Author: Joomlafreaks

November 4th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The words had barely passed David Norgrove’s lips when the backlash began.  Apparently members of the British government aren’t going to swallow Norgrove’s anti-father, anti-grandparent family law review without a fight.  Read about it here (The Sun, 11/3/11):

PLANS to wreck divorced dads’ and grandparents’ hopes of more time with their children have sparked a Cabinet revolt.

Tory Iain Duncan Smith will lead protests against an official report that today says fathers and mothers should NOT have equal access to kids…

Whitehall sources said Mr Duncan Smith would fight any attempt to sideline dads. One insider said: “The system should be recognising the important role dads can play, not marginalising them.”

The Conservative Work and Pensions minister has long been a champion of children’s rights to a full relationship with their father post-separation or divorce.  And he’s apparently none too happy with the whitewash of the rights of fathers, children and grandparents tossed off by David Norgrove two days ago.

Neither of course are advocates for fathers, children and grandparents.  They point out some of the many painfully obvious points that the Norgrove report ignores, overlooks or simply misunderstands, as this article makes clear (Daily Mirror, 11/3/11).

Ken Sanderson, chief executive of Families Need Fathers, said the review’s failure to recommend shared parenting legislation or a statement on the importance of both parents in law represents “an abdication of their responsibilities to children and their families”.

“The core failing of the current family justice system is that the rights of children to maintain meaningful relationships with both parents, as set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, are not adequately supported or enforced,” he said.

“By choosing not to address this issue, any other proposals to reform the system will be merely superficial adjustments to a fundamentally broken system.”

Nadine O’Connor, campaign director of Fathers 4 Justice, added that the review was “a monstrous sham and a bureaucratic exercise in improving the efficiency of injustice”.

“This report condemns children to a life without fathers with catastrophic social consequences,” she said.

The main goals of the review’s recommendations are speeding up the process of divorce and custody decisions and encouraging parents to mediate their disputes.  Both of those are worthwhile aims of course, but neither will fix what is most wrong with the British system of family law – the separation of fathers from their children.

I’ve said this before: those who oppose fathers’ access to their children bear the heavy burden of explaining to the rest of us why the current system is acceptable.  Explain to us why keeping fathers out of children’s lives, depriving children of the care, love, protection and guidance of fathers is a good thing.

That is what the current system accomplishes.  It does so by granting primary custody to mothers, almost exclusively.  (In the U.K. the rate of maternal primary custody is about 90%.)  It then fails to enforce the visitation rights non-custodial fathers supposedly have.  The effect is that children end up being raised without a father in their lives in any meaningful way.  In fact, that’s the result even if Mom is generous and doesn’t interfere with Dad’s parenting time, because two days of visitation out of every two weeks is not enough to establish and maintain a meaningful relationship with a child.

The “catastrophic social consequences” of fatherlessness Nadine O’Connor referred to were on graphic display only weeks ago as British youth rampaged through the streets for days setting fires and damaging property.  Let us be clear; that is what David Norgrove and the rest of the family law review panel approved when they failed to go to bat for children’s rights to a relationship with their father.

At the same time that Duncan Smith and others are attacking the review, others are scrambling to put a good face on it, as this article reports (BBC, 11/3/11).

The Deputy Children’s Commissioner for England, Sue Berelowitz, said the fact that equal access rights had not been approved did not mean the review was acting against fathers.

She said: “I have not seen anything in the report that says there must be a presumption on the rights of mothers. What the report is very clear about, which I wholly and utterly endorse, as does the commissioner, is that the presumption must be that the best interests of the child must be put first.”

What Berelowitz surely knows is that British family law already requires that the best interests of the child be paramount.  She knows as well that current British law has no “presumption on the rights of mothers,” and yet what the system does is give children to mothers.  So, like the others who oppose children’s meangingful relationships with their dads, Berelowitz plumps for the status quo – fatherless children.

She does so necessarily because, when their parents divorce, children lose their fathers and fathers lose their children.  And whether she knows it or not, the loss of a parent on divorce is bad for children.  Large volumes of research make it clear that those children experience emotional/psychological damage resulting in poorer educational outcomes, higher incidence of drug and alcohol use, greater likelihood of crime commission, lower employment, etc.  Best interests of the child?  Ha!

The family law review is just a recommendation; it has no legal effect.  But if Parliament follows its lead and makes no changes to improve the lot of fathers and children, it will have abdicated its responsibilities to the British people and to British society.  It will have given its stamp of approval to a status quo that has no claim to legitimacy.

Let’s hear it for Iain Duncan Smith and hope that he can force the government to see sense.

November 6th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The need to keep fathers in children’s lives post-divorce is being pressed by countless people in countless situations every single day.  Here’s an example from Oklahoma (NewsOK, 10/19/11).

Testifying before the Human Services Committee of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, several fathers made points about the failure of the family court system to keep fathers in the lives of their children.  They also made it clear that social service agencies that could be part of the solution to father-child separation, ignore the problem.

James Murrell easily could have been a deadbeat dad, but instead the Tulsa man told a legislative panel Tuesday of the struggles he has made to stay in touch with his daughter after his ex-wife took her with her when she moved to another state.

Murrell, 46, who grew up in Oklahoma City, said he was blindsided when his wife of two years filed for divorce about a year after their daughter’s birth. His parents have been married for more than 50 years, and he didn’t know anything about divorce court or child support arrangements. After his divorce, he was ordered to pay child support and half the cost of sending their child to a Tulsa day care, a fee he still pays, he said, even though his daughter now lives in Texas with his ex-wife.

In short, Murrell could have been a dad just like the news media and the anti-dad crowd seem to want him to be – uncaring about his child.  But he overcame his lack of income because he wanted to support her and remain part of her life.  His ex-wife rewarded his efforts by moving out of state so he can’t see her at all.  The courts obviously haven’t done anything to rectify the situation.  After all, the order to pay the daycare center she no longer attends is still in effect, so I suspect he hasn’t been able to get much action on her refusing to allow him custody.

That’s where he stands – paying to support a child his ex refuses to allow him to see.  My guess is that he doesn’t have the money to re-hire a lawyer, go to court and try to get the judge to do something about his ex’s move-away.

As we all know, if Murrell let up on the money flow for an instant, the State of Texas and the State of Oklahoma would come down on him with both feet.  Would his ex have to pay an attorney to get that to happen?  Not on your life.  But when a father seeks that most modest of things – face time with his child – American state courts begin to look like they were designed by Franz Kafka.

Calvin Williams, director of fatherhood services for Public Strategies, an Oklahoma City firm that provides technical assistance to clients in several human services sectors, said effective fathers need good relationship and financial skills.

Children growing up fatherless is a growing trend in Oklahoma and in the nation, he told members of the House of Representatives Human Services Committee during an interim study.

“It increases when you have the economic downturns like we do because when a father has the inability to provide for his child, his absence is the guilt and shame,” Williams said. “Mom becomes an impediment at that point — you can’t provide; you’re not going to see your kid.”

Lawyers always tell their clients that child support and visitation aren’t mutually exclusive.  That is, just because Mom doesn’t allow you to see your kid, you can’t stop paying support.  And vice versa.

That’s an accurate description of family law, but of course the real world is a bit different.  There, if Dad can’t pay, Mom can cut off access in a heartbeat and, as Williams said, many do.  After all, mothers know the ropes well enough, and if Dad’s lost his job and can’t pay support, that obviously means he can’t hire a lawyer to enforce his visitation rights.  So Mom knows she’s in the clear if she wants to keep Junior away from his dad.

Truth to tell, many men, particularly young ones, could benefit from some help regarding how to be a good father.  The epidemic of fatherlessness is more than a generation old and that means there are men who’ve become fathers who never had a father in their lives.  So how can they know what good fathering looks like?

“Men aren’t equipped, men aren’t taught, men aren’t shepherded,” Williams said. “It’s just an event that occurs in a variety of ways. Families are formed in a variety of ways and men find themselves as fathers.”

Many men don’t have the community support to learn to be good fathers, he said.

He said it would be helpful if the state had a fatherhood network to help men prepare for the emotional and financial stress of being a father as well as honing relationship skills with their child and also the child’s mother.

It would indeed be helpful, but I’ve got news for Mr. Williams.  Cash-strapped states aren’t about to establish such a network.  They don’t even do the basics – like enforce visitation orders.  Why would they take on a whole new level of expense, just to help prepare men to be good fathers.  Why spend the money when the courts are just as likely to shove them out of their child’s life later on?

Williams did have one good suggestion.  (Hey, it must be good.  I’ve made it before myself!)

Laws should be changed so fathers are allowed to have a salary equal to at least the poverty level before child support payments are determined, he said.

What a concept.  Williams is actually proposing that fathers shouldn’t have to bankrupt themselves just to support their kids.  They shouldn’t be forced onto the street so that Mom won’t suffer a decline in her standard of living.

The whole idea of child support assumes that fathers should have to gut every asset they have before a court will modify a child support order that was likely too high to begin with.  To put it mildly, that just doesn’t make sense.  After all, if the parents were still married and the guy lost his job, their standard of living would decline.  Everyone would do without so the family could get through its rough financial patch.

But let the parents divorce and the mere loss of a job is supposed to have no effect on Mom and Junior.  Where do people get these ideas?

The fight for common sense and fairness in family courts continues – all across America.

November 7th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
It’s good to see courts recognizing PAS when they see it.  Here’s a case out of Arkansas in which a trial court agreed with two doctors that a mother had alienated her two children from their father (Leagle, 11/2/11).  Apparently the court found that the doctors’ testimony passed the most stringent test for the admissibility of scientific evidence, otherwise known as the Daubert test.

I’ve written before about Dr. Amy Baker’s testimony regarding parental alienation being admitted into evidence under the Daubert standard by a court in Massachusetts. 
Things like that should put to rest for all time the notion that evidence of parental alienation should be kept out of family courts.  The fact is, passing Daubert scrutiny, will soon spell the end of arguments that PAS is a “discredited” scientific notion.  Whether PAS should be included in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual will continue to be debated.  Whether courts should ignore alienating behavior by parents won’t be.

And so it was in Grove v. Grove.  It’s a sadly familiar story.

Jeffrey and Kristi Grove had two children.  They divorced in 2004 with Kristi getting primary custody and Jeffrey getting visitation.  Less than two years later, Jeffrey was back in court complaining that Kristi was thwarting his access to the children.

In January 2007, the trial court ordered a family psychological evaluation by Dr. Paul Deyoub. In a May 8, 2007 report, Dr. Deyoub concluded that Kristi and her parents were poisoning the children against their father with unsubstantiated abuse allegations in an effort to alienate them from him.

Still, apparently Jeffrey didn’t think that was enough for the court to change custody, so in November of 2007, he and Kristi made a deal.

…Kristi and Jeffrey shared joint custody of the children with Kristi having primary physical custody and Jeffrey having visitation. The order included detailed information concerning Jeffrey’s visitation rights and provisions that Kristi give Jeffrey all school, medical, and caregiver information; both parties participate in family counseling; both parties not criticize or allow others to criticize the other party in the presence of the children; and Kristi participate in a “Children in the Middle” program.

Fifteen months later, Kristi was back in court saying that Jeffrey was abusing the children and demanding sole custody.  Jeffrey said she and her parents were alienating the children and that Kristi was refusing visitation.  The court asked Dr. Deyoub to look into the matter.

Dr. Deyoub authored a second report dated September 25, 2009. In his twenty-four-page report, Dr. Deyoub concluded, as he did in 2007, that Kristi and her parents had continued to coach the children to make false allegations of abuse against Jeffrey in an effort to alienate them from him. He opined that Kristi should not have sole custody. Instead, Dr. Deyoub concluded that Jeffrey should have primary custody of the children with Kristi having visitation rights.

Kristi was indignant and asked the court if she could get an opinion from the expert of her choice.  The court agreed.

The trial court granted the request, and Dr. Warren Seiler Jr. was selected. In his December 11, 2009 twenty-six-page report, Dr. Seiler also concluded that the children had been “regularly pressured and brainwashed [by Kristi and her parents] into becoming convinced that their father is a villain and a man to be feared.” Dr. Seiler stated that he was concerned about the future well-being of the children in Kristi’s primary custody. He concluded that full custody of the children should be given to Jeffrey and that Kristi be given supervised visitation.

And the judge agreed with that too.  He found that,

1. A significant and material change of circumstances has occurred so that it is in the best interest of the children that legal and physical custody of the minor children. . . should be placed with the Plaintiff, Jeffrey Grove.
2. Such significant change of circumstances includes, but is not limited to, the following:
a) Defendant has failed to comply with the parties’ Joint Custody Agreement;
b) Defendant has failed to follow the visitation schedule and initially interfered with visitation with the Plaintiff;
c) Defendant has failed and refused to cooperate in counseling as ordered by the Court;
d) Defendant has alienated the minor children from a meaningful relationship with their father;
e) Defendant has embarked on a course of conduct designed to end or substantially limit the contact of the children with the Plaintiff; and
f) Defendant has intentionally perpetrated or acquiesced in false accusations against the Plaintiff and has allowed such statements to be made in the presence of the minor children.

Kristi appealed, but the appellate court upheld the trial court’s findings.  Indeed, those findings are a litany of classic alienation.

Both doctors testified that Kristi and her parents had engaged in a course of conduct to alienate Jeffrey from the children by trying to convince or pressure them into thinking that Jeffrey is an evil father/person. According to the evidence, this was accomplished by Kristi and her parents either coaching or pressuring the children to lie about their father for fear of loss of affection by their mother and grandparents. In this case, there were many false allegations of abuse made by the children.  The doctors testified that there was no evidence to support any of the children’s allegations. Both doctors testified that their counseling sessions with the family revealed that the children have serious issues with lying and that they lied about the allegations against Jeffrey. Dr. Seiler stated that the children lied with impunity, “They lie when faced with an absolute fact that it could not be correct.” While Kristi testified at trial that she did not believe the various allegations of abuse made by the children, she reported them to Drs. Deyoub and Seiler as truth. Dr. Deyoub characterized Kristi’s behavior as “sick” and opined that it was psychologically damaging to the children. The effect on the children did not go unnoticed. Jeffrey testified that the children acted differently and distant toward him. Kristi acknowledged that AG suffered from significant anxiety and that he worried often. Kristi’s boyfriend, Mr. Bishop, testified that there was fear and anxiousness during visitation exchanges.

The public debate about Parental Alienation Syndrome goes on.  Whether it will or won’t ultimately become part of the DSM is not for me to say.  But what will continue to happen is that evidence of parental alienation will continue to be accepted as relevant in cases of child custody.  That will happen despite the cries of the anti-dad crowd that claims against all the evidence that PA, PAS and PAD are inventions by abusive fathers to wrest custody from innocent mothers.  It’s not true; it’s never been true, and more and more, courts are coming to realize it.

Thanks to Adam, a longtime supporter of Fathers and Families, for the heads-up.

November 7th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
As all the world – and probably some distant planets – now know, teen heartthrob Justin Bieber has been accused of fathering a child with a fan of his.  Here’s one article of many (NineMSN, 11/7/11).

The woman making the allegation is one Mariah Yeater.  She claims she went backstage after a Bieber concert and had sex with the pop star.  She now has a four-month-old son on whose behalf she’s filed suit claiming $262,000 in child support from Bieber.  That’s over $65,000 a month.  Hey, it takes money to raise a child.

Bieber of course denies her allegations outright.  He’s said he’s never met Yeater and is clear that he’s never had sex with her.  He said, “To set the record straight — none of this is true.”

Now, given all that, let me say that one of the two is just stupid.  Surely they both know about genetic testing.  That means that, soon enough, we’ll know to an absolute certainty who’s telling the truth.  My money’s on Bieber.  The reason is that, young as he is, he seems to have a pretty good head on his shoulders, and I’m not talking about his looks.  The young man seems pretty well grounded.

Exhibit ‘A’ for what I’m saying is a statement Bieber made about Yeater’s claim that he fathered her son.

“I know I’m gonna be a target, but I’m never gonna be a victim.”

That strikes me as one of the sanest things I’ve ever read about men and fatherhood.  Since young men are given to covering their bodies with tattoos, let me suggest they ink that message somewhere they can refer to it easily and often.  Maybe the inside of one of their wrists so they can look at it like a watch.  “I may be a target, but I’ll never be a victim,” are words to live by.

That means, among other things, taking responsibility for your own fertility.  Men’s contraceptive choices are shockingly limited.  For men, it’s a condom, a vasectomy or abstinence.  As a practical matter, that means a condom.  According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, an astonishing number of young men and women say that (a) they’re sexually active, (b) they’re not ready to be parents and (c) they’re not using any form of contraception.

To those young men, I say, listen to Justin Bieber.  Not using a condom means you’re setting yourself up.  You’re handing to your partner the power to decide whether you become a father or not.  And if she decides you will become a dad, know that the courts give her the power to also decide whether you get to know and raise your child, and if so, how much.  Of course all the while you’ll be paying child support and if you don’t, you’ll lose your license to drive and go to jail.  Paying for a child you didn’t want to a woman you’re not with, who doesn’t let you see your child: that’s a good definition of “victim,” the kind Justin Bieber said he’d never be.  Wise words.

Meanwhile, Mariah Yeater looks more and more like a loose cannon.  Her latest “proof” of Bieber’s paternity is a photo of the child.

Yeater was photographed playing with her son in a park in Los Angeles at the weekend.

“Just look at his mouth,” she told the Daily Star Sunday.

“Look familiar? I pray that Justin sees these photos, looks at Tristyn and knows in his heart that this is his child.”

My guess is that it’ll take a lot more than prayer to tag Bieber with paternity.  But whatever the case, Yeater would seem to have more problems than her latest gambit.  For one thing, Bieber turns out to be the third man Yeater’s claimed to be the father of her son Tristyn.

Yeater’s credibility has been challenged by a number of reports she thought two other men were the father of her child before she announced it was Bieber’s.

She first said the child’s father was ex-boyfriend John Terranova before saying Tristyn actually belonged to a secret lover named Steve.

“She just wants money,” Mr Terranova said.

So the bottom line is, well, the bottom line.  No surprise there.  But I guess you have to give Yeater credit for chutzpah.  After all, she’s bid up the price of her son considerably, from John to Steve to Justin.  That likely constitutes a vast improvement to her hopes of making bank.

Still, the question arises, “why’s she doing this?”  She’ll never get paid by Bieber and she’ll be revealed to be a serial liar.  That, combined with some other discomfiting allegations, might even get the attention of child protective services.  Attention.  I guess that’s the answer.  Still,

Yeater has also been accused of domestic violence, destroying another’s property and making threatening telephone calls.

Of course she hasn’t been convicted of any of that, but at the rate she’s going, at some point, someone is likely to get a snootful of Mariah Yeater and start demanding court action.  And that person might be the actual father of her child, i.e. not John, not Steve and not Justin.  Someone out there fathered little Tristyn and obviously, he doesn’t know it yet because Mariah Yeater has chosen to make up nonsense about Justin Bieber.  That means she hasn’t told the real dad about his son.

If I were the man who’s unfortunate enough to be tied to Mariah Yeater for the next 18 years, I’d go into court and point out that she’s been intentionally separating me from my son while lying to courts and various men about his paternity.  I’d acquaint the judge with the fact that that constitutes parental alienation that should give me custody of the little boy, since it likely violates at least one of the factors on which custody is based.  That, plus a few witnesses testifying to the above-mentioned domestic violence might just turn the trick.

We’ll see what happens.

Finally, one encouraging thing about the media coverage of all this was that the very first articles noticed that Yeater is legally an adult (she’s reported to have been 19, but in her photo, she could pass for 32) while Bieber, who was 16 at the time Tristyn was conceived, was still a minor.  So, if the two had sex, she’d have been guilty of statutory rape, sexual abuse of a child or whatever the law calls it in the applicable jurisdiction.  I was glad to see that not being swept under the rug.

To date, the police haven’t done anything because they haven’t gotten a complaint from anyone.  My guess is that’s because Bieber’s telling the truth – there was no sex between the two.  And where there’s no sex, there’s no sexual abuse.

Stay tuned.

November 8th, 2011 by Glenn Sacks

An adult child of divorce, Rep. Jason Nelson criticized the courts for marginalizing his father.

Fathers and Families member Chris Gregory, a Marine combat veteran of Desert Storm and Somalia, recently told an Oklahoma House of Representatives committee that the family law system is rife with injustices and often separates children from the fathers they love and need.

Led by Representative Mark McCullough and Representative Jason Nelson, the Oklahoma House of Representatives conducted an interim study on family law and no fault divorce earlier this month. According to the legislators’ press release here, “Oklahoma’s family law is dangerously failing the children it is supposed to protect, leading some lawmakers to consider reform of both divorce statutes and the foster-care system.”

Oklahoma Legislator Blasts Family Law System

Representative Nelson (R-Oklahoma City), a child of divorce, said:

[O]ur current divorce system is a racket that enriches attorneys and makes children and communities poorer. Divorce scars children and leaves them emotionally disfigured. The current divorce laws are perverse and they are destroying children and our society.

Representative Nelson spoke movingly about his childhood and watching the pain on his father’s face at not being allowed to spend much time with his son, as well as the financial privations the system put upon him. Nelson concluded with a call for a presumption of shared parenting after divorce.

The Chris Gregory Case–an Outrageous but Common Injustice

Former Marine Chris Gregory, recipient of the Combat Action Ribbon, told the Committee, ‘We need shared parenting.’

F & F’s Chris Gregory, the father of three girls who adore their dad, had a standard child custody order forced upon him—an order which granted his ex-wife “exclusive care, custody, and control of the parties’ minor children,” and allows Gregory’s girls only a few days a month with their father.

For the past three years, Gregory has fought in court to get more time with his girls, ages 11, 9, and 6. He has racked up large legal bills, as he was forced to pay for his ex-wife’s attorney—an attorney whose focus has been to minimize Gregory’s role in his children’s lives. He explains:

The court has denied all of my motions to modify custody or seek an equitable outcome.

Financial Plunder

Gregory, who was asked by Representative McCullough to share his experiences with the divorce system, is a good example of the way fathers are plundered financially.

The financial orders in Gregory’s case are more or less garden variety in a divorce, yet while Gregory earns $7,500 a month after taxes, by court orders he is to be left with merely $2,200 a month to live on. That’s correct–family court leaves Gregory less with less than 30% of his post-tax income. The breakdown is as follows:

Gregory’s monthly earnings after taxes: $7,518
Gregory’s child support: $2,568
Gregory’s alimony: $1,000
Gregory’s garnishment to pay his ex-wife’s attorneys’ fees: $1,726
Total left to Gregory post-family court and taxes: $2,224*

According to the family court, Gregory, a successful Senior Consultant at a major software company who earns a $125K a year salary, should be left with a mere $26,688 a year to support himself and his three girls.

After divorce-related garnishments and further obligations, Chris Gregory is left with less than 30% of his post-tax income. For details, click on the image above.

The child support and the attorneys’ fees are garnisheed directly from Gregory’s check. The $1,000 a month alimony is not, Gregory has not been paying it lately, and faces a contempt charge for it. As in many divorce cases, the attorneys’ fees Gregory owes grew out of his fight to be allowed to play a meaningful role in his children’s lives.

Gregory also got stuck with paying 90% of the $69,000 in marital debt. Gregory asked:

If this is a no fault divorce, why have I had to I assume all the fault?

As is the case with many divorced and separated fathers, Gregory’s daughters’ schools have been generally uncooperative, refusing to send him his daughters’ report cards and notices of parent-teacher conferences and other upcoming events, despite his repeated requests that they do so.

*In the original post we inadvertently omitted a few hundred dollars a month of expenses not related to family court. The figure has now been corrected.

November 9th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The following was written by Sophia Van Buren, who’s contributed before to this blog.

I resisted the urge to look up and scan the audience, but the temptation was just too great.  At least it didn’t take long to find her.  She was sitting alone and motionless in the stands about 30 rows above the high school gymnasium court.  For someone who I was accustomed to only seeing and hearing in action, usually barking orders at my kids or their father, this moment was surreal.  As I walked my daughter across the floor on “Senior Night” of her final home volleyball game, I couldn’t believe the emotion I was feeling for the woman – their stepmother – who over the course of the past eight years had done a formidable job of keeping as much distance between my children and me as possible.  That emotion?  Pity.

Only a few days earlier, Claire had called me in tears.

“Dad said he won’t walk me out onto the court for my last home volleyball game since I told him I didn’t want her out there with me.  Mom, I want you to do it.  Not her.”

To put it in volleyball terms, this was more than a side-out.

“Co-parenting” is just a slick new word for an old idea.  Cooperation (a word that even looks like a thinly veiled word scramble of “co-parenting”) is a concept most kids are introduced to at an early age.  From warming a sibling-to-be up to the idea that soon there will be a newborn in the house blindly expecting a share of limited resources, to songs on Sesame Street singing the praises of working together and getting along, cooperation and sharing are highly esteemed virtues in our society.

But in my situation (and from what I can tell, in far too many other divorced families), co-parenting has not really meant cooperation or a willingness to freely share the children.  As a non-custodial parent, my ex and his wife treat me as if I’m lucky to be involved at all in the lives of my children.  They’re constantly looking to spike the ball in my face.  In a word, they are bullies.  But instead of fighting with them, I tread lightly and try to complicate things as little as possible so as to avoid conflict for the benefit of my children.  My strength is in keeping the ball in the air, and when it comes to the situation with my children and my ex, it means I co-parent alone.

My daughter recently went on a little rant about this exact thing to my husband and me.

“It doesn’t have to be this way!  It doesn’t have to be this difficult!”

She was referring to the barriers that her father and stepmother are constantly building that gum up the machinery of a cooperative co-parenting relationship.

“I have a lot of other friends whose parents are now divorced and none of their situations are like this!”

She had a full head of steam that had been building, and she wasn’t going to stop until she got it all out.  In the early years, I told myself that this day would come if I was patient.  I wouldn’t fight, but I wouldn’t give up, either.  I’d just keep digging out spiked balls and lofting them back over the net.

My daughter was right about one thing – it didn’t have to be that difficult.  Yes, the dynamics of divorced and re-blended families are complex to say the least, and rarely perfect.  But common sense and calm heads must prevail in order for the game of parenting to not become playground chaos.  I urge divorced parents to observe just a few basic guidelines:

1.  Don’t speak badly about your child/stepchild’s other parent, step parents or extended family.

2. Communicate with the other parent about important information on a regular basis without hostility.

3. Respect your child’s need to have equal contact with the other parent.

At my daughter’s volleyball game last week, as I sat on the bleachers waiting for her to signal me to join her, I saw her stepmother walk into the gym with her father.  I didn’t feel victorious watching stepmom start up the steps into the stands.  I didn’t feel like I’d “won” anything, even though for years she had acted like our relationship with each other was some kind of parenting contest.  I’ve never treated my relationship with my daughter like a contest, and in fact I tried for years to have a cooperative and sharing relationship with this woman.  As the evening unfolded, though, I only felt sorry for her.  She’d spent the last nine years of her life paying for my daughter’s volleyball uniforms, camps, weekend tournaments, and club team memberships.  She drove my daughter to her practices and watched almost every game.  I hadn’t.  In order to keep my job so that I could pay child support, I was only able to make the occasional game.  One could certainly make the argument that she deserved to stand on that court with my daughter that night, but she had undermined herself in the end.  When I had asked my 17-year-old daughter why she didn’t want her stepmother on the court with her that night, she responded,  “Because she’s been such an ass**** all these years.  I am not going to reward her.”  17-year-old girls can be mean and reactive, but this reaction was a long time coming.

I would openly discourage divorced parents from treating their children as pawns in an ongoing battle.  That will only do harm to the children.  But if there are divorced parents out there who just can’t see their situation in any other light, then maybe the story of the tortoise and the hare will help.   In the end of that story, the tortoise ends up winning the race because of his persistence, unwavering dedication, and most importantly, his patience.  The much speedier hare’s arrogance caused him to lose, even though he had all the qualities needed to win.  I missed out on a lot of memories with my children.  There’s no sugar-coating that fact.  But I am more confident than ever that the foundation for my relationships with my children, now 17, 13, and 11 years of age, will prove strong and enduring.  I can’t help but wonder if their father and stepmother feel very confident about the future of their relationships with the kids.

Kill shots can be effective in volleyball, but they don’t always land in the court, and if you’re not very good, unforced errors can prove your own undoing.

November 9th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
I’ve said many times that mediation in custody matters is no better than the underlying law and practice of the court.  After all, mediators have little power over litigants.  Mediators just try to get the parties to make a deal rather than have a judge decide the matter for them.

There are a lot of reasons why mediated settlements can be a good thing.  For one thing, the parties tend to be more satisfied with them than they are with the winner-take-all judgment the court issues. 
That’s in part because they feel like they have input in the mediation that they don’t have in court.  They can also make agreements on matters that the court is powerless to rule on.  So, on balance, mediation has a lot to offer.

But what parties agree to is necessarily a product of what they think their chances are in court.  So if one party thinks a judge or jury will award him a large monetary verdict in a civil case, he’s not going to be very motivated to settle for less.

And so it is in custody matters.  A husband and wife can mediate till the cows come home, but if the wife knows to a certainty that the judge will give her the kids and him every-other-weekend visitation, why would she settle for less?  Oh, she might do so out of the goodness of her heart, and sometimes that happens.  But a system that depends on the good will of one of the parties to a notoriously acrimonious dispute – i.e. divorce and custody – is bound to fail more often than it succeeds.

So the concept of mediation as the cure-all for what ails custody cases is misplaced.  If laws and judge’s biases don’t change, there’s little mediation can do to help.

This case is a perfect example (Seattle Times, 11/7/11).

Solomon Metalwala, originally from Pakistan and Julia Biryukova, originally from Ukraine, were married in the United States in 2003.  They have two children, Maile, 4 and Sky, 2.  The couple had debt problems, but more than anything they suffered from Biryukova’s mental illness.  Between March of 2010 and the present, she’s been committed three times to mental institutions and diagnosed with a severe form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, that one psychologist said did not rise to the level of psychosis.

During the bitter divorce, Biryukova leveled child abuse allegations at Metalwala, investigations which were ruled to be unfounded.

So, on the one hand there’s the mentally impaired mother with a history of making false allegations of child abuse against the husband, who on the other hand, seems to be a perfectly capable, loving father.  In a sensible family justice system, he’d get custody and Biryukova would get visitation, probably supervised by social workers.

But our family justice system isn’t sensible; it’s Mom-centric, and, as I said above, no amount of mediation will change that.  So when the two went to mediation, what they agreed to looks like pretty much what they and their lawyers figured they’d get from the judge if he/she was required to rule.  Biryukova got primary custody and Metalwala got visitation.

But even that turned out to be too much for Biryukova.

[Attorney Leslie Clay] Terry said the mandatory mediation in which the couple participated last week was intended to bring a close to the bitter divorce. Both parties had compromised, he said, and an agreement that granted custody to Biryukova but allowed visitation with Metalwala was signed by both.

“On Friday, she called and said she’d felt pressured and wanted to void it,” Terry said.

Two days later, 2-year-old Sky disappeared while in Biryukova’s care.  Here’s what she told police happened:  she and the two children were driving in her car when she ran out of gas.  She and Maile walked a mile to the gas station, got gas, called a friend to come pick them up and, when they returned to her car, Sky was gone.

Police said there was no sign of forced entry into the car nor was there a gas can or any indication of car trouble. Police said the car started right up.

The police and the FBI are now searching for Sky.  He’s not with either parent, but the chances Biryukova is telling the truth are slim-to-none.  Someone has the child and that someone is conspiring to hide the boy from his father.  Such, at any rate, is my take on the situation.

No arrests have been made at this time,” [police officer Carla Iafrate] said. “All possibilities of what may have happened to the child are being investigated.”

She said there are still “many unanswered questions.”

You bet there are.  But however they’re answered, we all hope that little Sky is unharmed.  My money says he’s in the care of Biryukova’s co-conspirator.

With any luck, Biryukova will come clean about what she’s done with the little boy.  My guess is that will happen soon.  If so, it’ll be interesting to see what the family court judge does with the new information.  After all, if my take on the case is correct, we can now add an attempt to deprive Metalwala of his son forever to Biryukova’s previous maternal shortcomings.  Into the bargain, she’s needlessly involved the police and the FBI in her charade.

Will that be enough to convince the judge that Biryukova’s not fit to be a parent?  The fact that the local child welfare agency has taken Maile into care suggests caseworkers there think she’s not.  But of course they’ve also refused to give the girl to her father for reasons no one has yet explained.

So, despite everything, Solomon Metalwala is still being treated like a second-class citizen when it comes to his children.  Do we really expect a court to behave differently?

Maybe they should let a mediator decide.

November 10th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
A survey done for More magazine has found that women in management positions are opting out of the corporate rat race in favor of more free time and less stress.  It seems that once women became acquainted with the demands of advancement in corporate management, what was once excitement about independence and power has turned to disillusionment.  Read about it here (USA Today, 11/1/11).

The magazine surveyed 500 women aged 35 – 60, with at least one college degree, were employed in a professional or management position and earned at least $60,000 if single and $75,000 if married.

43% of the women surveyed say they are less ambitious now than they were a decade ago. And only a quarter of the 500 women ages 35 to 60 say they’re working toward their next promotion.

And forget about the corner office: 3 out of 4 women in the survey — 73% — say they would not apply for their boss’ job. Almost 2 of 5 — 38% — report they don’t want to put up with the stress, office politics and responsibility that often go hand in hand with such positions…

Two of 3 of women reported they would prefer to have more free time than a bigger paycheck, and 2 of 5 said they would be willing to accept less money for more flexibility.

So what’s been known for a long time to be true – that women, far more than men, tend to choose free time and flexibility over money and advancement – continues to be true.  Moreover, it holds not only for women generally but as well for women who are both well-educated and fully inculcated with the “work first” ethos taught by feminists for decades.  That is, the appeal of family takes precedence even for those women we might have thought would be the most resistant to it.

Interesting too is the fact that the women studied aren’t opting out of corporate life because they have children and want to stay home with them.  On the contrary, it’s the demands of corporate ladder-climbing that turn them off.

 Still, the trend isn’t just about women trying to manage children and professional demands. The survey found that only 15% say that household or child care responsibilities have held them back in their careers. Interestingly, while 62% of women with children say they would take more free time over more money, a larger number of single women — 68% — say they would.

The USA Today article illustrates the survey findings with the words of a former corporate middle manager named Tiffany Willis.  She doesn’t beat around the bush about her take on corporate advancement.

She walked away from the pressures, paycheck and prestige of jobs she called “meaningful and important” earlier this year and refuses to return, no matter how many offers come her way.

“I will never go back to the corporate world,” she says. “I want to own my life…”

“It’s not worth it. I had what I called my ‘heart-attack jobs,’ and I strongly believe they took years off my life,” Willis says. “I have been referred by people for other (management) positions, and I tell them no amount of money is worth it. I don’t care if they offered me a million dollars.”

Although the survey is new, its findings aren’t.  Indeed back in July I wrote this piece referring to a New York Times panel on men, women and work.  One female corporate recruiter wrote this:

 Our research at McKinsey [and Company] highlights the difficulty women have in identifying with success, an attitude that appears to hamper their professional development. The absence of female role models is compounded by a heightened perception of the difficulty of achieving success in today’s business environment. “Opting out” — a voluntary decision to discontinue one’s career — is both the result of the barriers identified and an additional cause of the shortfall of women among corporate executives.

Time and again, survey after survey finds that women in a position to do so tend to opt out of paid work.  Usually that’s to care for children, but the More survey shows that it’s just as likely to get out of corporate life.  Various studies have shown the same thing about female attorneys, MBA graduates and those in careers in science, technology, engineering and math fields.

My guess is that women further down on the educational and economic totem poll are just as likely to opt out when it’s feasible for them to do so.

What this suggests is that women are proving to be fairly resistant to much of the social engineering that’s been going on for the past 40 years or so.  Despite an astonishing array of cultural messages saying that motherhood is a snare and a delusion, and that a woman’s true place is in the corporate boardroom, women are saying ‘no.’  They’ve dipped their toe in the water and found it too cold for their liking.

If that trend continues – and it shows more signs of increasing than diminishing – it has the potential to profoundly affect much in American life.  For example, for many years now we’ve been putting an enormous amount of resources into the education of women and girls.  Currently about 58% of our higher education is directed at women, one assumption being that they’ll behave like similarly educated men, i.e. become the captains of industry, the creative geniuses of science, engineering, medicine, technology, etc.  But those who opt out to care for children or simply because they “have difficulty identifying with success,” may earn a good enough living and have nice balanced lives, but they’re unlikely to make the type of contributions made by those with their noses pressed firmly against the grindstone.  Part timers don’t win Nobel prizes.

And if women don’t do equal amounts of paid work as men, the chance of fathers becoming the equals of mothers in family courts lessens.  There’s always been a trade-off between mothers and childcare, and fathers and paid work.  The less mothers do of the former, the less fathers can do of the latter.  The more Mom stays home with the kids, the more Dad has to stay at work.

Even if mothers and fathers divided up the paid work and childcare equally, experience teaches us that dads would still get the short end of the stick in divorce court.  So in order for men to gain equality in custody matters, they’re going to have to do more childcare better than women.  Needless to say, with women opting out of paid work, that’s not likely.

Now, we may eventually move toward a situation in which men and women negotiate work and family obligations on a more or less equal footing, and are perceived by judges to be doing so.  In that case, we may see growing cultural perceptions of equality in individual relationships, irrespective of the “big picture.”  If so, a trend toward greater equality in parenting may come into being.  Certainly, recent changes to family law statutes requiring judges to look at specific parenting factors hold the potential for changing judicial behavior in the direction of greater equality.

Still, unwillingness by women to pull their share of the earning load, coupled with high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing, bode ill for our chances of keeping fathers in the lives of the children who so desperately need them.

November 10th, 2011 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
I’ve been wanting to post this for some time (Agence France Presse,9/11/11).  It seems a German court in Karlsruhe has ruled that a woman must divulge the identity of the man who fathered her child.  Not only that, but apparently she’ll have to pay back the duped non-dad the money he paid her to support the child he thought was his.

The couple were together for a time and the child was born in 2007.  They split up, but the woman told the man he was the child’s father and he accordingly paid to support it.  But somehow he learned that she’d lied to him, so he went to court to get back the money he’d paid due to her fraud, about $6,200.

Now, there’s nothing in the article that says the court ruled that he can’t recover the money, so I assume he can.  If so, Germany’s a step ahead of most U.S. jurisdictions that are still wrestling with the issue of whether to support lying about paternity or telling the truth.  The German court had no such difficulty.

“The defendant owes the plaintiff, in good faith, information about the person who was present at the time of conception,” the court in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe said in a written statement.

I have to say, that’s one of the strangest descriptions of sexual intercourse I’ve ever read.  “Present at the time of conception.”  What was he doing, filming her?

Still, I like the term “in good faith.”  It’s a concept U.S.courts could use more of when it comes to paternity fraud.  The idea, put forward by some, that courts should give a pass to women who lie about paternity, is among the silliest and most pernicious I’ve ever heard.  Telling the truth has a lot to recommend it in its own right.  But apart from the strictly moral aspect of the thing, if the woman comes clean from the start, two men and one child will be saved inexpressible hurt and anguish, and everyone will be saved a lot of money.

If American courts and legislatures can’t figure that one out, maybe they can telephone a German judge who can.

November 11th, 2011 by Glenn Sacks

Today America honors our military service members and veterans for Veterans Day. Fathers and Families honors our military and veteran parents every day, in a very different way–by fighting to protect the loving bonds they share with their children.

In the past 18 months alone Fathers and Families has been instrumental in passing eight bills in six states to help servicemembers and veterans. They are: Arizona HB 2348 and SB 1283; California AB 2416 and SB 285; Georgia SB 112; Indiana HB 1165; Nevada AB 313; and Ohio HB 121; and we’re working on more for 2012.

Beginning in 2005 with the passage of our SB 1082 in California, 44 states have passed military parent legislation–to see a chart of all legislation and state by state status, click here.

Honor Our Military and Veteran Parents with Your Gift

Give now so Fathers and Families may continue to defend military parents. Child custody and family court issues should be the last thing a servicemember should need to think about when they are deployed. www.fathersandfamilies.org/give

Contribute to protect military parents and their children in all 50 states.

Together with you in the love of our children,

Glenn Sacks, MA
Executive Director

and

Ned Holstein, M.D., M.S.
Founder and Chair of the Board