Author: Super User

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting everyone. And that includes parents who are paying child support. In fact, the economic devastation the virus has produced threatens to be disastrous for many of these parents. And NPO is taking a strong stand to try to protect these parents.

When parents in an intact marriage have any sort of economic setback, they tighten their belts to work through the hard times. When parents who pay child support have an economic setback, they get in arrears on child support and these arrearages can build quickly and be difficult to discharge even when income is restored. This is a troubling, but familiar, problem. What’s new—what the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought—is on a different scale. Without swift government action, we’re headed for a catastrophe for millions of parents.

The mandated economic shutdown will result in millions of paying parents who have never been behind on their child support payments suddenly being in arrears. The closure of many courts means that these parents can’t file a motion for modification of their child support. Even when the courts open up, there will be significant backlogs. And, unless lawmakers and child support officials take dramatic action, the strong enforcement measures intended to coerce child support evaders—those who have the ability to pay but are unwilling to—will be applied to parents who have lost income because of the deep economic recession.

The extraordinary times we are living through call for extraordinary measures from legislators and child support professions. This is why NPO has endorsed four resolutions concerning the handling of child support obligations in the COVID-19 era. The NPO Board passed resolutions calling for:

• Congress to amend the stimulus program so that those in arrears on child support do not have their stimulus checks seized to recoup the past-due child support. The seizure of these funds denies these parents needed funds and, because almost all of the seized funds go to state and federal government coffers, this seizure blunts the stimulus effect of the program.
• Congress to suspend the Bradley Amendment, which prohibits states from retroactively modifying child support to a time prior to the filing of a motion for modification. With the courts closed, this means that many parents will be run up an arrearage that will be very difficult to repay.
• State legislatures to suspend their laws that prohibit the retroactive modification of child support to a time prior to the filing of a motion for modification.
• Child support officials to suspend the enforcement mechanisms for the duration of the COVID-19 caused recession. These mechanisms, which include license suspension and routine reporting to credit bureaus, are designed to be used against child support evaders but they will unintentionally make it harder for responsible parents to recover financially and support their children.

NPO has communicated these resolutions to key members of Congress and to key child support officials.

We urge you to do your part, too. If you haven’t contacted your state and federal legislators calling on them to address these problems, please do so. Send them copies of the NPO resolutions and urge them to do the right thing to prevent a disaster that doesn’t have to happen but certainly will if they do nothing.

Among the many shockingly dishonest articles on parental alienation I’ve commented on in the past, two, one in the Washington Post and another by NBC, took aim at a program designed to reduce the awful consequences of severe alienation.  That program is called Family Bridges and the articles were scurrilous in the extreme.

Among many other shortcomings, they interviewed kids who’d been through the FB workshop but who’d relapsed into their previous alienated behavior.  Their comments on the workshop weren’t favorable.  Needless to say, the article failed to interview a single kid who’d had a good experience at FB.

So it’s worthwhile that Dr. Richard Warshak has included a section of his latest paper on a study that was conducted on Family Bridges and the kids and parents who’ve taken part in the program.  That study tells a lot about the efficacy of the workshop, but it also tells us more about the amazing dishonesty of the articles about it.  Suffice it to say that, at the time the articles were published, the study had been completed, but, predictably, the writers managed to avoid reading the study or interviewing anyone who had.

So how did Family Bridges measure up?  First the study asked the children to rate their experience there.

Most of the children began the experience with predominantly negative expectations, but eighty-nine percent felt better about the workshop at the end. At the conclusion of the workshop, only four percent indicated that they felt “very negative” about the workshop, eighteen percent “somewhat negative,” and seventy-eight percent positive about the experience. Two-thirds of the children rated the workshop as “good” or “excellent,” twenty-five percent rated it as “fair,” and eight percent rated it as “poor.” Even among the children who did not rate the workshop positively, most rated the workshop leaders positively as treating the children with respect (ninety-five percent) and kindness (ninety-six percent).

Family Bridges has two main goals – helping children better adapt to the conditions placed on them by court orders and improving parent-child relationships.  So it makes sense to measure the effectiveness of the workshop with regard to those two goals.

Compared with their behavior before the workshop, by the end, children were perceived as significantly more willing to cooperate with custody orders. Before the workshop, the previously rejected parents reported that only fifteen percent of the children cooperated with the orders “a lot” or “moderately.” By the end of the workshop, the percent of perceived cooperation rose to ninety-four percent as rated by parents, and ninety-six percent as rated by professionals, a statistically significant and large improvement.

Importantly, those ratings were done by previously targeted parents.  Clearly, they think the program made a vast improvement in their children’s ability to cooperate with court orders.

By the end of the workshop the children were significantly less alienated, as indicated in ratings by the parents, children, and professional workshop leaders. The parents and children perceived the workshop as helping to improve their relationship skills and the quality of the parent–child relationship. Parents and professionals most frequently rated the parent–child relationships as “much better” after the workshop, and children most frequently rated the relationships as “somewhat better.” Combining the “much better” and “somewhat better” ratings, parents rated ninety-nine percent of the relationships as improved, professionals rated ninety-four percent of the relationships as improved, and children rated seventy-four percent of the relationships as improved.

Again, those findings strongly indicate dramatic changes for the better in the more important of the two Family Bridges goals.  What’s not to like?

Well, if you’re opposed to non-custodial fathers being able to fight back against parental alienation, there’s a lot to dislike.  If you oppose children having meaningful relationships with both parents following divorce, you’ll certainly dislike the reality of Family Bridges.  If your anti-father bias leads you to claim that the very idea of parental alienation is suspect, then you’ll pen articles that are intentionally misleading on the subject.

But no more can principled discourse ignore either parental alienation or its effective treatment.  To the doctrinaire, that’s a big disappointment.  To the rest of us, it’s the best of news.

Professor Richard Warshak has penned an article on parental alienation in the journal Family Court Review.  It’s entitled “Risks and Realities of Working with Alienated Children.”  It’s a highly informative article, but it’s also a warning and one that’s long overdue.

As readers of this blog know, I’ve written many, many times about parental alienation.  Often those posts are about the scandalous misrepresentation of parental alienation by journalists, lawyers and other advocates.  The standard refrain is that the idea of parental alienation is a shady scheme hatched by abusive fathers to wrest custody of children from protective mothers.  Given that, it’s clear that the opposition to the recognition of alienation and treatment of alienated children traffics in intellectual dishonesty for the purpose of further marginalizing fathers in children’s lives.  In short, the people I refer to, because they seek to cast doubt on parental alienation, abet the abuse of children.

In his latest article, Warshak takes aim at some of those same “journalists.”

Glaringly absent from some media accounts is any information about the evidence the court considered in determining that the children’s best interests would be served by reuniting with a parent whom the children were rejecting for no good reason. Some decisions document appalling psychological abuse that compelled the judge to protect the children from further exposure to toxic parenting. Also absent from some media accounts are the voices of formerly rejected parents who recovered a healthy and rewarding relationship with their children, and the voices of formerly alienated children who used to avoid, but now embrace, their formerly rejected parent.

He then goes further and educates his readers about similar dishonesty among the ranks of mental health professionals.

First though, he very pointedly shows that there are risks to mental health professionals to working with alienated kids and providing forensic testimony.  Parents involved in divorce and custody litigation, particularly those involving parental alienation, are often angry.  If a custody evaluator offers an opinion that favors one parent, he/she can become the target of the other parent’s anger.  Therefore, for reasons of professionalism, professional ethics and getting one’s opinions right, custody evaluators must know the science on parental alienation and have the requisite training and experience to give fact- and science-based opinions.  To do otherwise is to risk discipline by professional licensing organizations and lawsuits for malpractice.

Warshak is clear on this and his suggestions are sound.  But they also sound like warnings to me.  Mental health professionals who carry into court their anti-PA biases run grave risks.  The science is too far advanced to play fast and loose with and, in the process, children’s well-being.

But, outside of court, the anti-PA/anti-father crowd has been busy.

Paul Fink, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association and former president of the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence, accused professional colleagues and members of the public of sexually abusing their children, based only on the fact that the people he accused favored official recognition of parental alienation.

Fink subsequently apologized and made it clear that he now understands that PA exists and that parents and children alike can be hurt by it.  Nevertheless, the anti-dad crowd still uses his pre-apology words to support their cause.  Of course they do.

As to the Family Bridges workshop that’s designed to address severe alienation,

A psychologist derisively dismissed the workshop to a reporter despite having no knowledge of the workshop, and having never talked with a parent who went through the workshop, or with any provider of the workshop. Five months later this psychologist read an article about the workshop, credited the article with helping to “demystify” it, and acknowledged that the intervention holds promise for some families. Naturally, a mystified professional would have done better to educate himself before publicly denigrating an intervention about which he was ignorant.

That is the level of frank dishonesty in which a supposedly professional psychologist engaged.  He not only knew nothing about the workshop and didn’t divulge his ignorance, he lent his transparently false opinion to a “hit-piece” against a workshop that’s shown significant success in helping alienated kids.

Then there’s this:

For her work raising concerns about “false memories,” including children’s reports of parental abuse, Elizabeth Loftus was condemned as harming victims, and aiding murderers and rapists. She has also faced death threats and actual assaults.

And this:

Psychologists and their families have been stalked and had their private information, such as home addresses, posted on the Internet— a practice known as doxing…

Some professionals who work with alienated children, or merely write on the topic, have been targeted for intimidation and overt orchestrated campaigns to sully their reputation. They have been threatened with violence, invasion of privacy, and public humiliation. False information has been sent to colleagues, regulatory boards, and institutions with whom the professional is affiliated. The professional and his or her family are investigated with the hope of finding information that can harm the professional’s reputation.

It seems to border on the pathological that perfectly intelligent, educated people should resort to such tactics simply to oppose the very concept of parental alienation that every family court judge and family lawyer knows exists.  These people make little pretense of intellectual honesty or doing what’s best for kids.  Their goal is to cast aspersions on fathers for the purpose of weakening them in family courts.  Why else would attorney Joan Meier pretend parental alienation to be this:

Parental alienation (or “alienation”), while lacking any universal definition, at its essence, is the theory that when a mother and/or child seek to restrict a father’s access to the child, their claims of dangerousness or harm are not true, but due to the mother’s anger or hostility, or pathology.

It’s a claim that has no basis anywhere in the literature on PA, but it does reveal that those who stoop to any level to try to cast doubt on PA believe it to be a gendered phenomenon in which unscrupulous fathers target innocent mothers.

Yes, there are risks out there for those who recognize PA and try to help parents and children through that briar patch.  But, as the science on PA advances, there are now risks for mental health professionals, lawyers and journalists who, until now, have had free rein to frankly misrepresent PA and disparage their more scrupulous colleagues.

More on this next time.

May 7, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

And here’s yet another case in which COVID-19 is being used as an excuse to interfere in a child’s relationship with a parent (New Zealand Herald, 4/29/20).  Although most courts seem to understand that parenting time orders need to remain in effect and unchanged due to the virus, a few, alas, do not.

In the current case, a father’s ex-wife abducted their son to New Zealand.  (The article gives no names and excludes the father’s country of residence.)  It took the New Zealand courts an astonishing three years to come to a decision about the matter, during which time of course the child remained in New Zealand with the mother’s abduction tacitly endorsed by the legal system.  The father’s country of residence is not a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, so he was unable to pursue the remedies it offers. 

But the courts of his country ordered that he have sole custody of his son and, eventually, the New Zealand court agreed.

“The father has been granted custody of the boy and permission to return with his son to his country of residence and boy’s birth country almost three years after the mother breached a court joint parenting order in 2017 and failed to return the boy back to his birth country during a visit to New Zealand…

The court found that if the mother was given full day-to-day care of the boy in New Zealand he was likely to lose any relationship with his father and be “further harmed by exposure to the mother’s continued anxiety and distress”.’

All that cost the father thousands of dollars and, given his visa restrictions in New Zealand, he can’t work.  Nor does he have health coverage there.  In short, the New Zealand court system has made his living conditions precarious and endangered his ability to care for his son while there.

“I have no medical coverage while I’m in New Zealand. How can anyone expect me to be here in a country during a crisis and looking after a young boy awarded to me by the New Zealand court… and literally I can hardly look after him.”

If that’s not bad enough, due to the excuse of COVID-19, life for Dad is about to get worse.

“But while the father was in the process of planning his trip home, [the mother] put in an application to the Family Court raising safety concerns about the boy travelling overseas during a global pandemic.

Apparently, while Dad has had to spend his own money on legal fees, Mom has applied for hers to be paid by the government, i.e. she wants the New Zealand government to not only endorse her child abduction by allowing it to go on for over three years, but wants it to pay her costs of doing so as well.  Amazing.

And of course, since she made the request, the court is spending still more time and Dad’s money to hold a hearing.  Who knows how long that’ll take or how expensive it’ll be?

An urgent hearing has now been set to look at whether it is safe for the boy to travel overseas or whether further conditions need to be added.”

As usual, this case should have been resolved years ago.  It seems to invariably be true that courts hearing abduction cases fail to see the obvious – that, apart from whatever other deficiencies the abducting parent may have, child abduction is child abuse.  The abductor is an abuser.

Of course abductors always have their ready-made justification close at hand.  The other parent is usually described as an abuser and courts generally make an inquiry into that claim.  But what’s also true is that courts of countries to which a child is abducted have no more ability to decide those matters than the courts of the countries from which children are taken.  (That’s assuming those countries of origin aren’t, say, Somalia, that is truly dysfunctional in many ways.)  So the logical and fair thing would be to return the matter to the courts of the country from which the child was taken, a process that should take weeks, not years.

But I can’t recall a single abduction case in which that’s happened. 

Children under the age of 17 are overwhelmingly safe from the COVID-19 virus.  It is inexcusable for this New Zealand court to use the remote possibility of the boy’s contracting the illness to further extend the abuse to which his mother began subjecting him over three years ago.

May 5, 2020 by Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D.

Children have an extremely low risk of dying from COVID-19. Hence, there is no reason to change parenting schedules or prevent a child from seeing a parent because of COVID-19.

Among children under age 15, only nine COVID-19 death had been reported in the United States by May 1. When looking at data since February 1, this can be compared to 101 children dying from pneumonia, 81 from influenza and 5,520 total deaths in this age group.

Are these low numbers due to the lockdown and school closings? To answer that, let’s look at Sweden, one of the few western countries that never closed its elementary schools. You may think this would put children at risk, but no. While the country has had thousands of deaths among adults, not a single child have died from COVID-19.

Are there any exceptions when a change in parenting schedule could be warranted? Yes, there are. If a child lives with a person over the age of 60 or 70, it is advisable to protect that older high-risk person from being infected by the child, and one option is then to have the child stay with the other parent. To give up time with a child is a decision that should be made by the family with the older person though. As an argument to prevent the child from seeing the other parent, it falls flat, as it is not the child that is at risk.

What about parents that are at high risk of being exposed to COVID-19 because they work as a medical doctor or nurse? Even if they get the disease and pass it on, there is no major risk to the child. I have 50/50 shared parenting of my four-year-old twins, and their mother works as a nurse at a major hospital, while my scientific work now must be done from home. She is likely to become infected at some points, and then infect our kids, but I am not worried about them. It would be both dishonest of me and detrimental to the children if I used COVID-19 as an excuse to limit their time with their mother. Children need both parents.

Every death of child is a tragedy, but very few of those deaths are due to COVID-19. On the contrary, while COVID-19 is a terrible disease among the elderly, it may actually have lowered the health risk of children, since lower traffic volumes have led to fewer traffic accidents and deaths. So, make sure your child gets to see both parents during this lockdown, but please, drive carefully when you drop them off and drive carefully when you pick them up. The children are our most valuable treasures.

Martin Kulldorff is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

May 5, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

I’ve mentioned the fact that, with a few exceptions, courts are requiring parents to abide by the terms of their custody and parenting time orders during the COVID-19 restrictions on travel, business, etc.  But what about child protective agencies?  Would they seize on the specter of the virus to step up their interventions into families?  If so, how might that play out?

Consider this example (Reason, 4/28/20).  A couple who, in the article, are called Bill and Kristy had just moved to Kentucky from New York with their seven kids.  They went to a bank to open an account, leaving the two oldest kids in the car and taking the five little ones into the bank with them.  Bank employees were not amused.

The teller immediately interrogated Bill and Kristy about why they had brought five kids into the bank at one time. She [the teller] told them they could not get within six feet of her and that they needed to take the children out. Kristy explained that the children were too young to be left unsupervised by an adult, and neither she nor Bill could take them elsewhere because the couple were opening a joint account, and both had to be present.

While Bill stayed with the children away from the counter, Kristy opened the account, feeling self-conscious as the staff whispered to each other and watched her family suspiciously.

Eventually, the two finished their banking business and went home, only to be met by a caseworker from child protective services.  It seems someone had reported Bill and Kristy for abusing their children.  And that someone was from the bank.  They know this because the accuser said they had five children, not seven.  The accuser also said he/she had witnessed bruises on the children’s arms, but this was March 3, a cold day in Kentucky.  The children were all wearing long sleeves.

The point being that someone at the bank took offense at Bill and Kristy’s insufficiently keeping their distance and used their special power to make life even more difficult for them than it already was.  That power of course was the power to falsely accuse parents of child abuse.  It’s a power we all have and can all use any time we want to.  We can do that because we can make anonymous allegations of abuse and fear no consequences if we act maliciously, as the person at the bank apparently did.

So the caseworker investigated the false complaint, as he/she is pretty much obligated to do.  But, despite finding no evidence of abuse, the case didn’t end there.  No, it’ll remain open for at least 45 days, during which time the stress of the pandemic and having seven kids in their home all day every day will be exacerbated by the alleged abuse case hanging over their heads.

The Reason article goes on to suggest that “off ramp” legislation would be a good idea.  “Off ramp” legislation would require CPS agencies to close a case promptly once an allegation has been investigated and no abuse or neglect found.  All too often, as with Bill and Kristy, CPS agencies keep cases open indefinitely causing emotional trauma to the targeted families.

That, then is one way in which the COVID-19 conditions policy makers have adopted can result in CPS involvement where none is warranted.

Here’s another.  I’ve read a document (that unfortunately I can’t reproduce) from the Oregon Department of Human Services, of which the state’s child protective agency is a part.  It was written by Lacey Anderson, Director of Child Welfare “Practice and Program,” and issued on April 22.  It reads in pertinent part,

“If, in the course of an assessment, a caseworker or supervisor makes the determination that a child will enter substitute care because their caregiver is infected with COVID-19…”

In that event, there is now a special type of case note that must be used to indicate a caregiver with the virus.  Stated another way, all parents in Oregon who’ve been diagnosed with COVID-19 are now subject to having their kids removed from their care and handed to a stranger.  Never mind that, to date, no child aged 17 or younger has died from the disease.  And never mind that anyone, including foster parents and CPS caseworkers can contract the illness and pass it on to children. 

Face it, although COVID-19 is fairly easy to transmit, its fatality rate is extremely low – probably between 0.1% and 0.2% of infected people.  It’s less lethal than many other communicable diseases, but so far those have not become reasons for taking children from parents.  Only COVID-19 has that dubious distinction.  Plus of course shielding anyone from the disease means that person’s immune system can’t protect it.  It’s Immunology 101 that exposure to disease-causing organisms/molecules is necessary to produce immunity.

Predictably though some CPS agencies have seized on the recent pandemic to expand their power over parents.  Will COVID-19 open the door to child protective officials using the same excuse with different diseases?  If Mom gets the flu, will she lose her kids?  

May 1, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

The Minnesota Supreme Court has established that a custodial parent’s denial of parenting time to a non-custodial parent is a matter of the custodial parent’s objective behavior, not her subjective intent.  That may sound like a trivial matter, but it’s not.

In Minnesota, deprivation of parenting time established by a court order is a felony.  Plus, unlike other states like Texas, it seems Minnesota law enforcement personnel actually enforce the law.  In Texas, deprivation of parenting time is also a felony, but the law is seldom enforced.  Indeed, some county sheriffs have a policy of refusing to enforce those orders.  The claim is that they’re civil in nature, when in fact the law is crystal clear that refusing to allow parenting time is a criminal matter.

So at least Minnesota enforces its laws on parenting time.

The case in question, State v. Culver, involved very straightforward facts.  Jennifer Culver had the great majority of parenting time with her child.  Her ex, D.E., had only a few hours on certain days, plus every other weekend.  Minimal though D.E.’s time was with his child, it was too much for Culver who seems, in the state Supreme Court’s telling of the facts, to have routinely ignored the trial judge’s explicit orders.  Her behavior looks very much like that of someone who didn’t believe there’d be any consequences to violating court orders.  In all, there were at least six such violations of which she was convicted by a jury.

The law she violated seems clear enough.  It reads,

‘It is a felony to intentionally take, obtain, retain, or fail to return a minor child from or to the parent in violation of a court order “where the action manifests an intent substantially to deprive that parent of rights to parenting time or custody.”’

To most people that probably means that keeping a child from a parent is illegal when doing so indicates an intention to substantially interfere with parenting time or custody.  The word “substantially” is there to prevent a parent from becoming a felon who is, say, an hour or so late returning a child to the other parent.  It’s to prevent “de minimis” violations of a law that’s supposed to criminalize serious offenses.

Somehow though, the court of appeals in Culver managed to decide that the statute required the Culver jury to in some way intuit Culver’s subjective intention.  Plainly enough, it does no such thing.  If Culver’s “action” itself indicated to reasonable people an intention to deprive D.E. of parenting time, as Culver’s clearly did, and the time lost is “substantial,” then she’s guilty.

In fact, email and text messages made clear that Culver had simply ignored D.E.’s parenting time.  She went to a wedding and later a funeral.  At both she wanted the child to be with her, despite both occurring during D.E.’s time and so she refused to abide by the court’s order. 

As a Supreme Court case, Culver is now precedent in Minnesota.  It means what the legislature clearly wanted the law to mean – that intentional deprivation of parenting time is a serious criminal offense and will be treated as such.  If a parent refuses to honor a court order for parenting time, she can find herself in jail and sporting a felony on her record for the rest of her life.

It’s one for every parent to think about.  Texas should follow suit.

April 30, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

There’s quite a conflict that’s arisen due to Congress’ decision to disallow stimulus checks being paid to anyone owing back child support.  As I pointed out here, child support obligors stand alone among debtors in being denied those funds.  Have you fallen behind in repaying your student loans?  No matter, you get a check.  Didn’t pay your taxes in past years?  IRS hot on your trail?  You still get a check.  Do you in fact owe the government or anyone else for any reason at all?  You still get a stimulus check as long as you otherwise qualify for one.

Only those who owe child support are omitted.

That’s of course true despite the fact that child support orders have been acknowledged for years to often be beyond the ability of the non-custodial parent to pay.  The Office of Child Support Enforcement has been saying so for years.  Plus, overwhelmingly, child support obligors are the poorest of the poor, so the refusal to give them stimulus checks hits directly at those who need them most.

Like much of child support law and practice, the refusal to send checks to non-custodial parents is frankly punitive in nature.  For decades, and despite much social science on non-custodial parents, we’ve referred to them as “deadbeat dads,” the assumption being that, if they fail to pay the ordered amount, they do so out of spite or simply not caring about their child’s well-being.  That’s seldom the case, but the narrative of the non-custodial cad survives intact and drives public policy.  The decision on stimulus checks is just the latest example of many.

After all, the poor don’t have much of a lobby in Congress, so there’s no political downside to continuing to pillory them.  And politicians can always use the occasion to strike the pose of “tough on deadbeat dads,” i.e. those who are too poor and often too poorly educated to fight back.  It was once thought unseemly to “kick a man when he’s down,” but Congress has long been happy to do just that.  Tough guys, indeed.

But some seem to know better (WISTV, 4/10/20).  The Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court has issued an order prohibiting the arrest of anyone for failing to pay child support.  The order is only good for 30 days, but may be extended, depending on the status of COVID-19 and the attendant economic slowdown when it expires.

It may seem like a small thing, but against the backdrop of our continuing blindness to the realities faced by child support obligors, it’s refreshing to see one person for whom the “deadbeat dad” narrative doesn’t trump common sense.

April 28, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

I couldn’t resist a quick blog on this (Japan Times, 4/10/20).  The headline “Justice Ministry Survey Finds Many Countries Allow Joint Child Custody After Divorce,” says it all.  Yes, they do.  And water is wet and the Earth is a sphere (roughly).

Seriously now, it took a “survey” by the Ministry of Justice for the Japanese government to figure out that some countries “allow” shared parenting post-divorce?  You’d think they could have just read a blog  I happen to know about and learned the same thing.  If they had, they’d also know that other countries have shared parenting because it’s by far the best arrangement for kids, sole parenting, i.e. that’s favored by Japanese policy, being the worst.

I suppose it’s the article’s tone of surprised discovery that got my attention.  It’s as if someone believes they’ve unearthed some hitherto unknown fact about life in those rare and strange parts of the world that are not Japan.

Japan has long been one of the most recalcitrant of countries when it comes to entering the 21^st century regarding child custody matters.  It’s one of the worst countries in the world for promoting the international abduction of children to Japan by Japanese parents.  Put simply, I can think of not a single instance in which the Japanese government has enforced the rights of a non-Japanese parent whose child was abducted to Japan.  Not one.  Plus of course, for years now the government has been hectored to begin including fathers in their children’s lives, but nothing’s come of it.

I’m glad the Justice Ministry now has obvious facts before it.  Perhaps now it will act to improve the lives of the children of the country by giving them an opportunity to maintain real relationships with both parents when the adults split up.  Maybe things are moving.

Of course maybe the Spitsbergen glacier is moving too.