NPO Blog Archive

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

In case anyone missed the point of Naomi Cahn’s article in Forbes, she’s the very soul of clarity (Forbes, 1/26/20).

June Carbone, a family law professor at the University of Minnesota, finds [Joan Meier’s] study highly troubling: “It shows the power of the shared parenting idea. An abuse allegation rejects the possibility of shared parenting. Parents who allege alienation by the other parent cloak themselves in the mantle of the shared parenting norm and judges reward them, even if the parent is an abuser.”

Yes, the whole point is to cast aspersions on shared parenting.  Cahn does so by accepting without question the findings of Joan Meier’s study of litigated and appealed cases in family courts.  The fact that the study is laughably bad deterred Cahn not a whit.  I dealt with Meier’s study here, here, here and here.

The shortcomings of her work are far too numerous to detail here (for that, see the linked-to posts), but perhaps the most important one is her failure to even try to ascertain whether judges were getting right the orders they made.  Meier’s study deals with cases in which mothers alleged some sort of domestic violence or child abuse against a father who then either did or did not claim parental alienation by her.  She found that in some cases judges sided with the father and in some with the mother.  She (and Cahn and others) then leap to conclude that this constitutes a problem, the underlying assumptions apparently being that all such allegations by mothers must be well-founded and all such claims by fathers must not be.

So the obvious and necessary question is whether the judges were getting it right or not.  If Mom alleged abuse, did she have evidence to prove it?  If Dad alleged alienation, did he?  Those are questions most people, I suspect, would find highly relevant to deciding whether or not family courts are witless dupes of scheming dads.  But neither Meier nor Cahn is interested in them.  On such, the whole of the study founders.

But, as the above quotation indicates, the point is not to give an accurate account of how well or ill judges are doing when faced with competing claims of DV and PA.  The point is to attack shared parenting by pretending that the entire concept of parental alienation is a figment of the imaginations of folks who promote children’s rights to real relationships with both parents post-divorce.  And not just a figment of our imaginations, but a clever ruse to disguise our true ambition – to deprive children of their mothers.

It’s a curious claim, to say the least.  After all, it’s the whole point of the shared parenting movement that neither parent lose custody of their children, because kids need both.  That’s done by ensuring that each parent shares parenting time equally or almost equally.  In short, the shared parenting movement embraces the equality of mothers and fathers and it does so because that’s best for kids, as a wealth of science demonstrates.  Who could argue?

Well, Joan Meier and her ilk can, that’s who.  It’s not as if these people go to great pains to obscure their agenda.  After all, Meier’s the one who claimed in a 2017 letter to the Washington Post that fathers have been getting the lion’s share of child custody “for decades.”  The utter absurdity of that claim is revealed by data maintained yearly by the U.S. Census Bureau and more occasionally by other organizations.  Data out of the states of Nebraska, Washington and North Dakota further give the lie to Meier’s claim.

The point being that Meier is now and apparently always has been opposed to fathers having custody of their kids in any meaningful way and that she’ll say pretty much anything to further that aim.  Cahn seconds that emotion.

Plus, even Meier’s data show no bias by judges in favor of fathers.

[T]he study found that when courts believed the claims of alienation, then mothers and fathers were equally likely to lose custody (73%). It also found that in cases without abuse claims (as reported in courts’ opinions), mothers and fathers’ alienation claims seemed to have a roughly equal impact on outcomes.

That of course urges the question “What’s the problem?”  As I mentioned last time, in only about 1.8% of Meier’s cases did a father’s claim of alienation override a mother’s claim of abuse.  And again, that may have been because there really was no abuse and/or there really was alienation.  Further, Meier studied only litigated and appealed cases, i.e. far less than 3% of all custody cases.  So what she found was that DV claims being trumped by PA claims occurred at all in only the tiniest sliver of cases and that judges don’t discriminate between mothers and fathers when adjudicating those claims.

So, what’s the problem?  Meier and Cahn are certain there is one, but even a casual glance at Meier’s data says otherwise.

Here are a few reality checks:  Kids need both their parents, both before and after divorce; equal parenting is the best post-divorce arrangement for children, assuming both parents are fit, competent and non-abusive; sometimes domestic violence occurs; sometimes child abuse occurs; sometimes parental alienation occurs; it is the job of courts to make the best call they can when parents allege DV, child abuse or alienation; not all abuse warrants removing a parent from a child’s life; not all alienation does either.

There is no job harder for a family court judge than sorting out competing claims of abuse/DV and parental alienation.  Everyone who opines on the subject should admit that.  Work like Meier’s ill serves everyone who takes seriously child well-being and parenting time arrangements following divorce.  Ideology doesn’t help.  It only makes murkier an already difficult topic.  If people like Meier and Cahn don’t want to be part of the solution in family courts, they should find other work.  Their disinformation only makes more difficult, an already difficult process.

January 31, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

The shoddy work of Joan Meier is back in the news (Forbes, 1/26/20).  And this time the article reporting on her work is even worse than previous ones.  Back in August I reported on a piece in the Washington Post whose idea of “balance” was a one-sentence quotation by Prof. Nicolas Bala who criticized Meier’s methodology in her most recent study.  The rest of the Post piece swallowed Meier’s claims hook, line and sinker.  But for law professor Naomi Cahn, writing in Forbes, even that modest nod to journalistic integrity is too much.  Cahn didn’t bother to pick up her phone and chat with anyone who might have been critical of Meier’s study.  In the whole article, there’s no hint of the serious shortcomings in Meier’s work.

That’s too bad, because they are many and varied as I detailed here, here, here, and here.

The core of Meier’s and Cahn’s claims is that fathers use false claims of parental alienation to wrest custody from mothers.  They do so particularly when mothers allege some form of DV or child abuse to a family court.  Cahn, who, just like Meier, is a law professor at George Washington University asks no questions, but merely regurgitates Meier’s claims.

What’s wrong with them?  A great deal.  For example, although she uses the terms “abuse” and “alienation” liberally, she nowhere defines abuse and her definition of parental alienation is flat wrong.  Worse, Meier nowhere attempts to ascertain whether mothers’ claims of abuse or fathers’ claims of alienation were justified or not.  In the cases she studied, it’s entirely possible that judges’ decisions were completely sound and well-founded.  But we’ll never know because Meier made no effort to find out.  My guess is that most people inquiring into the topic would want to know those things, but not Meier.

Plus, to her, all abuse is the same.  Nowhere did she attempt to differentiate between, say, a push or shove and a beating that put the victim in the hospital.  If Mom pushes Dad during a heated disagreement, should she later lose custody of the kids solely because of that?  According to the Administration for Children and Families, mothers commit about twice the abuse and neglect of children that fathers do.  Should all those mothers lose custody?  I doubt many people think so, but apparently Meier is one who does.

Or maybe not.  After all, her entire study is based on the false premise that parental alienation is nothing more than an attempt by fathers to gain an advantage in custody cases.  Here’s what she said:

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.

But no scientist working in the field of alienation has ever defined PA as a gendered phenomenon for the good and sufficient reason that it’s not one.  Mothers can alienate, but so can fathers as even a cursory glance at the literature on the subject reveals.  But Meier’s less interested in facts than she is in keeping kids from maintaining healthy relationships with their fathers post-divorce, so why use a real definition of PA when a false one is so much more serviceable?

Then there’s the fact that Meier’s study is hamstrung by its own methodology that’s doomed by selection bias.  She chose only appellate court cases to study, meaning that all those that were never tried to a court and never appealed weren’t considered by her.  It’s a fatal flaw for any study and one that caused Prof. Bala to call her work “extremely skewed.” 

That hardly exhausts the many flaws in Meier’s study, but suffice it to say that Cahn isn’t interested in giving Forbes readers a balanced view of the matter.  Consider this:

When fathers alleged mothers were alienating, regardless of abuse claims, they took custody away from her 44% of the time. When the genders were reversed, and fathers started out with the children, mothers took custody from fathers only 28% of the time. Fathers were overall much more likely to win than mothers by claiming alienation. 

Meier studied 4,338 cases in all.  In just 163 of those was there an allegation of abuse by the mother that was countered by a claim of alienation by the father.  And in just 81 of those was custody transferred from Mom to Dad.  That’s 1.8% of the cases.  So even if all the allegations by mothers were true and all those by fathers were untrue, only a tiny percentage of all litigated cases have the problem.  And of course those are in turn a tiny percentage (about 3%) of all cases.  So, Houston, do we have a problem?

Cahn’s article is entitled “Why Women Lose Custody,” but Meier’s dubious claims aren’t the reason.

I’ll have more to say about Cahn’s article next time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here are the bios for the panelists:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the takeaway?  Here’s Stone’s:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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