NPO Blog Archive

Below are some recent articles and items of interest from Fathers & Families’ latest News Digest.

Egypt weighs legality of divorce by text message (USA Today, 1-3-08)

Center contributing to falling divorce rate (Springfield News-Sun, 1-4-07)

Bring families together and keep them together (Woodtv.com, 1-4-08)

Lawyer: Delinquent child support online (Associated Press, 1-4-08)

Keeping joint custody cordial (KSFY.com, 1-4-08)

“I’ve lost three children. Losing another would destroy me,” says Terry Cannings (The Daily Mail, 1-5-08)

Non-custodial parent faces kidnapping charges after alleged absconding with child on Christmas (Texarkana Gazette, 1-6-08)

New year is busy time for divorce lawyers (Telegraph, 1-7-08)

Survey finds men have lost their role in society (Telegraph, 1-7-08)

Sites help smooth bumps on road to Splitsville (Palm Beach Post, 1-7-08)

From my co-authored column ‘Sperm Theft” Ruling a Step Forward for Men”s Reproductive Rights (Houston Chronicle, 3/6/05):

“All”s fair in love, war, and paternity cases. When child support is sought, there is scarcely any deceit that courts won”t push aside under the “best interests of the child’ test.

“Courts have ruled that boys who were statutorily raped by older women must pay child support. Courts have ruled that when a woman has taken the semen from a condom a man used for sex with a different woman and has inserted it in herself, the man must still pay child support. Courts have ruled that when a woman has concealed her pregnancy (denying the man the right to be a father) and then sued for child support a decade later, the man must still pay child support. Courts have ruled that when a woman has deceived her husband into believing that her baby is his child, he must still pay child support. Few if any men are relieved of child support obligations due to the circumstances of the pregnancy, no matter how bizarre or unjust.”

A good new ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. From the Associated Press’ Sperm donor wins Pa. appeal to not pay child support (1/3/08):

“A woman who promised a sperm donor he would not have to pay child support cannot renege on the deal, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled (pictured).

“The 3-2 decision overturns lower court rulings under which Joel L. McKiernan had been paying up to $1,500 a month to support twin boys born in August 1994 to Ivonne V. Ferguson, his former girlfriend and co-worker…

“Ferguson and McKiernan met while working together at Pennsylvania Blue Shield in Harrisburg and had a sexual relationship that had waned before Ferguson persuaded him to donate sperm for her. Courts found that the two agreed McKiernan would not have to pay child support and would not have visitation rights, but Ferguson later changed her mind and sued. Ferguson’s lawyer has disputed that the agreement existed in the first place, but courts have agreed with McKiernan on that issue.

“Between the time of the donation and when Ferguson sought support in 1999, McKiernan moved to Pittsburgh, got married and had a child.

“A county judge called Ferguson’s actions despicable but said it was in the twins’ best interests that McKiernan be required to support them. In addition to monthly payments, McKiernan also was ordered to come up with $66,000 in back support…”

Thanks to Judge Rufus Peckham, a reader, for the story.

“Officers said that Danielle Kah chased after her child’s father’s car on Sedler Street, ramming it from behind until he stopped. When the father stopped, police said, Kah opened the door of his car and took their 4-year-old daughter, then fled into a nearby wooded area.”

A classic case of domestic violence by a woman against a man, and what do we get from the police and the media?

1) She rams his care repeatedly, endangering him and his daughter, then absconds with the girl into the forest. Yet all she is charged with is endangering a child because the girl didn’t have her jacket on.

2) No mention of whether the father was injured.

3) No mention of “domestic violence.”

4) A ludicrous $2,000 bond–far lower than what men arrested for domestic violence get, even though many of those arrests are questionable, to say the least.

What would happen if a father repeatedly rammed his ex-wife’s car while the little girl was in inside, and then absconded with her? There’d be an Amber Alert and he’d be headed to prison.

The story is below–thanks to Mike in Savannah for sending it to me.

Mother Charged After Taking Child Out In Cold
1/2/08, WLWT.com

CINCINNATI — Cincinnati police have charged a woman with child endangering after a strange incident on Tuesday afternoon.

Officers said that Danielle Kah chased after her child’s father’s car on Sedler Street, ramming it from behind until he stopped.

When the father stopped, police said, Kah opened the door of his car and took their 4-year-old daughter, then fled into a nearby wooded area.

Police said the child was not dressed for the freezing temperatures.

Officers were able to find Kah and her child and take them into custody.

The child was not seriously hurt.

Bond for Kah was set at $2,000 on Wednesday.

[Late note: Hugo, a reader, writes:

“I just called the news station and asked if they intended to do a follow-up story on this case in order to find out why the police were not charging Ms. Kah with Domestic violence, Child abduction, interfering with custody, etc.

“I was told ‘that’s a very good question. I’ll pass it along, and see if we can look into that.’

If you are curious as I was, you also may wish to call them. Their contact info is:

WLWT-TV
Main Number: (513) 412-5000
1700 Young Street
Cincinnati, Ohio. 45202]

“The children are so alienated and have been so brainwashed against me that they refuse to talk to me or even look at me. They just sit and continually ask when the session will be over. These are children that I acted as the stay at home dad as for five years…I have fought for over two years and spent my life savings and I have seen my children a total of seven hours in two years.”

Dear Mr. Sacks,

I am a father of two girls, now age eight and six. In September of 2005 my wife was caught in an extra-marital affair. She told me she would “get me, destroy me, and make a divorce as hard on me as she could’ if I tried to find out the identity of her lover.

Long story short she took out a restraining order on me one month later and then filed false sexual abuse charges against me. I totally and completely cooperated with the courts. A court appointed therapeutic team concluded that I never did anything wrong. I took and passed three polygraph tests. My wife failed one saying that she coached the children against me. This sordid tale has continued on for over two years. I spent over $400,000 in trying to get to see my children.

Finally I was allowed visitation as we came to a settlement on the divorce and she agreed to me having custody for two days out of the week.

The only problem is now I see the two girls with a court appointed psychologist. The children are so alienated and have been so brainwashed against me that they refuse to talk to me or even look at me. They just sit and continually ask when the session will be over. These are children that I acted as the stay at home dad as for five years (my ex is an attorney and I stayed home with the kids).

So now I have no more money to continue this fight. My wife was awarded the $1.5 million dollar house (it was paid for) and got almost all the other assets. I now live in a crappy one-bedroom apartment and she and her new live-in stay in my old four bedroom house.

I am giving up on ever seeing my children again. I have lost everything and no court has ever helped me out. The system is broken and fathers have no rights, at least not in the state of Hawaii.

I applaud you in trying to help other fathers stay in contact with their children. I never thought I would give up being reunited but I have fought for over two years and spent my life savings and I have seen my children a total of seven hours in two years. My ex-wife is relentless and will never give up trying to destroy me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For each of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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