Category: Blog

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

This article gives a pretty good idea of the dysfunctional nature of the child support system in the United States (Kansas City Star, 1/26/20).  The state in question is Missouri, but the issues are the same from sea to shining sea and beyond.

Case in point: that of Rebecca Greenwell.  Back in 2001, she was ordered to pay child support for her two kids.  She did for almost five years, but then experienced health problems (emphysema and herniated spinal discs) that severely limited her ability to work and earn.  The state’s solution?  Put her in jail.  Of course that didn’t help her pay, nor did it improve her health, so Greenwell plunged further and further into debt.

So the latest threat against her is a six-month stretch in jail, a prospect Greenwall understandably dreads.  But she probably won’t go inside again.  Why?  Because her daughter, who’s now 20 years old, pays the child support for her.  That’s right, the daughter for whom she owes the support in the first place is paying it for her mother.  Amazing, but true.

Now, what the article doesn’t mention is that other versions of Greenwell’s case are actually fairly common.  It’s true that the payor isn’t usually the child for whom the support is intended, but the fact remains that, when a parent is faced with jail, others often step up to make sure that doesn’t happen.  So, relatives, friends or neighbors often pitch in to pay child support they don’t owe, just to keep the state from jailing a parent who’s too poor to pay.

And, speaking of the poor, that’s who typically fall under the State of Missouri’s axe in child support court.  That’s not surprising, given that the same is true throughout the country and, as elsewhere, in Missouri, the poor don’t get much of a day in court when they fall behind on their payments.

“We have people who are clearly indigent, clearly insolvent, in prison solely for not paying child support,” said Matthew Mueller, special public defender for the Missouri State Public Defender system. “We need to ask ourselves whether we as a state, as citizens of Missouri, believe it’s appropriate or fair to be sending poor people to prison solely for not paying child support.”…

“I really have an issue with criminalizing poor people for not paying their child support because it’s not that they are choosing not to pay, it’s they really just don’t have the resources to pay it,” district defender Shayla Marshall said…

“The state cannot penalize someone just for being poor,” said Phil Telfeyan, executive director at Equal Justice Under Law, which has litigated the issue in five states.

“We think the vast majority of the 40,000 suspensions are people who literally cannot afford to make the payments. We’re not dealing with people who are refusing to pay and they have money hidden away somewhere.”

As the Office of Child Support Enforcement has announced numerous times, the overwhelming majority of child support debtors report earning under $10,000 per year.  That, together with the fact that support orders are routinely set at levels above which obligors can pay, mean that the child support enforcement system comes down hardest on the poor and those unable to pay.

Plus,

State Sen. Karla May said she is confident the law on driver’s license suspensions can be amended this legislative session.

The St. Louis Democrat is sponsoring a bill that would allow evidence to be presented at suspension hearings, and for judges to make decisions based on a person’s ability to pay child support as well as their transportation needs.

“Right now they don’t have that option,” May said. “Basically when they come into the court, it’s just a quick procedure and they suspend the license right away and they can’t go into discussion.”

To me, that looks like a procedure of dubious constitutionality.  When a state senator says that the current system doesn’t allow the production of evidence (apparently any evidence), it strongly suggests that the debtor isn’t permitted to show indigency.  Of course, license suspension is different from incarceration, but a state’s refusal to hear evidence from the debtor can’t satisfy the requirements of due process of law.  Can it?

Meanwhile, Republican office holders have weighed in on the need for reform.  Senator Wayne Wallingford told NPO:

Conservatives believe a limited government includes the protection of children.  While we should end the punitive practice of suspending licenses when there is an inability to pay, my values dictate that we should also ensure children receive the care that they fundamentally require.  I’m sure we can come up with bipartisan support on this.

There are a few efforts afoot in the Missouri Legislature to make the system less draconian than it currently is, but they’re mostly rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  The system of ordering and enforcing child support is not only dysfunctional, but in many ways divorced from the realities of what it takes to raise a child and how much should be ordered. 

In the not too distant future, the National Parents Organization will be producing a comprehensive report on child support that should form the basis for the type of wholesale, root-and-branch reform that’s long been needed.

February 6, 2020 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors

I’ve written many times about the tendency of child protective authorities to overreach, i.e. to intervene in families when doing so isn’t warranted by the situation.  Last time I wrote about the case of Dr. John Cox who, despite over a dozen doctors saying he hadn’t injured his infant daughter, has had the child taken from him and his wife and now faces felony child abuse charges.  Key to the child’s removal by the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families were the opinions “child abuse pediatricians,” a small but growing set of medical specialists whose very existence is troubling to many.  Dr. Cox’s case looks like a good example of why and NBC and the Houston Chronicle have publicized several others.

But even those who believe that the current approach to child protection is, on balance, doing its job well, would have to admit that the use of child abuse doctors has its disturbing downsides.  In my last post, mentioned the tendency to exacerbate overreach and the problem with conflicts of interest, but there’s another problem.

Cox’s ordeal has also opened a rift at Children’s Wisconsin, where some treating physicians say they are so alarmed by what’s happened to him that they now hesitate to refer injured children for evaluations by child abuse pediatricians, fearing that an abuse specialist might jump to the wrong conclusion and needlessly report parents to Child Protective Services. 

In other words, the existence and nature of child abuse doctors sometimes causes other doctors to avoid their input into cases of injured children.  Surely that’s not the result child protective officials would want, but it’s the one their interactions with child abuse doctors has produced.  After all, Dr. Cox put the matter succinctly when he said,

“In hindsight,” Cox said in a recent interview, “taking her to our own hospital was the single most harmful decision that we made for our baby.”

Indeed.  The more state officials are determined to find abuse where there is none, the more people will refrain from contacting them, even people like doctors who are required by law to do so.

My guess is that that tendency extends to parents generally, at least somewhat.  After all, CPS agencies’ willingness to overreach, to take children from parents when it’s not necessary, is well-known and getting more so.  News reports of that abound.  If you’re a parent with an injured child and if the injury doesn’t appear too serious, what would you do?  Would you take little Andy or Jenny to the ER and risk the “mandated reporters” there bringing in CPS caseworkers?  It wouldn’t be surprising if we learned that parents consider exactly those risks and keep the child out of the hands of those mandated reporters if possible.

The child abuse pediatrician quoted by the NBC News article, Dr. Lynn Sheets, makes some quite dubious claims for the behavior of her fellow specialists.

Her 2013 research into these “sentinel injuries” — a term she coined and popularized — found that nearly a third of seriously abused children had previously suffered minor injuries, such as bruises.

To which I can only ask “So what?”  I’m surprised that only one-third of those kids had minor injuries.  Face it, kids fall down, they toddle into furniture, the cat swats them, they tumble off chairs.  Of course they had minor injuries.  Didn’t we all?  But Sheets indulges in a logical fallacy.  Even if 100% of abused kids had minor injuries prior to their abuse, that doesn’t mean that every minor injury either indicates or is a precursor to intentional harm.  Sheets seems not to grasp that elementary fact.

She goes on.

“One of the things we realized is, if you just call it a bruise, everyone has bruises,” Sheets told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last year, after the bill was introduced. “Everyone thinks about it as a minor injury, including the doctors, including child welfare. So we needed to change the way people are thinking about these minor injuries in young infants.”

Oh?  Why do “we” need to do that?  Minor injuries are just that and every kid has them.  What Sheets apparently hasn’t done (I suspect because she can’t) is demonstrate some robust correlation between minor injuries and future abuse.  If she can do so convincingly, she may have a point, but until then, she doesn’t.

Meanwhile, others are examining the devastating consequences of looking for abuse where none has occurred.

But some doctors, defense lawyers and parental rights advocates have criticized the effort to redefine minor injuries as beacons of future danger. They warn that it opens the door for increased prosecutions of innocent families, especially people of color, who are more likely to be flagged as abuse suspects, and parents of children with rare disorders that predispose them to bruising.

It’s what I and many others have been warning about for years.  The strong tendency of child protective agencies to overreach can only be exacerbated by the existence of child abuse pediatricians.  And the point can’t be stressed strongly enough: taking children from parents who’ve done nothing wrong is not a victimless crime.  Children are terribly traumatized and so are parents.  Parents may be forced to spend huge sums of money just to legally regain the care of their child they shouldn’t have lost in the first place.  And whatever trust the general public has in agencies of government is further eroded.

Dr. Cox’s case is an excellent example.  He and his wife, who’s also a doctor, are intelligent, highly-educated and at least reasonably affluent people.  If this travesty can happen to them, it can happen to anyone.  The poor and undereducated don’t stand a chance.

February 4, 2020

A video-taped symposium on ‘Reducing Parental Conflict and Harm to Children’ was held last week at the Connecticut Legislature.

The first invited speaker was Professor Martin Kulldorff at Harvard Medical School, who talked about the ‘Scientific Evidence on Shared Parenting’ (video @32:00). Based on a review paper by Dr. Linda Nielsen, he presented the scientific evidence that shared parenting is in the best interest of the great majority of children, in terms of mental health, physical health, behavior and inter-personal relationships. From tables containing effect estimates from each outcome in each study, there were overwhelming evidence that shared parenting is better, and for some outcomes, the differences were surprisingly large. He concluded that there is a family court paradox between (i) the best interest of the child principle, (ii) the scientific evidence that shared parenting is in the best interest of the vast majority of children, and (iii) the fact that only a minority of children live in a shared custody arrangement. Dr. Kulldorff ended his presentation stating that if shared parenting was a medical drug, it would easily be approved by the FDA for its mental health benefits and the pharmaceutical company would make billons from it.

The second speaker was Professor Emily Douglas from Worcester Polytechnical Institute, one of the nations’ leading experts on child abuse and other forms of domestic violence (@54:20). She spoke about ‘Stepping Out of the Shadows: Men’s Experiences with Partner Violence Victimization and Recent Efforts to Meet their Needs’. She explained that somewhere between 20-50% of adult domestic abuse victims are men, but that their support system is less developed than for women. While some men have positive experience receiving help from medical professionals, domestic abuse agencies, hotlines and the police, other men described how their cry for help where summarily dismissed and disbelieved. Dr. Douglas also discussed legal aggression as a form of domestic abuse as well as the negative effect on children when witnessing domestic abuse.

University of Connecticut professor emeritus John Clapp was the third speaker, basing his talk on the Hollywood portrayal of divorce in the recent ‘Marriage Story’ movie (@1:40:20). He cited the movie review by New York Times, which stated that custody battles require parents ‘to participate in a legal process that is artificial and estranging by nature, calling on them to make cartoon villains of each other’. He then asked if that was an accurate description of divorce in Connecticut. Dr. Clapp contrasted Connecticut with Sweden, where divorce is less contentious as the parents are told that absent abuse, it is ‘highly unlikely’ that the outcome in court will be anything other than equal-time shared parenting.

The last speaker was an experienced divorce mediator, Colleen O’Neill, who spoke on ‘Mediation and Alternative Dispute Resolution in Divorce’ (@1:54:00). After first describing her own personal experiences, she outlined the short- and long-term benefits of mediation, for both the parents and children. She also spoke about the need for professionals to have mental health training to make family assessments during divorce proceedings.

The symposium ended with comments and questions from the audience. Responding to one question concerning the financial impact of shared parenting on the state (@2:34:00), all panel members agreed that it would save money for Connecticut tax payers; in court, school and health related expenditures.

With help from NPO, this symposium was organized by the Shared Parenting Council of Connecticut (SPC). NPO and SPC are planning additional activities in the state, and if you are interested in joining the important efforts for shared parenting and against domestic abuse in Connecticut, please contact the NPO national office. We will then put you in contact with the right people.

February 4, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

This excellent article is the latest in a series by NBC News and (sometimes) the Houston Chronicle (NBC News, 1/27/20).  The series deals with the rising “specialty” of child abuse physicians, i.e. those who are supposedly uniquely trained and qualified to diagnose intentional injuries to children.  Those physicians don’t necessarily have a conflict of interest, but, as the article demonstrates, they often seem to adopt one.  Plus, as the NBC piece also makes clear, the very existence of the specialty can produce other more sinister ethical violations.

The piece is long and too detailed to adequately describe here.  Suffice it to say, that Dr. John Cox, an ER physician and his wife, Dr. Sadie Dombrozsi, an oncologist and hematologist, were in the process of adopting a baby girl.  They’d already adopted two boys and appear to have been entirely loving and fit parents to them.  But, not long after they’d brought home their one-month-old daughter-to-be, Cox fell asleep with the baby beside him.  When he awoke, he was partially on top of her.  The child was in no distress, but Cox was concerned.  He called his wife who was out of town with the boys and together they decided to “err on the side of caution” and take the baby to Children’s Wisconsin hospital at which they both worked.

As events developed, that turned out to be the least cautious thing they could have done.  Months later, the baby has been taken from them by the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families and John is under felony indictment for child abuse.  The latter of course threatens not only his freedom, but his livelihood.  That is all true despite the fact that there is no clear evidence of abuse, the pair have always been good parents to their other children and numerous doctors have looked into the case and found no reason to believe abuse occurred.

What followed, according to more than 15 medical experts who later reviewed Cox’s case, was a series of medical mistakes and misstatements by hospital staff members that has devastated Cox’s family and derailed his career. A nurse practitioner on the hospital’s child abuse team confused the baby’s birthmarks for bruises, according to seven dermatologists who have reviewed the case. A child abuse pediatrician misinterpreted a crucial blood test, four hematologists later said. Then, two weeks after the incident, armed with those disputed medical reports, Child Protective Services took the child. 

Actually, that recap of the problems in the case seriously understates the doggedness with which child abuse specialists, a nurse practitioner and others, and caseworkers with the WDCF credited medical interpretations that concluded abuse had occurred and ignored those saying otherwise.  That’s a process that one independent medical expert, orthopedist Dr. Matthew Wichman called “quite preposterous.”

But it’s worse than that, far worse.  On several occasions, child abuse pediatricians at Children’s Wisconsin have apparently attempted to get doctors to falsify medical records to enhance the state’s possibility of securing a court order to remove a child from its parents.  Needless to say, that’s an outrageous breech of medical ethics that warrants discipline by the appropriate licensing agency, if proved.

A dozen members of the hospital’s medical staff spoke to a reporter on the condition of anonymity, worried that they would be punished for discussing their concerns publicly.

Several emergency room doctors described an “out of control” child abuse team that is too quick to report minor injuries to authorities and that is too closely aligned with state child welfare investigators. Three of the doctors recalled being pressured by child abuse pediatricians to alter medical records, removing passages where they had initially reported having little or no concerns about abuse, though there’s no evidence that happened in Cox’s case.

“Essentially they’ve asked us to edit medical records to help the state prosecute parents,” one doctor said. “It’s completely inappropriate.”

It also shows what’s perhaps the most important takeaway from this and other cases involving child abuse doctors – their tendency to become less doctors caring for young patients than advocates for state child protective agencies.  Obviously, the line between the two can be unclear, but when a doctor’s title and job description involve seeking out abuse, the tendency to find that abuse where others haven’t increases.

For example, several staff members told a reporter that child abuse pediatricians at the hospital routinely review medical records of children who’ve been admitted to the ER — even when no doctor has asked for their opinion — and then weigh in on whether Child Protective Services should be called. Sometimes child abuse specialists send notes scolding ER physicians for failing to flag children, even though those physicians did not believe the child had been abused, several doctors said.

Plus, as I and others have said before, parents trying to deal with an injured child, who take that child to a hospital and are confronted with a welter of doctors, nurses, administrators, etc. may well not be aware of the child abuse doctor’s dual role, i.e. that of caregiver to the child and potential adversary to the parents.  Needless to say, that conflict of interest may not be disclosed at all and certainly not in the early going.

I’ll say more about this next time.

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.