Author: Super User

We often see commentary to the effect that men do less housework and childcare than do women, facts borne out by many authoritative datasets like those produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The gist of that commentary is usually that, if men would only “step up” and do their share, then women would be freed to become equal in the workplace.  That is, men hold women back.

Now, as I’ve often said, the weaknesses of that commentary are too many to address in a limited space.  But generally, they boil down to the fact that, if a woman wants her life to emphasize paid work, there’s nothing preventing her from doing so.  The simple fact is that most women want children and, having given birth to them, aren’t generally very enthusiastic about leaving them behind to rush back to the office.  They didn’t have them just to have them; they want to love and nurture them too.  The further fact is that women’s biological makeup urges them to do just that.  The biochemical connections between mothers and their offspring have always created parent-child bonds that all but demand that Mom see to her children before anything else.  This shouldn’t be news, but, in our Brave New World, certain basics sometimes seem to be.

Now, given that propensity for mothers to care for their children, comes a corollary – that Dad be the family’s resource provider.  The one tends to beget the other.  Needless to say, I would never contend that mothers don’t work and earn.  Of course most of them do.  But the great majority of primary family breadwinners are men and the main reason is that mothers tend to prioritize childcare.

Now, as I’ve said countless times, the fact that women tend to spend more time caring for children than do fathers in no way suggests that kids don’t need their dads.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  We humans are a bi-parental species.  That means that both mothers and fathers care for children, that mothers and fathers tend to parent differently, that kids need both types of parenting and that kids form all-important attachments early in life to both of their parents.  Given all that, when parents divorce, it is imperative that children maintain their real, lasting and necessary relationships with both Mom and Dad.  Shared parenting is a necessity for healthy children and therefore for a healthy society.

Which brings us to this article (Institute for Family Studies, 1/12/20).  It seems there’s been some thought to the effect that, while fathers emphasizing paid work and mothers childcare may dominate the behavior of the less educated, those with college degrees have moved away from the old paradigm.  That was always a dubious proposition to me and the linked-to piece demonstrates it to be more wishful thinking than reality.

Today, men still earn the majority of the income in most married-parent families. A study by University of Chicago economist Marianne Bertrand and her colleagues found that husbands and wives were less likely to report a “very happy” marriage when the wife earned more; they were also more likely to report marital difficulties in the last year. A recent Pew survey found that never-married women are much more likely to report that finding a spouse or partner with a “steady job” is “very important” to them. Not surprisingly, a new study found that “the tendency for women to marry men with higher incomes has persisted.”

Clearly, the ideal and the reality of male breadwinning remain alive, at least in some quarters. However, some, such as Richard Reeves, the co-director of the Center on Children and Families at Brookings, have argued that the traditional model is less likely to characterize the marriages and family lives of more educated and affluent Americans. He suggests, for instance, that marriage among the well-educated is less likely to be predicated on male breadwinning.

It turns out that what Reeves was really reporting was less what those educated, affluent folks did than what they said they valued.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two were not the same.  We’ve seen that before.  Several years ago, the Work and Families Institute found that, although people in their 20s voiced strongly egalitarian sentiments about work and family, when the first child came along, they tended to do the usual.  Mom took time off work and Dad redoubled his earnings efforts.

And so it appears in the more recent data.  Researcher Christos Makridis reported that,

I found that areas with a higher male-female employment gap—that is, the percent extra of employed males, relative to employed females—have greater shares of the local population who are married…

The data shows that a one percentage point rise in the male-female employment gap is associated with a 0.347 percent rise in the share of married adults for the areas with the lowest fraction of college or graduate degree workers, but is associated with a 0.79 percent rise for the areas with the highest fraction of college or graduate degree workers.

The results are very similar when using the male-female earnings gap as the proxy for male breadwinning: a one percentage point rise in the male-female earnings gap is associated with a 0.18 percent point rise in the share of married adults in the least educated areas, but with a 0.233 percent rise in the most educated (see Figure 2)…

[W]hat is clear is this: In the United States as a whole, and especially in better-educated communities, when men earn more and work more relative to the women in those communities, a greater share of the local population is married.

Again, this shouldn’t be treated as news.  We’ve long known, for example, that the single greatest predictor of divorce for a man is the loss of his job.  Failure to provide resources is dangerous for men who want to get or remain married.

So, once again, the simple truth is that there’s little evidence for the proposition that women are champing at the bit to get away from their kids and back to the office or plant.  On the contrary, women and men in couples tend to work together to (a) raise their kids and (b) support their families.  That very often means Mom emphasizing childcare and Dad emphasizing paid work.  To most people, that’s neither threatening nor politically suspect, but some still want parents to behave, not according to their best interests and those of their children, but according to an ideology that some give lip-service to, but most reject.  

NPO is honored to be a sponsor of FATHERLESS to FATHERHOODhosted by The Fatherless Generation Foundation Inc. & Dr. Torri J.in partnership with All Pro Dad.This live event will be on February 1 in Miami at the Superbowl LIV Miami Experience. Our Executive Director Ginger Gentile will be on a panel with actor Omar Epps, pro football player Julio Jones, advocate Mark Merrill, and Dr. Torri J discussing the impact of children growing up in fatherless home and solutions. Some topics will be: 

-Struggling with how to be a father because you did not have one?
-Challenged by how to maintain proper relationships because you did not see one demonstrated in your household growing up?
-Covering up childhood wounds with success? 
-Struggling on how to raise your children in the absence of their father?

And here are the bios for the panelists:

Actor Omar Epps (Juice, Higher Learning, The Wood, In Too Deep and Love and Basketball) is also the author of FROM FATHERLESS TO FATHERHOOD. This riveting memoir and parenting guidebook chronicles his personal journey of breaking the cycle of fatherlessness, learning to forgive, and how to parent effectively. https://www.fromfatherlesstofatherhood.org/

Julio Jones is Wide Receiver for the Atlanta Falcons and advocate for increased father involvement.

Mark Merrill is the founder and president of Family First, Inc., a national non-profit organization that provides programs and online resources dedicated to helping people love their families well. He is host of the Family Minute with Mark Merrill, a nationally syndicated radio program reaching over 5 million listeners daily and is the author of All Pro Dad – Seven Essentials to Be a Hero to Your Kids.

Dr. Torri J is the founder of The Fatherless Generation Foundation Inc., which works to reunite fathers with their children. Author and motivational speaker, she is dedicated to family court reform including Default Shared Parenting.

Our Executive Director Ginger Gentile is also the the Director of the documentary Erasing Family, www.ErasingFamily.org, that exposes the trauma of the over 22 million American children who have a parent erased from their lives after divorce and separation.

Join Dr. Torri, Omar Epps, Julio Jones, Ginger Gentile and Mark Merrill at the Regal South Beach Cinema on February 1, 2020, from 11am-2pm. Go to http://www.beyondfatherless.com/for more details and to get your tickets!

Are we learning?  Is it possible that we’ve experimented with abandoning the two-parent, intact family, found the results wanting and are starting to return to sanity?

Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies analyzed the latest data from the American Community Survey for 2018.  What he’s found is a bottoming out of the trend toward single-parent childrearing and even a slight trend in the opposite direction.  From 2014 – 2018, the percentage of children living outside of the traditional two-biological-parent household actually dropped.  From 2001 to 2011, it remained stable.

[S]ince 2014, the share of children living with two married parents has risen ever-so-slightly, from 61.8% to 62.3% in 2018, and data from early 2019 in the Current Population Survey suggest that 2019 will show further improvement. The period from 2011 to 2019 is the longest period of stability or improvement in children’s living situations since the 1950s.

Obviously, a half-a-percentage point increase isn’t much, but it comes after a fairly long period of stable numbers.  Is all that a precursor to greater positive change?  Hang around for the next half century and I’ll let you know.

Needless to say, the changes in family structure over the past 60 years have been one of our society’s most remarkable features.  In 1960, about 13% of kids lived outside a traditional family.  By 2000, that number had ballooned to about 35% and the trend was worsening.  But then in about 2010, it evened out and began to reverse.

The question is “why?”  The answer is “No one knows.”  I’d like to believe that education and experience have made a difference.  For example, much has been made of the idea that one or two generations of kids brought up in families without two biological parents consider their experience a disaster and are determined to raise their own children better.  Another possibility is that the experience of divorce and court-monitored child custody is so overwhelmingly negative that people are gritting their teeth and staying married if at all possible.  Certainly the divorce rate is down from previous years, so perhaps that partly explains the uptick in kids living in intact families.

Alas, the overall trend is up, but, as averages so often do, that obscures some less favorable data from individual groups.  Now, the good news is that both white and black children now have a greater chance of living in intact families than before.  The trends for both groups are up.  Of course only about 31% of black kids lived with both parents in 2011, a figure that’s risen now to about 33%.  In other words, whatever the trend, black children still lag far, far behind all others in their chances of living in traditional families.

For white and Asian children, those numbers are about 72% and 83% respectively and appear to be little changed over the past two decades or so.

The bad news is that Hispanic and Native American children’s chances are dropping.  Each group’s chances of living in an intact family has decreased about 5% (not 5 percentage points, 5%) since 2001.

What’s the takeaway?  Here’s Stone’s:

Overall, the decline in the share of kids growing up in married, two-parent households seems to have stopped for now, and there’s even been a modest recovery. But much of this change is purely compositional: Asian, Hispanic, and multiracial kids are growing as a share of children thanks to immigration and intermarriage, while African and Native American kids are not. As a result, the nationwide aggregate is improving. But among specific groups, the trends are less optimistic. Particularly for Hispanic and Native American kids, family conditions have deteriorated markedly over the last two decades. 

I can’t improve much on that, except to say that sadly it’s too early to say that people have learned and are mending their ways.

Missouri Rebuttable Presumption bill HB 1765 will have a hearing January 28 at 6 pm and SB 531 will have a hearing January 29 at 8 am.  These bills are identical to the ones from last session. We are very excited that these bills will be heard so soon in session.  Representative Swan and Senator Wallingford both are making these bills a priority this year, so hopefully we can finally get them to the Governor for his signature! Click here to fill out a witness form for the Senate bill hearing and click here to fill out a witness form for the House bill hearing.

January 24, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

In Virginia, there’s a bill, HB 1500, that deserves support.  If enacted into law, the foundations of civilization won’t quake, but it will make a modest improvement to the status quo.

In 2018, Congress changed the Tax Code to make spousal support a nullity for tax purposes.  That is, spousal support is no longer income to the recipient and no longer deductible by the payor.  Each is a reversal of what had gone before.

How Congress came up with that brilliant idea, I assume I’ll never know.  After all, in most cases in which income is transferred from one entity to another, the recipient is required to report it as income.  And in some of those cases, the payor may deduct the amount transferred from his/her taxable income.

As to spousal support, that’s no longer the case.  That of course constitutes a significant windfall to recipients and a further blow to the pocketbooks of payors. 

So the Virginia bill seeks to ameliorate that situation, at least a bit.  It does so be simply reducing the amounts called for in the state’s guidelines for spousal support.  In so doing, it would decrease the amount paid and received in what approximates the increases caused by the new tax law.  In short, it tries to get Virginians back to where they were before Congress acted.

Unfortunately, it pertains only to orders that are effective during the pendency of the divorce case, i.e. temporary orders.  What its effect, if any, would be on permanent orders, I don’t know.  And of course existing orders for payment of spousal support would be entirely unchanged.

As I’ve said before, spousal support should be a thing of the past in almost all cases.  There is simply no reason why, in this society, in this economy, in 2020, an adult can’t support her/himself.  The principle of gender equality demands the abolition of spousal support in the great majority of divorces.  And, also as I’ve said before, there should be narrowly-tailored exceptions to the rule of no spousal support.  Those include disabled spouses and those who are too old to be expected to re-enter the job market.  Plus, I’d make an exception if one spouse stayed home with the kids for a significant period and needs some time to re-train for paid work.

But beyond those narrow exceptions, spouses need to be responsible for themselves and the choices they make.

So, as I said, Virginia House Bill 1500 isn’t earthshattering.  It’s a modest attempt to right a wrong.  As such, it should be supported.  Please do so if you can.

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

A British Columbia psychologist has been disciplined (sort of) for her role in a contentious child custody case (CBC, 1/14/20).  Dr. Cindy Hardy committed multiple ethical violations that resulted in the child’s father being prohibited from seeing his son for over a year.

The origins of the case are obscure and none of the family members have been named either in the linked-to article or the findings of Dr. Lynn Zutter, panel chair of the Health Professions Review Board.  Suffice it to say however, that, from this far remove, it appears as if Hardy actively participated in a campaign of parental alienation on behalf of the mother against the father.  It further appears that, despite being found to have committed ethical violations, neither the College of Psychology of British Columbia nor the HPRB punished her behavior in any meaningful way.

In ways unexplained, the custody and parenting time matters were, in early 2016, being heard simultaneously in two courts, one in Alberta and the other in British Columbia.  The child’s mother retained Dr. Hardy to assess the child, informing her that he feared spending time with his father.  Hardy had little or no experience conducting forensic psychological evaluations, but did so anyway.  She did so without a word to the father and indeed, throughout the entire case made no effort to contact him.  Needless to say, she failed to obtain his informed consent to evaluate his son, a clear violation of professional ethics.

But it seems that Hardy was more interested in assisting the mother than in scrupulous compliance with ethics.  Her initial approach to assessing the child was to have him complete the Behavior Assessment System for Children, Third (BASC-3).  That’s a very standard way to begin, but, remarkably, she allowed the child to take the assessment tool home and complete it there under the watchful eye of his mother.

So situated, the child answered one question to the effect that he had contemplated self-harm.  Hardy interpreted that to mean that he did so because of his concern about going to spend time with his father.  There was nothing to make that connection but the mother’s say-so, but Hardy made it anyway.  Later, when the child re-took the BASC-3 and answered the same question the opposite way (i.e. that he didn’t contemplate self-harm), Hardy announced that the results of the tests were invalid and couldn’t be used to assess the child.

None of that stopped her from stating in writing to the Alberta court that the child did intend self-harm if he were required to spend time with his father.  She later claimed, this time to the B.C. court, that the self-harm she predicted would be a suicide attempt, an allegation for which there was literally no factual support.

Now, the judge in Alberta was so unimpressed with Hardy’s performance that, on reading her reports in court, she picked up the phone and called her.  Judge Karen Jordan demanded to know why Hardy had failed, over the course of at least two months, to contact the father and get (a) his informed consent and (b) his side of the story.  She had no satisfactory reply.  Judge Jordan wanted to know the nature of the risk Hardy predicted for the child and was told “Well, I’m not sure.”  Quoting Lynn Zutter,

The court held that [Hardy’s] conclusions and recommendations were “of no value to the Court because they predetermine the issue.  You cannot arrive at a valid finding about a child’s distress in the absence of half of the information.”

Judge Jordan went on to remark that she was considering reporting Hardy’s astonishing behavior to her professional organization, i.e. the College of Psychology of British Columbia.  Whether she did so remains unclear.

A matter of days later, Hardy appeared in court in the B.C. case, reiterating her opinions that had been so disdainfully rejected by the Alberta judge and upping the ante to include claims of possible suicide by the child.  Based on that, the judge issued an order that the child be kept in British Columbia and have no contact with his father.  That order, issued in April of 2016, remained in effect until July, 2017.

In case Hardy’s frank bias in the case wasn’t clear enough, she soon made it absolutely crystalline.  When the mother’s partner emailed Hardy to let her know about the B.C. judge’s order, she emailed back, “Hallelujah!  I’m very happy to hear this news.  Thank you for updating me.  Please convey my best wishes to [the child and mother].” An impartial observer, she was not.

But this appears to me to be more than simply another case of anti-father/pro-mother bias on the part of the mental health professionals who are so often involved in family court.  From the outside looking in, this seems like a case of parental alienation on the part of the mother, alienation that went entirely ignored by Hardy.

After all, Mom unilaterally decided to involve a mental health professional.  She told her that the child was extremely nervous about visiting his father.  Hardy was nothing if not agreeable to corroborating those claims and excluding the possibility of finding facts that contradicted Mom’s narrative.  She did so assiduously.

But what if Mom were alienating the child, as she appears to have been?  In that case, the boy’s trepidations about visiting Dad would have been perfectly natural.  At nine years of age, he surely understood that he was supposed to fear his father and that successful visits to his father would contradict his mother’s preferred narrative.  That would put him in the untenable position of deciding who to love and who was right, his mother or his own experiences of his father.

Indeed, it’s one of the worst aspects of parental alienation that the child is forced into a terribly confusing situation.  He’s required to choose between parents despite the fact that he loves both.  And he’s forced to believe a narrative (the targeted parent is uncaring/violent, etc.) that his own experience contradicts.

What child, placed in such a position, wouldn’t have been upset?

After over a year, father and son were finally reunited and now see each other free of the blandishments of Cindy Hardy.  Did the boy harm himself on returning to his father?  He did not.  Hardy’s claims turned out to be false.  Is anyone surprised?

But, as with so many of these cases, the fact that father and son are now permitted contact is hardly a happy ending.  Dad spent ruinous amounts of money attempting to defend the scurrilous allegations against him.  And of course he lost over a year of contact with his son.

And Hardy?  Yes, she was disciplined by her professional organization, but how?  She was forced to write a letter of apology to the father and is now prohibited from taking forensic family law cases, cases she’d all but never taken before.  In other words, her punishment is no punishment at all.  As the father pointed out,

“There are really no consequences for her actions. A limitation in regard to something she rarely practises does not affect her,” he said.

Very true.

In family courts, the anti-father/pro-mother bias that’s so often been noted and bemoaned by lawyers and litigants alike doesn’t stop with judges.  Too often, the mental health professionals on whom they rely exhibit bias that’s as bad or worse than anything judges have to offer.  And that goes to show that we’ll never improve children’s outcomes in divorce cases until we educate those in charge about the value to children of spending equal time with their fathers and their mothers.

January 17, 2020 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors

In my last piece, I criticized Danish historian Mikael Jalving’s piece in Quillette entitled “Scandinavia: Can the New Parental Team Replace Marriage?” (Quillette, 1/2/20)  I did so because of his strange conclusion that shared parenting (and the scientific evidence supporting it) is dangerous because it encourages divorce.  Needless to say, he cited no evidence for the proposition.

Nor did he mention that, in the U.S. at least, we know from Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen’s work that it’s precisely the prospect of sole parenting that encourages divorce.  The two researchers found that women tend strongly to file for divorce because they know that the sole-parenting custom by judges means they know they won’t lose their kids.  If anything, that suggests that equal parenting would tend to discourage divorce filings. 

As I said in my last piece, people divorce, whether Jalving likes it or not.  Given that, surely public policy should be informed by the science on children’s welfare when their parents split up.  And that science points directly to shared parenting.  It’s an obvious point that Jalving missed due to his antipathy for government interference in families.

I of course share that antipathy, at least to an extent, and Jalving makes some important points about the relationship between families and governments.  I’ve been studying and writing about families, children, parents and family law for over two decades now and my strong take on the subject Jalving raises is that governments are poor substitutes for parents.  They prove it every day.

For example, even a brief glance at state child protective authorities reveals time and again a preference for state interference in children’s lives, often despite the harm it does to those children.  The other side of the coin often reveals shocking negligence that often results in injury to kids.

Now, CPS officials will argue that, however badly they’re doing their job now, the state does better now than was ever done in the past before public authorities got involved in the business of trying to protect kids from harm.  That’s probably true for kids who truly are at risk.  The problem with state intervention though is that it often occurs when it need not.  Time and again we see parents, judges, lawyers, etc. complaining about state overreach, about families torn apart for no reason, about parents threatened and browbeaten by caseworkers.  And of course the depredations of CPS are visited overwhelmingly on the poor and poorly-educated.  CPS agencies doubtless came into being with the best of intentions, but, as seems to be invariably the case, when governments take a certain power, it tends to increase far, far beyond what was originally intended.

Jalving is likewise concerned about events in Sweden that tend to further establish the government as everyone’s surrogate family.  He’s right to be.

In Sweden, individuality springs from the state. Without it, emancipation is not possible. Equality and freedom of choice is in itself made possible by a form of social engineering that the authors describe as “statist individualism,” under which high levels of state support serve to enhance, rather than challenge, citizens’ personal autonomy. More broadly, this typically Swedish approach to policy, informed in equal measure by optimism and paternalism, is animated by an institutionalized sense of national confidence in experts who use scientific methodology to improve society from one generation to the next. The overall effect of these ideas has been a weakening of many of the institutions that once mediated relations between state and citizen—including churches, charities and even families—since they are seen as dispensable in a country where individuals interact directly and regularly with a benign state. 

Central to this “cradle-to-grave” arrangement are such initiatives as universal daycare, a comprehensive program of direct student loans to teenagers and young adults, and the creation of a special ombudsman to protect children’s rights. The very language of public discourse now reflects such expectations: When the current government recently introduced the idea of making it mandatory for parents to send their young children to daycare in order for immigrant children to learn Swedish early on, this was presented as vindication of “the right to compulsory pre-school.” Implicit in these projects is the idea that a reliance on traditional forms of community and upbringing sets one at risk of oppression and inequality, while the welfare state is idealized as a liberating agent that frees citizens from hidebound social norms.

Yes, it’s that concept of the state as a benign actor in relationship to individuals that’s at the heart of the Swedish approach to, apparently, pretty much everything.  It’s an assumption that’s dubious at best, so dubious in fact that the Founding Fathers of the United States made exactly the opposite assumption.  That’s why we have the Bill of Rights as part of our Constitution.  They well knew the tendency of governments to arrogate power to themselves, a process we see often.  Did the Patriot Act promise that the NSA would never, never acquire and analyze general information about Americans?  It did, but guess what happened.  It did just that, sucking up vast stores of data from telephone companies and elsewhere with neither the consent nor the knowledge of those surveilled.

Were we assured that FISA courts would protect individual Americans from surveillance by the state via scrupulous courts positioned as a check on investigative agencies?  We were, but now we know how easily those courts can become, not an obstacle to state intrusion, but a co-conspirator in it.

And, as I mentioned above, child protective agencies originated to keep kids from harm, but they’ve evolved to become the face of Big Brother to many, many parents.  The system of “mandatory reporters” means that 80% of reports of child abuse are unfounded, but can still involve investigations by agents of the state wielding the terrifying power to take away parents’ children.

This “benign” state acting for the “benefit” of the individual can lead to some truly Orwellian outcomes.  So the Swedish government’s notion that a “right” to pre-school education can also be “compulsory”  is both mind-bending and no surprise.  Orwell himself couldn’t have imagined a more perfect example of Orwellian language.

But perhaps the state is benign and if so, why not in the area of the family?  Perhaps it can be, but Jalving’s examples don’t encourage the conclusion.  After all, daycare may free parents for non-child-related pursuits, which of course is the point.  But much science on child well-being and daycare finds that, particularly for very young children, daycare can result in elevated levels of cortisol that can have deleterious effects long into adulthood. 

Direct loans to adolescents for school expenses tend to bypass parents as supporters of children.  And an ombudsman for children’s rights does the same.  We’ve seen the results of that in, for example, Canada, where a girl sued her father because he grounded her for disobeying his demand that she spend less time on social media and more on her studies.  She won.  The judge overruled the father, substituting his own ideas about appropriate parenting for the girl’s everyday dad. 

So Jalving’s right to be concerned about the rise of the state as a substitute for parents.  The hobbyhorse of shared parenting doesn’t take him there, but he’s right all the same.  History is devoid of evidence that governments can do a proper job of caring for kids.  And our knowledge of the biological connection between parents and their children militates strongly against the notion and in favor of parents being our best bet for promoting children’s welfare.

But the experiment in Sweden is well under way.  I suppose we’ll see how it turns out.