NPO Blog Archive

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

I’ve criticized Joan Meier numerous times.  She’s a professor who’s long been a prominent member of the team that seeks to cast doubt on the very existence of parental alienation and alleges that courts allow abusive fathers to gain child custody simply by claiming that their ex is alienating the kids.  To that end, in 2019, she did a study of appellate court cases that, as I show here, here and here, does little to advance her cause.  In a nutshell, Meier’s study was so badly done that it can’t be used as a guide to figuring out whether judges rightly or wrongly decide custody cases in which there are claims of domestic violence, child abuse or parental alienation.  Meier nowhere defines abuse or domestic violence and, when she does define parental alienation, gets it spectacularly and obviously wrong.

More importantly, she makes no effort to differentiate among kinds and severity of domestic violence.  Mom shooting Dad with a pistol is, in Meier’s study, treated the same as Dad shoving Mom.  Meier of course is free to play fast and loose with her definitions, but judges aren’t.  A responsible family court judge could be entirely right to not deny custody to a parent who’s committed DV as long as it was a minor case.  Why should a child lose that parent simply because of a momentary lapse?

Now, the distinct odor wafting from Meier’s work is that of a gender idealogue who decides what outcomes she wants from her study and designs the study to ensure those outcomes.  Her anti-father/pro-mother bias is all but impossible to miss and I did my best to reveal the matter in my previous posts.

But now we have Prof. Jennifer Harman of Colorado State University and attorney Demosthenes Lorandos to do what I never could, i.e. mercilessly slay the dragon that is Joan Meier’s sorry work.  They do so in their article entitled “Allegations of Family Violence in Court: How Parental Alienation Affects Judicial Outcomes” that was published in the most recent edition of the APA journal, Psychology, Public Policy and Law.

Harman and Lorandos’ article is divided roughly into two parts.  The first part savages Meier’s work; the second reports on their own study that found none of the shortcomings in the judicial system claimed by Meier.

As to part one, Harman and Lorandos identified an astonishing 30 errors in the design of Meier’s study, its methodology, its use of statistics, etc.  Actually, there are more, but those only came to light after Harman/Lorandos had conducted their study and written it up.  The reason they couldn’t discover those errors earlier is that Meier resorted to what radical feminist “scholars” (e.g. Lenore Weizman, Carol Gilligan, Susan Brownmiller, etc.) so often do – hid her data and how she analyzed it.

Amazingly, the U.S. agency that funded Meier’s work requires all that information be reported to the agency at least 90 days ahead of publication so that other scholars and divers others can access it.  Almost a year after publication, Meier had never complied with the terms of her agreement with the agency, meaning that Harman/Lorandos couldn’t tell exactly what she’d actually done.  Once she finally got around to informing the agency and the material became public, additional errors became apparent.

Harman/Lorandos weren’t deterred by the opacity of Meier’s article reporting on her study.  Much pertinent information was simply left out of it, rendering it hard to figure out exactly what her data do and don’t say.  So Harman/Lorandos contacted Meier who evinced not the slightest interest in providing the information and not a little defensiveness at the notion that they even asked.  It’s an understandable posture for someone whose work is as bad and ideologically-motivated as Meier’s.

I’ll have more to say on this in my next two pieces.

December 23, 2020 by Indiana Lee

Everyone tells you your life will change when you have a child, but until you actually become a parent yourself, you can never truly understand what that means. It’s almost as if your life becomes separated into two halves: Before Baby and After Baby.

Once you’ve tasted the sweetness of this perfect, precious, perplexing and sometimes maddening little being that you helped to create turning to you and calling you Mama or Daddy, you can never go back. You will never be the same.

And because this little creature has given you a new world, a new life, you would do pretty much anything you can to make theirs as idyllic as possible.

But life itself is far from idyllic, and, no matter how hard you try, there are just some things parents can’t protect their children from. If you and your spouse are going through a divorce or separation, there’s no getting around the fact that your child will be affected. Just as her parents do, your child will hurt, will grieve. They may feel anger or fear. They almost inevitably will need time to adjust.

Whether the separation is a new thing or has been the status quo in your family for a while, there are steps you and your former partner must take to protect your child’s mental health while you co-parent.

The Necessity of Equal Parenting

Even in the most amicable of separations, breakups are difficult for everyone in the family. Children, especially, are creatures of habit. A significant change in the home, even from the standpoint of disrupting the child’s ordinary daily routine, can be traumatic for children. Kids simply don’t have the life experience, the coping skills, or the mature understanding to enable them to adjust to such a profound life change without significant support.

This is why effective co-parenting is so crucial. Children need the reassurance and stability that only cooperative, unified, and amicable parenting can provide.

The good news is that the equal parenting standard isn’t just great in theory. The evidence is mounting that equal parenting is essential for kids, and the courts are paying attention. In states such as Nebraska, custody cases are on the decline because now the assumption, among families and family courts alike, is that mom and dad will share equal time as much as possible.

Effective co-parenting isn’t just good for kids, though. It’s also great for parents, especially fathers, who traditionally have received short shrift in courts, even among the most gifted jurists in the highest court in the land. When fathers are disadvantaged in dysfunctional co-parenting relationships, their mental health declines significantly — and the kids feel it. In fact, a mounting body of research shows that children do far better, psychologically, socially, academically, and even financially, when their fathers are mentally healthy and equally involved in the co-parenting process.

Know the Risks and the Signs

Though building a strong, communicative, and supportive co-parenting relationship with your former partner is an essential first step, it’s far from the only one. Even in the best shared parenting situation, children can still struggle. After all, change is hard and growing up, in general, can be even harder.

Co-parenting effectively means communicating with your partner so that together you can keep your thumbs on the pulse of your baby’s wellbeing. This must include sharing any situation in the home that might affect your child, such as financial, family, or school issues.

Children are extraordinarily perceptive, after all, and they have the uncanny ability to pick up on things you may be trying to shield them from. But kids also have other superpowers, including the ability to catastrophize the unknown and to blame themselves for problems that are not even remotely their fault.

In other words, children are experts at taking the weight of the world on their shoulders. And because of that, financial issues, problems at school, or stressors within the family can easily spiral into full-fledged mental health disorders in your child if you don’t recognize the signs and intervene early.

So, it’s imperative that you maintain close contact with your parenting partner to routinely exchange notes about your child’s behavior and any subtle signs of mental health distress. If and when those should arise, ensure you address them together, showing your child that when they need help, the whole cavalry is coming.

Our children are the greatest gift we will ever know. They are the best of us, and they deserve the best in return. This means we must practice effective co-parenting whenever and wherever possible.

Strong shared parenting, means working in unison to support children’s mental wellbeing. It takes time, understanding, effort, and cooperation, but seeing your child grow into a healthy, happy, productive, and fulfilled human being makes it so much more than worthwhile.

Indiana Lee lives in the Northwest and has a passion for the environment and healthy lifestyles. She draws her inspiration from nature and makes sure to explore the outdoors regularly with her two dogs. Indiana enjoys mountain bicycling and hiking on her off time and has experience in owning and operating her own business. Feel free to contact her at indianaleewrites@gmail.com or follow her on twitter @indianalee3

December 22, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Naomi Schaefer Riley’s assault on kinship care for kids in danger with their parents eventually gets to, you know, kinship care, although it takes its time (Quillette, 12/12/20).  As I said last time, despite a federal lawsuit and consent decree mandating that the State of New Jersey reduce the number of kids taken into foster care, Riley somehow imagines that all those kids who were taken by the state actually needed to be in foster care.  Never mind that the plaintiffs, the state itself and the judge found that many of them shouldn’t have been.

With that dubious background, Riley tells readers that kinship care isn’t a “panacea,” i.e. a cure-all for what ails the foster care system.  I know of no one who’s ever called it that and Riley cites no source.  What kinship care is, however, is a usually-better alternative to taking a child from parents and placing him/her in a strange home with strangers.  The reasons for that I’ve detailed many times and they’re little but common sense.  Even Riley recognizes that being taken into foster care is traumatic for children and that kinship care is usually far less so.

Strangely, to bolster her case against kinship care, Riley cites the case of J.D. Vance as detailed in his book, Hillbilly Elegy and the movie of the same title.  Her reliance on Vance is odd because his is a clear case in which kinship care worked well.  His mother was a violent drug addict who physically abused him and plainly placed him in serious danger.  So he went to live with his grandmother, a move that Riley admits turned out well.

“Luckily,” he recalls, “I had enough faith in my grandma. I knew that she wouldn’t let anything too bad happen to me.” Vance’s story of remaining in the care of his extended family and not being put into the system turned out well—he eventually goes into the Marines, college, and Yale Law School—but it is easy to imagine how the situation might have gone south.

Well, we can imagine anything.  We can even imagine Riley’s coming up with a case that supports her antipathy for kinship care.  In fact, we’ll have to do just that because, in the event, Riley provides none of her own.

Nor does she listen to Vance about his reasons for lying to the judge about his mother’s violence toward him.

“The judge asked whether she had done anything to threaten me. And I lied. I told him no because I knew that if I kept on pushing the case, one, it would cause a lot of problems for the family. And two, it might land me in a foster home.” 

See?  It’s there in black and white.  An adolescent boy lies under oath to a judge in order to remain with his violent mother because doing otherwise “might land me in a foster home.”  What about that does Riley not understand.  The kid had hell with his mother, but, to him, that was still better than foster care.

Riley’s piece is entitled “The Problem with Kinship Care.”  So what is the problem with kinship care?  Well, first she claims that CPS caseworkers may simply find it easier to shove kids off on Grandma than do all the paperwork required to place them in foster care.  She cites no authority for the proposition which, in any case, flies in the face of the known facts – that caseworkers all too often take kids into care who don’t need it.  Remember that federal lawsuit?  That’s what it was all about, so Riley’s claim that placing a child in foster care is just to difficult for caseworkers falls flat.

Then she tries a different tack.

Margaret Nichols Honeycutt, a pediatrician who works in Richlands, Va., told me that many children she sees born drug-exposed “may have the grandparent listed on the guardian certificate but they are going to the same home.” She notes, “Because drugs here are a multigenerational problem, if the kids go home with the grandparents, the pathology is still right in their face.”

I suppose that could be a problem, although again, Riley’s citation of a single pediatrician’s entirely unscientific take on her own day-to-day practice hardly seals the deal.  More importantly, it doesn’t explain why children do better on average in kinship care than they do in foster care.  If exposure to the same pathologies were truly a major problem, we’d have to think they wouldn’t.  But they do.  Riley neither acknowledges nor explains the rather obvious shortcoming of her and Honeycutt’s claim.

So she moves on to this:

[T]he fact that a parent with addiction issues who has lost custody of her children has continued access to them may actually remove one of the major incentives to get clean.

In other words, when little Andy or Jenny moves to Grandma’s house, Mom still comes to see them any time she wants and so has little reason to get off whatever addictive substance she’s on.  Again, that’s certainly a possibility, I suppose.  But when caseworkers channel a child into kinship care, it’s not as if they ignore the parent who made the move necessary.  Typically, the addicted parent tries to get the state to hand the child back, a process that usually means a drug or alcohol treatment program and proof the parent is no longer using.  If and only if the parent satisfies CPS that he/she’s no longer a danger to the child will caseworkers agree to return the child.  That’s true in kinship care and foster care, so it’s hard to see the problem.

And, as before, Riley attempts to bolster her criticism with authority that does no such thing.  She cites a study that compares, not kinship care with foster care, but foster care with abusive parental care.  The study finds foster care to be preferable, but says nothing about kinship care.

In short, Riley’s efforts to besmirch kinship care fail.  But what’s most remarkable about her article is what it never says.  She wants us to be critical of kinship care, but never lets on about what the alternatives are.  We know, but she refuses to address the elephant in the room – foster care.  There are reasons why movements to sharply restrict the foster care system abound.  Those include the fact that foster care is often far worse for kids than even abusive or neglectful parental care.  Foster kids are more likely than other kids to be physically or sexually abused in care, they’re more likely to be drug- or alcohol-addicted, they do worse in school, are more likely to drop out before graduation, girls are more likely to become pregnant and, in what must be called the coup de grâce, often return to the very family from whom they were taken when they “age out of the system” at age 18.

Unless Riley has some miraculous plan about which she says nothing, foster care is the alternative to kinship care.  There aren’t any others and the picture of foster care isn’t pretty.  Is kinship care a “panacea?”  Of course not, but neither is anything else.  Can it be improved.  It can be.  But let’s focus on doing that and not on trashing the very idea of a type of care that’s often a child’s last, best hope for a decent childhood.

December 22, 2020 by Donald Hubin, Ph.D., Chair, National Board of Directors

When the first stimulus bill passed last March, Congress had protected these funds from being seized by the government for repayment of debts with one notable, and mean-spirited, exception: past due child support. This was likely done under the mistaken impression that seizure of these funds would benefit children. In fact, though, most of the seized funds went into state and federal coffers to “repay” them for welfare benefits.

This was a terrible decision. Instead of these funds going to parents who pay child support, most of whom have at least partial physical custody of their children and many of whom were horribly hurt by the economic disruption of Covid-19 pandemic, they went to the government. This not only didn’t benefit parents and children, it blunted the stimulus purpose of the act. 

NPO called “foul”! (See Robert Franklin’s article on this here.) And we weren’t the only ones to do so. The National Child Support Enforcement Association (NCSEA)—the organization of state child support enforcement agencies—did as well.  And NPO sent out a “call to action” to our members to contact their federal legislators to urge them to correct this problem.

This problem with the CARES Act, the first stimulus bill, was never corrected. But there is good news to report. The economic relief package just passed yesterday (12/21) ensures that relief checks will not be intercepted to repay state and federal governments for past-due child support obligations. It specifically states that these funds “shall not be … subject to reduction or offset pursuant to” the relevant section of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 which provides for seizure of funds for past-due child support.

We can’t know, of course, the effect our voices had on correcting Congress’s mistake. As I said, there were other voices making the same point. But there is no doubt that the voices of constituents matter. If a legislator receives even a small number of complaints about some action, they know that they’re seeing only the tip of an iceberg. They know that many others share the same view. 

So, keep raising your voice when legislators make mistakes—and congratulate them when they do the right thing. It makes a difference! 

DEC 18

If you’ve recently been granted joint custody, you might be wondering what exactly comes next for your family. More often than not, shared parenting requires a complete change of your living arrangements, personal schedules, and decision-making processes in order to best serve the interests of your kids. Regardless of the roadblocks you face early on, giving your children equal opportunities to grow their relationships with both parents is well worth the effort in the long run. 

New Family, Now What?

The early stages of joint custody unavoidably bring about a change in your current living situation. Some families settle for an arrangement called ‘bird nesting,’ where the children live in the same house and parents rotate in and out to care for them. Nesting can be the ideal solution for situations where the parents are having difficulty locating independent homes within close proximity. Nesting allows the children to have a stable home with ample space and gives parents the option to live in apartments that otherwise wouldn’t be ideal circumstances for raising children. However, the more common approach is for both parents to find their own home—preferably close to one another—and have their children alternate between living spaces. 

What About The Old Home?

Aside from custody of the children, ownership of the marital home is often the other major issue in a divorce since it is usually the most valuable asset. The best way to handle this situation requires the consideration of many different factors such as, whether one party can afford to buy out the other party’s equity, how selling versus keeping the home could affect the children, and any emotional attachments to the home. Similar to custody of the children, it is possible to maintain joint ownership of the marital home, as long as both parties are in agreement. 

If both parties would rather not maintain joint ownership of the property, but not sell the home, then it’s time to consider how it will be divided. Oftentimes, a buyout is completed in the overall divorce settlement and can take the form of directly paying the full amount of the spouse’s equity or handing over marital financial assets such as retirement and investment accounts equal to the value of the equity. If, however, a full upfront buyout either isn’t financially viable or simply isn’t preferred, there is an option for a gradual buyout where the equity can be paid back through monthly payments.

When one party keeps the marital home, it’s important to keep in mind the effect this can have on the children. It may be beneficial for the children’s sense of stability to keep the home, but this can also cause the children to feel estranged from the parent that does not keep the marital home. Since the children will already be familiar with the marital home, they can easily form the perception that this is their “real” home and that the other parent is simply a person and location that they periodically visit.

A New Home

Separated living conditions after a buyout will come with the financial burden of supporting two separate households, usually without any added income. This problem is also often exacerbated by court-ordered payments such as child support and alimony which can leave the debtor in a difficult situation, especially in relation to finding a home of their own. If a parent is having difficulty affording a mortgage due to financial stressors, it can be beneficial to look into government-backed loan programs through the Federal Housing Administration, also known as FHA loans. 

Solutions such as FHA loans can allow for leniencies like having your closing costs rolled into the life of the loan rather than paying them upfront, as well as a lower required down payment and credit score. Once a home is picked out, both parents should agree to meet up and discuss budgeting for the new two-household dynamic. In order to raise your children the best that you both can, there should be absolute transparency, especially in financial decisions. 

With a separate home, it’s necessary to keep in mind that the children should feel at home just as much as you feel at home. One of the biggest stresses that children face in regard to divorce is the threat to their life’s stability and security. Before applying for any loans or signing any papers, it is important that the children who will be spending time in this new house feel involved in the home-buying decision in a way appropriate to their age. It’s best to approach the children with this question once you have narrowed down possible homes that you like, so as not to add too much responsibility and stress for them. Allowing the children to give sincere input on where they will be living will help them feel more empowered, which is crucial during a fragile time such as this.

December 18, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

In this article, Naomi Schaefer Riley goes to bat against kinship care as an alternative to foster care (Quillette, 12/12/20).  At best, it’s a quixotic adventure; at worst, it’s gravely misleading.

For decades now, experts have been arguing that placing abused or neglected kids with relatives is better for them than placing them with strangers.  The evidence for that is both overwhelming and a matter of common sense.  Removal from parents – even those who are pretty deficient, even those who are somewhat abusive – is traumatic for children.  For better or worse, those kids have formed with those parents the most basic and indelible of all human bonds – the biochemical connection between offspring and their parents.  Break that bond and you do serious harm.  Yes, sometimes that bond needs to be broken and the harm done because not doing so is the more injurious alternative.  But in all cases, the trauma of removal from a parent must be weighed in the balance with the trauma of not doing so.

Kinship care, i.e. moving the child out of his/her parents’ care and into that of a close relative, is usually the next best thing to good parental care because the relative is known to the child, his/her home is familiar and there is likely to be familial love there.  All that of course is absent in a foster placement, however well-motivated the foster carer may be.  Again, this is all well enough known and, to their credit, state child welfare agencies have begun shifting their focus toward kinship care when they conclude a child is at risk of abuse or neglect.  It’s a healthy trend, but Riley is on the warpath against it.

Weirdly, she begins her piece by pointing out that, pursuant to a consent decree arising out of a federal lawsuit, the State of New Jersey has seen the number of foster care placements plummet in recent years.  The state says that’s because it’s placing more and more kids in kinship care, but Riley says the numbers don’t add up.

It’s true that the state has reduced the number of kids in foster care by two-thirds since 2003, from 13,000 to 4,000. But there are only about 1,700 kids who are being officially removed from their homes and cared for by relatives now (compared to 2,000 in non-relative homes). In other words, according to the state’s numbers, state-sanctioned kinship care can hardly be the real reason for this dramatic drop. What happened to the other 7,300 kids who would have been in foster care?

It’s a remarkable question.  It assumes that those 7,300 kids “would have been in foster care,” but, for some sinister reason, aren’t.  But what if those kids didn’t need to be in care?  What if state officials had been doing what state child welfare workers so often do – “erring on the side of caution,” that in reality means taking kids from families when they’re not in danger?  Does Riley even notice that that was one of the main reasons the lawsuit was filed against the state in the first place?  That’s why the consent decree requires the state to force fewer kids into foster care.  Previously the agency was overreaching.  Plus, the very term “consent decree” means that the state agreed to change its ways, a fact that at least suggests an awareness that previous practices needed to change.  And of course the fact that the state signed off on the consent decree means it was aware that the plaintiffs had assembled enough evidence to win their case. 

In short, it seems a lot of those 7,300 kids never needed to be in foster care in the first place, but the obvious conclusion eludes Riley.  For her, if those 7,300 kids were ever in foster care, then they belonged there.  Period.  The evidence produced by the plaintiffs, the state’s agreement and a federal judge’s signature be damned.

But Riley’s just getting started.  I’ll say more about that next time.

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

As part of its efforts to limit state interference with parental authority, Lenore Skenazy’s organization, Let Grow, analyzed the 50 state laws and policies on child neglect.  Diane Redleaf reports on the results that aren’t pretty (American Bar Association, 9/30/20).

The survey shows that almost all states fail to distinguish reasonable independence from neglect.

That is, when a parent decides that a child is old enough, mature enough, responsible enough, intelligent enough to do a particular thing unattended by a parent, “almost all states” allow child protective authorities and/or police to deem that decision “neglect” and take action against the parent.  Never mind that the caseworkers and the police don’t know the child or his/her capabilities and the parent does.  No, states empower those public officials to substitute their own guesses about appropriate parenting for those of the actual parent.

Let Grow divides state laws into three general categories:

Juvenile/neglect statutes that allow neglect findings when parents give children reasonable independence. 

States that have criminal laws when parents leave children temporarily unsupervised.

States that expressly protect reasonable independence for children. 

The first category is the most egregious, as Redleaf details.

Most of the states’ juvenile/neglect laws are very open-ended, allowing child protective investigators and their supervisors to declare a child neglected based on their own unbounded opinions as to what is “proper” or “necessary care.”…

Typical state statutes simply define lack of supervision as “neglect,” without any limitation (e.g., Alabama, Alaska, South Dakota, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.) that sets a standard as to how deficient the supervision needs or what supervision entails for children as they grow. Others hardly narrow their reach by adding the word “proper” or “adequate” to describing this form of neglect, presuming thereby that adults know what level of supervision is required without any specific guidance.

Needless to say, the adults have no such idea.  Those laws are so vague and overly broad as to give caseworkers and police virtually limitless discretion about which children to take from parents and which to leave alone.  They also look patently unconstitutional and should be attacked as such in court.

As the second category makes plain, a finding of neglect by a child welfare caseworker may be the least of a parent’s problems.  He/she may face criminal liability as well.

On the criminal side, many states have open-ended criminal endangerment laws. And while most states would allow prosecutions of children left alone, some states like Maryland are clear that children under 8-years-old cannot be unsupervised at all, on pain of criminal prosecution. Connecticut provides that children under 12-years-old can’t be left alone on pain of criminal penalties. Florida makes lack of “necessary supervision” a crime, and Montana treats any violation of a duty of care toward a child a criminal offense.   

Some states are unusually punitive to parents who let their children sit in the car even for a few minutes, if the child is below a specified age, such as Hawaii’s law which provides that children under 9-years-old can’t be alone in a car for more than five minutes. Nebraska’s law contains a blanket prohibition without any stated age limit. Of particular note is the law of Louisiana, which provides a child can’t be in a car if the adult is more than 10 feet away—a law that on its face would make it hard for a parent to put their child into a car and then go return a grocery cart. Such draconian laws, if strictly enforced, would prevent parents from running simple errands without potentially running afoul of the state’s criminal law.

Again, those laws look to be plainly vague and overly broad in constitutional terms.  They also seem to have little to do with children’s safety.  The likelihood of a child being harmed by staying unsupervised in an automobile for five minutes or when the parent is farther than 10 feet away is vanishingly small. 

Little reported or acknowledged is the fact that children in this country are overwhelmingly safe.  In 2016, the Administration for Children and Families logged about 180,000 instances of child abuse out of about 72 million children under the age of 18.  Of course not all cases of abuse were reported, but the fact remains that children are far more at risk in a moving car than they are from child abuse generally.  And cases of abuse or abduction of children by strangers are rarer still.  To an astonishing degree, these laws fail to reflect the lived realities of children in this country.

Finally, some states have taken a more sensible approach to what constitutes child neglect.

Utah is currently the only state with an explicit protection from neglect findings for children engaged in “independent activities.” But we read Kansas’s law as supporting the right of children to engage in independent activities, too, because (1) Kansas requires a likelihood of harm from the placement of a child into a situation that is “beyond their maturity,” (2) it expressly states that the parent must have the financial means to avoid putting the child into such position, and (3) it also has a very strong policy that encourages independence (see discussion below).

In short, states have a long way to go before they appropriately limit their own power to intervene in families’ lives and parental decision-making.  Thanks to Lenore Skenazy and Let Grow for taking the fight to those states and raising awareness of one of the worst problems besetting parents and children. 

December 14, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

I wrote recently about Lenore Skenazy’s op-ed that challenged a school principle’s decision to, in contravention of their mother’s permission, prohibit three children from walking to and from school.

Skenazy has long been one of the country’s most effective and sensible advocates for children’s autonomy and independence from state oversight.  She started the organization Free-Range Kids that’s now morphed into the organization Let Grow.  Let Grow has embarked on a serious campaign to alter state laws governing what constitutes parental neglect of children and, in the process, limit child welfare authorities’ power to intervene in parental decision-making.

Here’s an excellent and informative article by Diane Redleaf – herself a long-time advocate for children and against governmental overreach into families – detailing some of the efforts to change laws to keep states from micro-managing parents and their kids (American Bar Association, 9/11/20).

As I wrote about here, Utah passed the first such law back in 2018.  But the movement to limit the power of the state over the behaviors of parents and kids is just getting started.  And, for me, it can’t gain momentum quickly enough.  Redleaf summarizes the nature of child neglect statute thus:

Typically, the child neglect laws that authorize child protection investigations are very broad and vague. They include terms of unlimited potential scope—words like “injurious environment,” “lack of proper care,” and “inadequate supervision”—that invite open-ended discretionary, standardless, and discriminatory applications. Moreover, these laws generally do not defer to parents to decide when their children are “old enough” to manage activities alone. As a result, parents largely remain in the dark as to when and how they can safely make those decisions and what the state will judge as neglect.

All that means many things.  For one, those state laws appear to be patently unconstitutional as overly broad and vague.  When parents can’t guess what state officials will deem “neglect” and what they won’t, the law gives insufficient guidance to lawful behavior and can’t withstand constitutional scrutiny.

Plus, if parents can’t figure out what the law requires, CPS caseworkers probably can’t either.  That gives the state carte blanche to interpret the law any way it wants, which in turn typically means erring on the side of overreach.  We see that every day.

Finally, nowhere in those laws is there a presumption that parents act in the best interests of their children.  In a different context, the U.S. Supreme Court articulated such a presumption in the case of Troxel v. Granville and I believe that presumption should be extended to child protective officials when deciding cases of alleged neglect.  Too often those officials simply substitute their own ideas about appropriate parenting for those of parents.  But fit parents know their kids and their kids’ capabilities better than anyone.  One 9-year-old can be more mature and capable than the next 9-year-old, but state agents don’t spend enough time in enough different situations with the child to know which is which.  Parents of course do exactly that.

Meanwhile, states like Illinois have taken steps to limit their more egregious statutes.  For example, the state’s statute on child neglect once included the notion that “inadequate supervision” of a child constituted neglect.  Of course what constituted inadequate supervision was anyone’s guess and it took a lawsuit to get the state to stop using the concept in child welfare cases.  Amazingly the Illinois Legislature had excluded the concept of “inadequate supervision” from its child neglect statute in 1980, but its child welfare officials simply ignored the law and used the term until ordered to desist by the state Supreme Court in 2011.  That’s 31 years of lawless behavior aimed specifically at allowing child welfare authorities greater power over families than lawmakers permitted them to have. 

Since then, Illinois’s legislature has made major changes to the statutes governing neglect of children.

In the wake of this litigation and as a result of negotiations that involved parents who had been directly affected by overbroad neglect allegations, in 2013, Illinois’s legislature adopted much tighter language that defined neglect as “blatant disregard” of “obvious dangers” that are likely to result in serious harm to the child and as to which the parent “failed to take responsible precautionary measures.” This language drew on another of the Family Defense Center’s appellate court cases, a decision in In re Slater, which held that neglect requires more than mere momentary inattention; to be cited for neglect, a parent must unreasonably ignore obvious dangers to a child.

All that looks like a legislature and a state Supreme Court that were none too pleased with child welfare officials for ignoring the law.  Have they changed their ways?  Do they now abide by the restrictive definition of child neglect?  Or do caseworkers and managers continue to substitute their own preferences about parental behavior for those of actual parents?  Who knows?  Certainly the law is clear and an obviously strict limitation on governmental power.  But the huge majority of child welfare cases involve poor and poorly educated parents, i.e. those who don’t know the law and, even if they do, don’t have the money to stand up to the power of the state.  Those families typically fly under the radar of the legal system and the press, and we can rest assured that child welfare workers know it.

More on this later.

December 11, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

In the past, I’ve written a fair amount about child support guidelines and laws in Canada.  Here, here and here are previous posts of mine and they include valuable links to articles by Christy Blatchford and another NPO post by Lucien Khodeir who’s certainly one of the most knowledgeable experts in the world on Canadian child support law.

In those posts, I (and others) made a few basic points.  First, Canada’s child support guidelines are based on no economic data.  That’s right, none.  And that’s not my opinion, but that of the Fraser Institute that studied the guidelines in detail.  Second, they’re based on assumptions of fact that are rarely true.

According to the report, the Formula assumes that the child-support recipient (Recipient)

• earns whatever income the child-support payer (Payer) earns,
• spends all her time and the Payer spends no time with the child,
• incurs all child-related expenses and the Payer incurs no child-related expenses,
• spends a prescribed percentage of her income in child-related expenses, and
• resides only with the child and the Payer resides alone.

Third, those assumptions tend strongly to result in a net transfer of wealth from payers to recipients.  That is, when the actual cost of raising the child is subtracted from the child support payments, the recipient ends up with positive net earnings.

Fourth, because about 90% of Canadian child support recipients are mothers, the result of the guidelines is a net transfer of wealth from fathers to mothers.  Fifth, that was the plan all along.  Researchers Douglas Allen and Paul Millar found the same thing.  Radical feminist advocates used the flawed research of Lenore Weizman to claim that divorce impoverished women and the Canadian government responded with the guidelines that are mandatory on judges deciding child support issues.

Sixth, the guidelines are so draconian that fathers can be driven to bankruptcy and suicide by them.  The imputation of income often results in fathers being ordered to pay more in child support than they earn.  They then fall behind and interest and fees increase the amount owed.  That can result in the astonishing situation in which a father can pay everything he’s been ordered to pay in child support and still fall further behind.

Seventh, second wives are often saddled with paying to support children they obviously took no part in conceiving.  Second wives, not wanting their husbands to go to prison, often try to make up the difference between what their husbands owe and what they earn.

Finally, prior to the establishment of the guidelines, Canadians said they were satisfied with the existing law and how much they were paying or receiving in child support.  A survey of fathers and mothers conducted in 1990 found broad satisfaction with how the system worked, and how much they paid and how much they received.  The guidelines “fixed” what wasn’t broken.

Against that backdrop, we now learn that the guidelines may violate Canadian federal law.  There is currently pending in the provincial court for Alberta a lawsuit challenging the child support guidelines.  It does so on the legal theory that the guidelines violate Section 26.1(2) of the Divorce Act.

Section 26.1(2) of the Act requires the Guidelines to allocate the financial responsibility for the children based on each parent’s relative ability to contribute to the obligation.  However, the Guidelines do not do this. Instead, they are skewed very much in favour of the custodial parent.

That quotation is from a bulletin issued by the plaintiffs in the case.  The point that the guidelines are skewed in favor of recipient parents is, of course, very much what I and many others have said for years.

Now, what’s most interesting about the bulletin is that the Canadian Department of Justice has used every weapon in its arsenal to try to avoid a court’s ruling on the issue.  Indeed, legal challenges to the guidelines date to some 20 years ago when our friend Lucien Khodeir attempted to litigate the matter pro se.  Since then, the DOJ has used procedural techniques to thwart resolution of the matter, which leads us “to an overwhelming question:” If the Canadian government were confident that the guidelines accord with the requirements of Canadian law, why don’t they simply put aside their procedural quibbles and let the matter be decided on its merits?  It’s as if they aren’t confident of the outcome.

It’s also as if the government is content with the very thing that makes the guidelines so noxious – the transfer of wealth from fathers to mothers.  Why else the 20-year delay?  The government knows as well as anyone the impacts of the guidelines, so why would they pursue the delaying tactics they’ve used except to continue those very impacts?

The Alberta court held a hearing on December 2-4 of this year.  With any luck, there’ll be a decision soon.

December 10, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Here, the ever-wise Lenore Skenazy asks the pithy question “Is it a crime to trust your kids?” (Sentinel and Enterprise, 11/30/20)  The answer seems to be “Not yet, but we’re getting there.”

Jessie Thompson is a mother who lives in South Carolina.  She has three kids, ages 9, 10 and 11, whom she allows to walk to school and back each day.  They seem to have done so successfully so far, but recently the principal of their school issued an edict that Thompson would have to either ferry the children to and from school each day or they’d be put on the school bus.  How the principle intended to enforce that rule in the mornings, I have no idea.

Whatever the case, the local news picked up the story and seems to have backed the principal’s theory that Thompson’s kids weren’t safe because they walked back and forth each school day.

Ominously, at the end of an ABC News4 story about her quest, the anchorwoman said: “Social Services could be called if the children are left to walk home on their own.”

“Left” to walk home. As if the mom is abandoning her kids rather than trusting them.

Indeed, it sounds more like an excerpt from Grimms’ Fairy Tales than an everyday occurrence in the 21st century.  “Fearfully, Hansel and Gretel entered the dark forest…”

And, as Skenazy also points out, who’s to say that taking the bus is the safer alternative?  After all, we do live in the midst of a pandemic and COVID-19 is far more likely to be contracted in an enclosed space like a school bus with numerous kids than it is in the open air.  Plus, the four-lane highway that separates the Thompson children from their school is regulated by “Walk/Don’t Walk” indicators, so crossing there is actually quite safe.  Is it also a school zone?  Skenazy doesn’t say, but, from her description, it sounds likely.  In that case, traffic travels at something like 20 miles per hour, i.e. slowly enough to be aware of children crossing.

But none of that satisfied the principal or the school district.

Meanwhile,

For Thompson, the issue is simple: Why is the school allowed to dictate what kids do once they leave school property?

Good question, but the district is worried about liability for injury to the children, should that occur.  The lawsuit would likely allege that the school failed to ensure that the children got on a bus while on school property, a not-impossible-to-win cause of action.

But Skenazy’s interest lies beyond the potential liability of the school district.

But just because it’s not 1,000% safe does not mean it is 1,000% dangerous. That’s a truth we have lost in our black-and-white, litigiously minded culture. No intersection can be guaranteed 1,000% safe — but neither can a car ride to or from the school. Indeed, car passenger deaths are the No. 1 way children in America die. Still, no one stops parents from driving their kids home. How come?

However fretful the school wants to be about Thompson’s children, the issue is in fact a far larger one.  The issue is to what extent parents raise their children and to what extent someone else does – someone with no biological connection to them, someone who doesn’t love them, someone who, after school hours, probably gives them no thought at all.  The simple fact is that, to the greatest extent possible, parents should be left by the state to raise their children as they see fit.  My guess is that Jessie Thompson is a good, loving and responsible mother.  She knows her children’s capabilities far better than anyone else and so shouldn’t have to fight with the school about whether they can walk safely to and from school.

Children learn far more from living everyday life than they ever will in school.  To the extent we shield them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we stunt their growth, we block their passage to adulthood.  Needless to say, children should only be asked to do what they’re ready to do and, as long as it’s safe, a bit more.  But parents are by far the best judges of that and they have the most to lose if their judgment is wrong.

Finally,

With any luck, South Carolina will pass the Reasonable Childhood Independence Bill that had passed the Senate unanimously and was working its way toward the House before COVID-19 shut the legislature down.

Doing so wouldn’t lessen the school’s potential liability, but it would be an important step toward parental autonomy and away from the ever-increasing state interference in family life.