Author: Super User

The drawings above were taken from Kara Bishop’s www.postcardsfromsplitsville.com. Bishop works with Children of Divorce, a class run by Tucson, Arizona-based Divorce Recovery. The class did an art project that included “sending away” the frustrations of divorce. The website is a place where Kara says “children can share their divorce-related feelings anonymously and parents can get a new perspective on how this life-changing experience impacts their children”s lives.”

To learn more, click here. Kara can be reached at Kara@PostcardsfromSplitsville.com.

Background: The recent New York Times piece A Bundle of Joy Isn”t Enough? (12/6/07) discusses “push presents”:

“In a more innocent age, new mothers generally considered their babies to be the greatest gift imaginable. Today, they are likely to want some sort of tangible bonus as well….

“That”s ‘push’ as in, ‘I the mother, having been through the wringer and pushed out this blessed event, hereby claim my reward.’ Or ‘push’ as in, ‘I”ve delivered something special and now I”m pushing you, my husband/boyfriend, to follow suit.’

“It”s more and more an expectation of moms these days that they deserve something.”

As I discussed in Some Thoughts on the ‘Push Presents’ Now Expected From Expectant Fathers (Part I), I have mixed emotions about “push presents.” I wrote:

“If this gift is about love, if it is about a man wanting to give his wife something special to show his appreciation, then I’m 100% for it. If instead the gift is yet one more obligation, another example of why she has its so hard and he has it so easy, why he could never understand how much he suffers, why she’s good and he’s bad, and dammit isn’t it the least he could do for her, well, then count me out. Men already have to deal with way too much minimization of their contributions to their families, along with exaggeration of women’s contributions. In in this particular instance, of course, the woman’s contribution is tremendous. In most cases, it is no more (and no less) than the man’s contribution.”

As one person noted in the New York Times story, I think the period right after the birth of a child is a rather poor time to choose to buy luxuries such as expensive jewelry. Unless one is rich, it is easy to become financially overwhelmed in the years after the birth of a child.

The primary caregiving parent’s income goes down, at the same time that expenses rise. It can be nerve-racking worrying if you will have the money to properly support your children. My father always said:

“People should not have children until they are sure that they can financially provide for them–but if everyone waited to have children until they were sure they could financially provide for them, nobody would have children.”

I would also argue that in many if not most cases, men very much are giving their wives the equivalent of a push present, though of course it is not acknowledged by our politically correct media. For example, it has been many years since I had a child, but thinking back to the birth of my first child, it is hard for me to see myself as a slacker. We had just bought a new house on an acre of land and at an excellent price. The downside was that the house was a disaster.

In the couple years leading up to the birth of our child and right afterwards, I was working seven days a week. During the day I would either do construction jobs or do construction work on our house, and at night I taught English and citizenship classes in South Central Los Angeles. On Saturdays I would teach, and then spend the afternoon/evening and Sunday building and fixing our house.

I ripped up our decaying old floor and installed hardwood flooring. I did numerous plumbing and electrical jobs. With the help of my father-in-law, I put a new roof on the house. I built a redwood front fence and front gate, as well as a back fence.

I cut down numerous large, diseased pine trees from our front yard, and built my son a bunk bed out of them. I cleared an enormous amount of junk out of the yard, enough to fill several huge dumpsters. If I choose to, I could walk around our house or our yard and probably find something that I did in practically every single area, while also working full time. Given everything I was doing, a “push present” would seem pretty trivial. And as I was building and fixing the things needed to make our house the wonderful home it now is, a good deal of my motivation was seeing how happy it made my wife.

(The best part of cutting down the pine trees was this–I had a chainsaw and was very, very careful to cut the tree so that it would not fall on our phone lines or on our house. I succeeded–the tree fell in exactly the opposite direction, right onto our power line. Fortunately, my wife was not home at the time. It would have been hard to explain to her that she shouldn’t worry, because cutting the tree onto our power line was, um…”all part of my plan, honey.”)

Background: Those who suffer from child support enforcement’s abuses and errors lead difficult and stressful lives. Sadly, child support enforcement abuses may have contributed to the recent heart attack and death of an English father.

According to the Equal Parenting Alliance, this month “36 year-old veteran soldier Lee Wilkins died while out running. He survived action in Northern Ireland, but those who knew him well believe it was the battles he had with Family Courts and the Child Support Agency which killed him.

“His son lived with him, and in these circumstances, one wonders why the CSA were hounding him to pay them £650, instead of paying money to him. Lee could not understand this either, and we saw the increasing stress which this alleged debt, and the threat of bailiffs caused him.” Lee is pictured with his son. To learn more, see my blog post Did Child Support Enforcement Help Drive this Innocent Father to His Death? (Part I).

F4J member John Ison, who was Wilkins’ legal advisor, sent the following letter:

“My name is John Ison. I used to be one of the spokesmen for the original F4J here in the UK.

“I have since moved into politics and stood against the current Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, in the 2005 UK General Election but still campaign for fathers rights and those of our children.

“The reason for my post here is that I was also Legal Advisor to Lee Wilkins.

“Lee contacted me in 2003 when he had no contact with his son and at a time when his son had been partially blinded whilst in the care of his mother. I worked with Lee right up until his death on the 6th December to get justice for his child and for himself and every other law abiding father who has become a victim of the bias family court system.

“Lee and I became extremely good friends and for the last three years always spend our summer vacations together with our children. He became my best mate.

“I was dealing with the threat of the bailiffs since he received the demand detailed above. The date of their contact was the 14th February 2007 – how romantic.

“Lee won’t mind me telling the world that he had no spare money. For every £1 he spent on himself he would spend £2 on his little boy. He would start the month off with £5 in the bank. The small assistance he received from the so-called UK government would clothe and feed his son but little else. If the bailiffs had have come in and taken away the TV, the video, the computer they would have effectively removed it from his son and prevented Lee from potentially earning any money as he was a professional photographer who had just graduated from University and worked from home.

“I had the traumatic job of sorting Lee’s belongings last weekend deciding what needed to be kept and what was surplus to requirements. A man’s life lay before me and I had to save and discard items that were Lee’s, not mine.

“What was VERY apparent was the way he conducted his life – HE LIVED IT FOR HIS SON.

“Lee was a fit man, he ran 5 miles a day, swam, enjoyed judo and cycled instead of using his car. His death certificate indicates that stress cannot be ruled out as a cause, which if anyone knew Lee as well as I did, would know that he was in a personal turmoil with the attitude of the CSA.

Background: According to the latest U.S. Government estimates, the average family in the highest income bracket (average income–$112,000 per year) spends $1,340 a month to raise each child. Yet some men are paying 20 times that much a month in child support. Most of this money is not going to the child, but instead to finance a wealthy lifestyle for the custodial parent. That’s not the purpose of child support, which is supposed to be for the child. To learn more, click here.

In the Los Angeles Times opinion column below, Dana Parsons makes some relevant points about child support in the Bren case. Donald Bren, the chairman of the Irvine Co., pays $17,000 per month per child in child support but his two teenage children want a readjustment that would bring the total to over $2 million a month.

Parsons spares us the usual lecture on Bren’s stinginess and hesitance to man up to his “responsibilities,” and instead looks at the case from a refreshing angle.

Hey, Bren kids, make your own way
Los Angeles Times, 12/27/07
By Dana Parsons

Some teenagers need an iPhone in the worst way. Not that a 40-inch plasma TV wouldn’t do nicely in the bedroom too.

But those teens aren’t the offspring of Donald Bren, the chairman of the Irvine Co., a man of the world and always at or near the top of the list of Orange County’s richest men. His kids, it turns out, set their sights a bit higher.

The Times reported this week that two of Bren’s teenage children want a readjustment in the child support he’s been paying. Through their lawyer, the teens say the formula for determining such things might put their fair share at roughly $2.2 million a month.

For each of them.

They’ve gone to court to collect, after alleging a few years ago that Dad hadn’t made good on a promise to support them in a style to which they’d like to grow accustomed and that reflected the way he lives.

The next courthouse showdown is set for a week from today.

I’m a little skeptical of monetary figures in lawsuits, but Bren’s lawyers say he’s been paying $17,000 a month for each of the two children, per an agreement with the children’s mother, whom he never married.

Not to get bogged down in minutia, but the $2.2-million figure may not be etched in stone. The teens’ lawyer told The Times that a precise and fair amount — based on the state’s child-support formula — can’t be determined without a full accounting of Bren’s actual wealth. The $2.2 million was divined by taking published accounts of Bren’s wealth — Forbes magazine, for example, has estimated his wealth at $8.5 billion — and crunching some numbers.

Most rich guys would rather tell you they’re using Viagra than reveal their net worth, so don’t hold your breath on Bren going that route. The matter sounds like something that will be negotiated behind closed doors.

But let’s play along. Let’s talk about what’s fair. About what makes sense.

Who wouldn’t be sympathetic to a couple of teenagers who just want a fair shot? They didn’t ask to be born to a rich guy. Should they be downgraded as if they were some kind of junk bond?

If I could just have a minute of the kids’ time. . . .

Kids, you don’t want $2.2 million a month. You don’t even want $2 million. Or $1 million. You don’t even want $50,000 a month.

You may think you do, but you don’t. You’re much too young to have your own yacht or to fly off, if the mood strikes on a slow weekend when there’s nothing good on TV, to the French Riviera.

For now, settle for Turtle Rock in Irvine, not Turtle Island in Fiji.

Make friends, don’t buy them. When you have millions of dollars coming in every year, it’s hard to know who your real friends are. Just ask Britney Spears.

Would you rather discover life on your own or have it handed to you?

I’ve been hard on child support officials for their ridiculous pretense that when fathers don’t pay their child support, it must mean that they have the money but are being stingy with their kids. Research shows just the opposite–usually the fathers who can pay, do so. Most who don’t pay, can’t. To learn more about the problems with the child support system, see my co-authored column When Beating up on ‘Deadbeat Dads’ is Unfair (Houston Chronicle, 1/7/07), or click here.

In this article, Doug Thompson, deputy director for Ohio’s Office of Child Support, says:

“When you’ve got a parent in front of you who says, ‘I want to pay child support but I need help,’ before we lock that person up, before we put them on TV, we want to give them that opportunity to do the right thing.”

I’m not laying up nights waiting for child support enforcement bureaucrats to do the right thing, but there does seem to be an increasing recognition of the unfairness of the “deadbeat dad” raids and the child support system as a whole. In August, David Engle, director of Ohio’s Washington County Department of Social Services explained that one of the biggest barriers to paying support is unemployment. He said:

“The No. 1 reason why people can’t pay their support is they’re not able to find a job, or a job doesn’t give them sufficient funds to pay the support,” he said.

On a separate note, I absolutely do not condone violence, but with so many men being unfairly persecuted, I’ve often wondered about the possibility for violence against arresting police officers. Apparently Bob Cornwell, executive director of the Buckeye State Sheriffs’ Association, is worried about it, too. In the article, he says:

“When you give people advance notice that, ‘I’m coming out tomorrow to pick everybody up because we’re having a big roundup,’ it gives some people an opportunity to lay in wait.”

The article is below. Thanks to child support expert Jane Spies of the National Family Justice Association for the first article. Jane discusses problems with the child support system in her recent article The Myth of the Successful Child Support System.

State ends annual deadbeat-parent roundup
By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS
Associated Press, 12/27/07

The state has ditched a decade-old program that rounded up deadbeat parents one day or week each year to draw attention to people late with their child support payments.

The Department of Job and Family Services said people behind in support payments don’t always deserve to be handcuffed on TV. The state also can’t say whether the arrests generated overdue money for children.

Sheriff’s departments said they had safety concerns about the program. Counties said they couldn’t always pull together the employees to administer the arrests.

“When you’ve got a parent in front of you who says, ‘I want to pay child support but I need help,’ before we lock that person up, before we put them on TV, we want to give them that opportunity to do the right thing,” Doug Thompson, deputy director for the state’s Office of Child Support, told The Associated Press.

The arrests aren’t going away, and many counties arrest dozens of people each day for failing to pay child support. But Thompson said the state is working with counties to figure out new ways to get parents to make regular payments.

Texas criminal defense attorney Paul Stuckle (pictured), who specializes in defending men falsely accused of domestic violence or sexual abuse, wrote me recently concerning the Domestic Violence Benchbook used for judges in the state of New Mexico. It is put out by the Rozier E. Sanchez Judicial Education Center of New Mexico, which was established under a federal grant to provide education and training to the judges, administrators and other staff of the New Mexico judicial branch. The Benchbook contains numerous gems, including this one:

“Domestic violence perpetrators can be men or women involved in heterosexual or same-sex intimate relationships, and New Mexico’s laws against domestic violence make no distinction based on the parties’ gender or sexual orientation. Nonetheless, the discussion in this chapter will assume a heterosexual relationship with a male abuser unless otherwise indicated. The discussion uses this assumption because most domestic violence research has been done in this context.

“Violence in same-sex relationships and in heterosexual relationships with female abusers has not been much studied to date, and is not well understood. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (1992-1996), about 85% of victims of intimate violence are women. Although less likely than men to experience violent crime overall, women are 5 to 8 times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate. Greenfeld, et al, Violence by Intimates, p. 1, 4 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1998).”

As I’ve explained on numerous occasions, crime surveys dramatically and consistently undercount male victims of domestic violence, for reasons that are logical and understandable. (To learn more, see my co-authored column New DOJ Domestic Violence Study Undercounts Male Victims, Baltimore Sun, 1/12/07). Domestic violence research clearly shows that women are at least as likely to attack their male partners as vice versa, and that one-third of domestic violence injuries are sustained by heterosexual males.

The Domestic Violence Benchbook even cites and treats as good coin research from Dr. Lenore E. A. Walker’s The Battered Woman Syndrome (aka the “How to Murder Your Husband and Get Away with It” defense).

This is another example of the importance of the California Alliance for Families and Children’s upcoming conference “From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence.” The dissident domestic violence authorities and researchers speaking and directing the conference are challenging the domestic violence establishment’s discredited yet pervasive “man as perp/woman as victim” model of domestic violence. To learn more, see my recent post Group of Domestic Violence Dissidents/Authorities Sponsors Historic Conference.

[Note: If you or someone you love is being abused, the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women provides crisis intervention and support services to victims of domestic violence and their families.]

Background: Feminists often portray the pre-feminist (pre-1970) era as one in which women were not valued or seen as being fully human. To cite one example of thousands, recently the National Organization for Women wrote on their website: “Are women human? Do women deserve full human rights? The U.S. Senate isn’t sure.”

My belief is that while 1960s/1970s feminists had plenty of legitimate grievances, their insistence that society never valued women is false. In reality, men made enormous sacrifices to provide for and protect their wives and children–a testament to the average man’s respect for women.

While reading one of Bill James’ baseball books recently, I stumbled upon a couple examples of how society viewed women 100 years ago. In one, George Davis, a turn-of-the century star baseball player, and his teammates rushed into a devastating apartment fire to save the lives of its female inhabitants. To learn more, see my blog post From 1900: Another Example of How Our Society Never Valued Women or Saw Them as Human.

From Bill James, describing an incident involving Tommy Corcoran (pictured) and Orville Woodruff, major league baseball players over 100 years ago:

“In St. Louis in 1903 Corcoran was walking around the town sight-seeing with a teammate, Orville Woodruff, when a horse, frightened by an automobile, reared up, creating panic. According to Lee Allen in The Cincinnati Reds, ‘pedestrians scattered in all directions, Corcoran was pinned against a building and badly hurt, but Woodruff emerged from the affair a hero, picking up a woman who was lying right in the path of the horse and carrying her away from the danger in the nick of time.'”

Background: Tim Russert’s Wisdom of Our Fathers has hundreds of stories men and women tell about their fathers. It’s a remarkable book–to learn more, see my co-authored column America’s Father Hunger (World Net Daily, 10/13/06).

This story is “He loved his family too much to say good-bye,” from Carole Harris Barton of Burke, VA, about her father, coal miner Samuel Sterling Harris (1911-1983).

“Daddy never said good-bye. I first noticed it the year I turned five, when he used to drive Mother, my brother John, and me from our shanty at the coal mine into Madisonville, the heart of the West Kentucky coalfields. ‘Be good babies,’ he would say to John and me before he left us to wait with Mother in the car when he went inside to night school, where he was earning a certificate in mining safety that would entitle him to a raise.

“He had gone to work in the mine when he was fourteen, three years after his father died and left the family destitute. When the foreman learned that Daddy was underage, he sent him home; Daddy waited two years and went back to the mine. He had been there ever since. He didn’t complain about his lot, but he was determined that his children would have more education than he did. He worked days and studied nights to get a better job, so he could save enough money to move us away from the mine, where there was no high school, into town, where there was.

“He never said good-bye when he left for work. ‘Be a good baby,’ he would say, throwing me a wave. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Other kids had dads who said good-bye. Why wouldn’t mine?

“Finally, Mother explained. Daddy never said good-bye because he was afraid of a fatal mining accident. He thought if he never said good-bye, there’d never be one.