer.  Unfortunately, Brooks isn’t equal to the task.

I’ll have more to say about that next time, but for now I’ll only address two points.

First, Brooks dispenses far too easily with the nuclear family.  As I noted earlier, he begins by failing to notice that, in every extended family, there’s a nuclear one.  From there he goes on to point out that nuclear families are more vulnerable than extended ones.  Dad, Mom and two kids living in a detached, single-family house is a fundamentally less secure arrangement than that nuclear family plus 20 relatives.  That is true.

But Brooks goes on to conclude that, because nuclear families aren’t as stable as extended ones, then they’re doomed to extinction, or at least are nothing to count on in the future.  It’s an illogical leap and very likely a wrong one.

He overlooks a lot in that discussion, about which I’ll have more to say later.  But for now I can only note one astonishing gap in his narrative – the role of family courts in destroying the nuclear family.  About that, Brooks says not one word.  The fact that, against the enormous weight of science and common sense, public policy in every way militates against the survival of the nuclear family, escapes Brooks entirely.  Yes, the nuclear family is more fragile than were extended families, so why make it even more so as a matter of intentional policy? 

Brooks doesn’t ask the question.  It’s an unacceptable oversight and one that’s well-nigh fatal to his overall theme.

March 3, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Last time I began discussing this article by NYT columnist David Brooks (The Atlantic, 3/2020).  It’s title – “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” – indicates both Brooks’ thesis and where it jumped the tracks.

As I said before, Brooks extols the extended family as having been the bedrock of human society for almost all of our history.  That’s true enough, but where he goes wrong is failing to acknowledge that the extended family only existed because of the nuclear one.  All those many aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. came together solely because of their relationships with Dad, Mom and their children.

That’s more than an incidental error on his part, because it leads to Brooks’ subsection entitled “The Short, Happy Life of the Nuclear Family,” in which we find,

For a time, it all seemed to work. From 1950 to 1965, divorce rates dropped, fertility rates rose, and the American nuclear family seemed to be in wonderful shape. And most people seemed prosperous and happy…

During this period, a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids. When we think of the American family, many of us still revert to this ideal. When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.

But the nuclear family didn’t begin in 1950 or end in 1965.  It far predated the former and survives fairly nicely today, despite our best efforts at its destruction.  Still, having set those parameters on the nuclear family, Brooks leaps to the conclusion that, for Mom, Dad and the kids, time is up.  And that in turn leads him to the final part of his article in which he attempts to imagine alternatives to the nuclear family that, one assumes, fit our Brave New World better.

The problems with all that are myriad, but most important is Brooks’ passive acceptance of mini-trends.  He writes as if the decline of the two-parent family is, for some ill-defined reason, inevitable.  And, given that highly dubious conclusion, Brooks exempts himself from examining policies that did so much to damage the nuclear family.  And, having done that, he can avoid suggesting policy alternatives that could reverse those trends.

In short, he hastens to his preferred topic – new modes of living – without adequately justifying the need for doing so.  What are his thoughts on the sexual revolution of the 60s?  The Pill?  No-fault divorce?  Radical feminism’s relentless denigration of all things masculine and its frank attacks on the family?  The domestic violence industry and its 45-year history of misrepresentations of family life?  The divorce industry?  The adoption industry?  Welfare policies?  Alimony?  Child support?

Some of that is hortatory, but much is a matter of established public policy and all of it tends in one direction – the break-up of the nuclear family.  If the nuclear family is in decline, it’s because we chose that path.  Indeed, we choose it every day, countless times a day. 

The simple fact is that much public policy that impacts the family is wrongheaded and needs to be changed.  Brooks failure to even mention the possibility of reform is deadly for his article.  The entire point of the piece is to convince readers that (a) the nuclear family was a mistake, (b) we didn’t need it anyway and (c) there are perfectly serviceable alternatives.  It’s impossible to make the case for those alternatives when the end of the nuclear family is anything but inevitable.

And of course Brooks nowhere mentions certain biological basics that strongly militate against his desired retreat from the nuclear family.  Nowhere does Brooks betray the least knowledge about how children attach to their parents and vice versa.  Having avoided that subject too, he’s also able to miss the stickiest wicket of all – the fact that no one takes better care of kids than do their biological parents. 

Brooks wants to cast aside the nuclear family and try something else, but no one with a knowledge of children’s welfare agrees.  What they want to do is strengthen the family, because the more we do that, the better are children’s outcomes and the stronger, healthier, happier and less dysfunctional society becomes.

Next time I’ll get into what Brooks imagines can replace that “mistake,” the nuclear family.

By Clayton Craddock, Chair, National Parents Organization of New York

Originally published on http://claytoncraddock.com/ and The Altamont Enterprise

Why must kids miss out on certain family relationships when parents separate? It’s cruel for children, who love both parents, to suddenly lose access to everything they once knew when their parents no longer want to live together. Does a child’s love and need for both parents suddenly end when parents decide to separate? A couple may no longer want to be together, but a child wants to remain close to their parents. Most children are willing to do what is necessary to be in a relationship with their caregivers as long as it means that they continue to see them as much as possible after separation.

Barring exceptional circumstances, a child’s right to both loving, fit parents should not be allowed to be used as leverage against the other while personal differences are ironed out in a settlement or in family court. 

Our culture is due for a drastic paradigm shift. It’s time to stop seeing one parent as the  default and the other as just a visitor. These assumptions are often sexist and outdated. If the parents can no longer live together, the next best thing is for the child to have equal time with each parent.

Our current domestic relations law here in New York State makes no effort to require, or even encourage, that healthy, fit, loving parents spend equal time with their child after a separation. Family courts usually pick one parent  to “win custody.” However, in the long run, the children are the biggest losers. When one side of their family suddenly is cut off, children have a strained relationship with not only the non-custodial parent, but the extended family as well. For example, they may rarely see their aunts, uncles, cousins and/or grandparents who they used to see frequently. Extended family relationships are often a vital support system.

Child custody cases in New York State today, can last for weeks, months or years. During this time, the child, under current custom, is oftentimes denied the best of both parents while a judgement is determined. By setting a rebuttable presumption of shared parenting for temporary orders, with room for exceptions if one parent is demonstrably unfit, it will shift the starting point to what’s best for children. It will also free a judges’ time to review and consider more challenging matters.

There is a new bill in the New York State Legislature, sponsored by Assemblyman Chris Tague, that sets a standard of equal time with each parent during this crucial moment. A time when a child needs all the support, reassurance and stability as possible. Bill A09819 will add a rebuttable presumption in temporary child custody proceedings. This legislation specifically takes into account the children’s best interest, and encourages outcomes of shared parental responsibility when possible while completely preserving judicial discretion.

More than 20 states have recently considered shared custody, and an increasing number have adopted statutes in favor of some form of shared parenting. The concept of shared parenting has been validated by social science as well, with about 50 studies endorsing equal custody as best for children in most circumstances.

Shared parenting is also very important gender equality issue. Having fathers more involved in parenting is essential if mothers are to achieve full equality and shrink the gender pay gap. As Gloria Steinem said: “Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.” Shared parenting means neither parent would have to bear the complete burden of child care day at night. Sharing parental responsibilities is a win-win for all involved. Parents can have more time to focus on their careers and even start new businesses. They would have time to care for one of their own elderly relatives if needed. There is more time to dedicate time to be more physically and mentally fit and even start a new relationships.

In 2017, Kentucky passed the nation’s first true shared parenting law. It was the state’s most popular law of the year. In addition to its popularity, since the law went into effect, the law has help decrease conflict in family court. The law is effective and extremely successful. Family court filings are down 11%, and domestic violence claims are down 445 cases. 

Why is Kentucky, a conservative “red” state, more progressive than a state like New York? Are we truly progressive in this state or are we interested in preserving the status quo? It’s time for the New York State Legislature to look past the special interests that benefit from our broken family court system. We should be focusing our attention on what children want and need — as much time as possible with both loving, fit and caring parents. If we don’t focus on for what’s best for our children, we are giving into the desires of special interest groups who are fighting to protect the outdated system we all know hasn’t worked. If we don’t do what’s right, we are essentially rallying against our children and propping up a system that only works for those who benefit from continuous conflict.

Assemblyman Chris Tague’s bill A09819 should have bipartisan support. I feel it’s time to support this new legislation that will show just how “progressive” New York can be. Let’s do what’s right for our children and update the law so children won’t lose significant contact with loving parents. When parents separate, the family doesn’t end, it just gets rearranged. 

Clayton Craddock is an independent thinker, father of two beautiful children in New York City and is the drummer of the hit broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University’s School of Business and is a 25 year veteran of the fast paced New York City music scene. He has played drums in a number of hit Broadway musicals including “Tick, tick…BOOM!,Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical and Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill. In addition, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.

Clayton is the chair of the New York chapter of the National Parents Organization and is focused on promoting shared parenting, where both parents have equal standing raising children after a separation or divorce. He is writing a memoir and writes for various local and national publications.

February 27, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Last time I wrote about the scandalous case of Megan and Andy Carter and their five-year-old daughter Ellie (NBC News, 2/14/20).  Ellie had multiple health problems due to her having been born very prematurely.  Her many visits to doctors and hospitals and her difficulty combatting an infection drew the attention of Mary Bridge Hospital’s child abuse pediatrician Dr. Elizabeth Woods who seems to have believed that Megan was overtreating the child and withholding care to keep her sick. 

Woods’ intervention into Ellie’s parental care resulted in the child being taken from her mother for over a year, Megan’s being charged with child abuse and the Carters shelling out some $300,000 to defend against allegations that were not only unfounded, but contested by other experts.  To accomplish all that, Woods made numerous statements under oath that were either untrue or stretched the truth beyond recognition.  The judge in Megan’s trial laid into Woods:

Most of Woods’ testimony, the judge wrote, was “without supporting factual basis.” Amini dismissed parts of Woods’ conclusions as “not plausible” and “speculation at best.”

But Woods wasn’t finished.  Six months after all charges had been dropped and the family reunited, the Carters got a visit from Child Protective Services.  They had a report that Megan was giving Ellie unnecessary oxygen treatments.  Who made the report?  CPS officials didn’t say, but the only person fitting the description of one of the reporters was Elizabeth Woods.

But Ellie hadn’t received oxygen treatments in over a year and hadn’t been to Mary Bridge Hospital in six months.  The report to CPS was a complete fabrication made by someone who not only didn’t know the facts, but couldn’t know them.  From this far remove, it looks like an act of malice.

As I said in my last piece, the Carters’ harrowing story of abuse by Woods and CPS is more than just one about a single rogue doctor apparently bent on depriving a child of her mother at any cost.  If that were true, we could take solace in the knowledge that any such doctor can ultimately be overruled by more scrupulous ones.

But that’s not the case and the Carters’ ordeal demonstrates the fact.

Most importantly, the Carters’ case shows the degree to which CPS was willing to pay attention to the opinions of a doctor who said there was abuse and ignore other doctors who said there wasn’t.  Apparently, caseworkers were also willing to ignore the evidence of their own eyes.

“I couldn’t understand why her opinion carried so much weight,” Carter said. “It was like, whatever Dr. Woods said, everyone just accepted it as fact.”

Woods’ key piece of “evidence” against Megan Carter was a videotape that was made in Ellie’s hospital room.  Woods claimed it showed Megan throwing away medication Ellie needed instead of administering it to the child.  Astonishingly though, the recording showed no such thing.  Plus, two hospital personnel were in the room at the time.  Did anyone at CPS even view the tape?  Or did they, as Megan said just accept as fact everything Woods said?

The same holds true for the post-case proceedings.  CPS and a police officer showed up at the Carters’ door with the claim that there was ongoing abuse in the form of unneeded oxygen treatments.  Apparently, that claim came from Woods who hadn’t clapped eyes on either Ellie or Megan in six months.  And, like so much of what Woods claimed in the case, that was simply false. 

Did anyone at CPS ask Woods how she knew about the alleged treatments?  Or did they simply accept them as fact without question?

Moreover, the Carters’ is not the only case in which something similar has happened.

In four cases reviewed by reporters, child welfare workers took children from parents based on Woods’ reports — including some in which Woods misstated key facts, according to a review of records — despite contradictory opinions from other medical experts who said they saw no evidence of abuse. 

Again, in those cases, it appears that CPS caseworkers valued Woods’ conclusions that abuse had occurred over those of other doctors who said it hadn’t.  Inevitably, that led to taking children from their homes and families.

I suspect that tends to happen for a combination of three reasons.

First, it’s the tendency of CPS workers to “err on the side of caution.”  The last thing CPS wants is to be told a child is being abused, leave the child in the home and then have the child end up severely injured or dead.  That’s a headline that no caseworker wants to read, but the inverse – a child taken when there’s not abuse – is viewed as less bad.  We’ve seen caseworkers admit as much in the past, and I suspect the tendency is deeply ingrained.

Second, the above tendency stems in part due to a failure to appreciate the damage done to children and families when the kids are taken by CPS.  The idea that “erring on the side of caution” means breaking up families as a default position is dangerously wrong.  Taking kids from their parents causes trauma.  Therefore, it is incumbent on every CPS worker to balance the potential damage to kids of leaving them in the home against the damage of removing them.  If the former doesn’t significantly outweigh the latter, then the children should remain at home.

Third, I strongly suspect that calling “child abuse” a medical subspecialty strongly reinforces the above two reasons.  After all, if the doctor who’s saying there’s abuse is a “specialist” in the matter, shouldn’t CPS value her opinion over all the others who aren’t specialists, at least in that discipline?  And doesn’t the status of specialist tend to imbue the doctor with a greater than usual certainty about her conclusions?  Certainly Dr. Woods was nothing if not certain of her opinions in the Carter case, irrespective of how badly based and factually incorrect they were.

Indeed, CPS caseworkers in the Carters’ case emphasized Woods’ “training and experience” to bolster their reliance on her and rejection of other opinions.

To justify that decision [in another case], the Child Protective Services worker described Woods as “a physician with extensive training and experience in regard to child abuse and neglect,” according to a written report reviewed by reporters.

But Woods had no fellowship training in child abuse and hadn’t passed the exam to become a specialist in the field. 

Did she have experience in diagnosing abuse?  She did, many years of it.  But that raises the question of exactly what that experience consisted of.  Did she rigorously follow up her diagnoses (whether of abuse or not) to find out if she’d made the right calls?  Did she keep scrupulous records of how many cases she got right and how many she got wrong?  If she did none of that, then of what value is her experience?  How can she learn from it if she doesn’t establish a feed-back loop to teach herself?  Based on the latest act of the Carter drama, it appears that Woods still believes that she made the right call there, despite the obvious falsity of that position and the humiliating chastisement by the judge.  If Woods believes, after all that, that Megan Carter is an abusive mother, then I suspect she has little ability to police herself and learn from her mistakes.

Will CPS authorities take note?  Or will they continue to rely on Elizabeth Woods as the last word on child abuse in Pierce County, Washington?

February 26, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Here’s more on child abuse pediatricians (NBC News, 2/14/20).

This time, the story comes to us from Washington State and Mary Bridge hospital.  That’s where Megan Carter, her husband Andy and their four-year-old daughter Ellie were put through a legal, medical and emotional wringer over a period of over a year.  Megan was charged with medical child abuse of Ellie and eventually exonerated, but not after having been forcibly separated from both her children for a year and spending over $300,000 to fight the case.

Ellie was born at 24 weeks of gestation, i.e. extremely premature.  Unsurprisingly, that meant that, from day one of her life, she’s had medical issues.  She’s spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices and hospitals.  She’s had a feeding tube inserted into her stomach and ventilation therapy to help her breathe.

When she was four, she contracted an infection that her immune system had serious difficulty combatting.  Megan took her to her pediatrician multiple times and eventually to Mary Bridge hospital.  That’s where she ran afoul of Dr. Elizabeth Woods, a child abuse physician who decided that Megan was engaging in medical child abuse.  In this case that meant overtreating the child, much like Munchhausen’s Syndrome by proxy.

The problem with that diagnosis was that essentially nothing supported it.  Megan is a nurse and had devoted herself to Ellie’s care, a job that appears to have been necessary, given Ellie’s condition.  But Woods drew the conclusion anyway and, to say the least, resorted to making claims (some of them under oath) that significantly embroidered on the facts.  Indeed, reading the linked-to article, one eventually comes away with the feeling that Woods was animated by a fervor bordering on malice.

Consider, for example, her written opinion:

“Ellie Carter is a victim of medical child abuse,” Dr. Elizabeth Woods wrote in May 2018, indicating that Megan Carter had abused her 5-year-old daughter by pushing for excessive and harmful medical treatments. “This is life threatening, and she is at imminent risk if her mother is involved in her care.”

Note the lack of any qualifying phrases.  Woods didn’t say she was concerned about abuse or the risk of it in the future.  “Ellie Carter is a victim…”  “[S]he is at imminent risk…”  Such phrasing indicates absolute certainty, but, as the facts of the case show, Ellie in fact was neither being abused nor at risk of being.

Consider too that Woods misrepresented facts about the medical sub-specialty of pediatric child abuse.  Under oath, Woods admitted that she hadn’t taken the three-year training course to be a child abuse pediatrician, nor had she passed the exam to become board certified in that field.

But, Woods added, neither have most doctors who specialize in identifying child abuse.

“There are approximately 250 of us nationwide that function as child abuse consultants,” Woods said that day in court, according to an audio recording of her testimony. “And a very small minority of those have received training, as the training just started about three years ago. So I was already well into my career prior to that being offered and have established my credibility through extensive experience.”

The problem being that little of that is true.  In fact there are about 375 such specialists nationwide and all of them have either received that fellowship training or spent years diagnosing child abuse prior to  the establishment of the training.  Plus, the training began 15 years ago, not three as Woods claimed.  That means she could easily have received the training, but simply hasn’t.

Eventually, when Ellie was in the hospital and Megan was caring for her, Woods announced that she had video evidence of Megan failing to give her daughter needed medication.  She reported that claim to Child Protective Services, who called the police who in turn escorted Megan from the hospital’s premises.

Based on Woods’ allegation, CPS got a court order barring Megan from seeing either of her children except in a supervised setting.  Andy and his parents would care for them, an arrangement that went on for a year.  But Elizabeth Woods wasn’t done yet.

She reported writing messages to Child Protective Services officials and a prosecutor assigned to the case, urging them to restrict Carter’s access to her children even more, blocking her from seeing them altogether, but state authorities refused…

Woods then tried another strategy to block Carter from seeing her children. The doctor brought her concern directly to Andy, while Ellie was still hospitalized. Woods told him that she had video proof of his wife committing a crime, though she declined to elaborate or show it to him, Andy said in an interview.

Then she told him that the hospital wouldn’t discharge his daughter into his care unless he obtained a restraining order against his wife, blocking Carter from seeing her children, Andy said.

The doctor told him the court order requested by Child Protective Services wasn’t good enough, and that his wife was dangerous, Andy recalled. Woods told him that, even while supervised, Carter could hurt Ellie with a doctored glass of water or piece of candy, Woods wrote in her notes describing the conversation.

In fact, Woods had no evidence of Megan’s failure to administer Ellie’s medication.  She not only lied to Andy, but attempted to hold Ellie hostage unless Andy bent to her will.  Fortunately, he declined.

Eventually, it came time for Megan’s trial on child abuse charges.  Woods was the state’s star witness.

Over the course of four days, Woods testified that she believed “all of Ellie’s medical issues” were the result of medical abuse, even though the child was born severely premature and continued to require significant medical care after she was separated from her mother.

Woods claimed that only Carter had ever witnessed Ellie suffer seizures and that the child had since been weaned from anti-seizure medicine, though medical records showed otherwise. Multiple members of the hospital’s medical staff reported observing seizures, which was why Ellie was still receiving anti-seizure medication at the time of trial.

There were more misstatements from Woods.  But what about the video of Megan tampering with Ellie’s medication, the one that got her removed from her daughter’s life for a year and that she used to browbeat Andy?

[W]hen lawyers played the video for other witnesses, including a doctor who supervised Ellie’s care, they said it showed no such thing. Plus, two hospital staff members were in the room at the time and did not report wrongdoing, Amini, the judge, later noted.

Woods’ “smoking gun” turned out to be nothing but a false claim used to deprive a little girl of her mother.

More than three weeks after the trial ended, she issued her order. In a scathing 26-page report, [Judge]Amini both dismissed the state’s case against Carter and rebuked the doctor who’d initiated it. Most of Woods’ testimony, the judge wrote, was “without supporting factual basis.” Amini dismissed parts of Woods’ conclusions as “not plausible” and “speculation at best.”

But it actually gets worse.  Six months after her acquittal and return to her family, Megan, Andy and their kids were sitting at home one evening when the doorbell rang.

A Child Protective Services worker and a police officer waited on the porch…

The child welfare worker explained that the agency had received two new reports from members of the child abuse intervention team at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital. Although nobody at the hospital had seen or treated Ellie in more than six months, the hospital staff members were reporting — without evidence — that Carter had begun giving her daughter oxygen treatments that she does not need.

Medical and billing records show that Ellie hasn’t received oxygen treatments in more than a year. Mary Bridge officials did not answer questions from reporters about what prompted the latest reports or who made them.

One of the referrals came from a pediatrician on the hospital’s child abuse team, the Child Protective Services worker said. She would not name the doctor, but Woods is the only physician who matches that description.

Yes, not content with issuing under oath opinions that were implausible and “without… factual basis” and being excoriated for her performance by the judge presiding in the case, not content with needlessly causing two children to lose their mother for a year based on made-up “evidence” of abuse, Woods seemingly had doubled down, making claims about which she not only had no knowledge but could have none.  And of course, like so many others of her claims, this one too was false.

But, astonishing as this case is, it’s not about a single rogue doctor determined to find abuse where there was none and apparently entirely unaware of the damage she was causing.  No, it’s about far more than that.

I’ll deal with that next time.

NPO’s Executive Director, Ginger Gentile, has received an offer to direct a new documentary, not yet titled, that focuses on the promotion of better parenting practices and how society can help children. Because filmmaking is Ginger’s passion and because of her ongoing commitment to promote the well-being of children, Ginger has decided to accept this offer. Unfortunately for NPO, this means that Ginger will be leaving her post as Executive Director of NPO as of February 27, 2020.

During her tenure with NPO, Ginger worked effectively to promote NPO’s mission. She launched the 2019 NPO Shared Parenting Report Card with a press conference in New York’s Lincoln Center which garnered press coverage in the New York Post, Fox News, US News & World Report, and Yahoo. She also opened new NPO affiliates in seven states and brought new leadership to two other NPO affiliates. Ginger also helped us build alliances with a number of state-based shared parenting organizations to facilitate collaborative efforts to promote shared parenting.

We are sorry to see Ginger leave as our Executive Director but we wish her every success in her new endeavors. We know that Ginger remains strongly committed to the mission of NPO and she will continue to serve the organization in an advisory capacity.

Don Hubin, Chair

National Parents Organization

Working with the affiliates of NPO, who are volunteering long hours on raising awareness of the importance of shared parenting has been inspiring. They are turning personal pain into the energy needed to create a better future for their children, and all of our children. I enjoyed working with Chair Don Hubin and the other board members who are strongly committed to creating systemic change. 

I am confident that NPO is poised, along with other family court reform organizations, to make divorce and separation healthier for families. Right now there are a handful of states poised to join Kentucky in making Shared Parenting the legal norm. While I am sad to leave NPO, I am happy that I will be able to continue in an advisory role on issues related to messaging and strategy. All of the erased parents who watch my documentary ERASING FAMILY will be encouraged to join NPO to work on legislative advocacy, judicial education and distribute the great research produced by NPO. 

Remember, almost everyone supports shared parenting (literally! 93% in the last NPO poll conducted in Virginia) and research says this is best for kids. So by applying effective messaging we will quickly solve this public health crisis of kids not having both loving parents in their lives. 

Ginger Gentile