Category: Blog

September 9, 2019 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Japan has long been a haven for parents who kidnap their children.  I’ve written numerous times about that fact, but always in the context of international kidnapping.  So, for example, a Japanese mother married to an American father and living in the U.S. can simply pack up the kids, move back to Japan and, effectively, Dad has no recourse.  Yes, Japan signed the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, but, like so many other countries, refuses to enforce its terms.

This fine article not only supplies the reason Japanese courts do so, it lets us know that the same thing is happening to Japanese parents in Japan (Washington Post, 8/22/19).

The concept behind Japanese child custody law is this:

Traditionally, children are not viewed as individuals with rights, or as belonging to their parents, but as the “property of the household” where they live. As soon as children move to a new household, the estranged parent becomes an outsider, with no right to disturb the new one. 

That tradition of course is entirely at odds with the biology of parent-child attachment.  As Dr. Anna Machin has told us in her book The Life of Dad, pregnancy and affectionate care by Mom and physical interaction such as play (often rough and tumble play) produce increases in oxytocin in both parent and baby.  Those are then reinforced with dopamine that gives a pleasurable sensation associated with the particular parenting behavior.  Again, both adult and child get both the oxytocin and the dopamine.  That’s part of the neurochemistry of parent-child attachment.

But Japanese tradition isn’t based on parent-child attachment; indeed, it runs afoul of it.  If one parent takes the child from the other, then all of a sudden, one of the two most vital relationships in the child’s life is severed.  It’s traumatic for the child, but Japanese law abets doing so and, unsurprisingly, many parents use it to their (if not the child’s) advantage.

Lawyer Akira Ueno says tens of thousands of Japanese children a year are effectively kidnapped by one parent, who then cuts off contact with the other parent. The second parent — often but not always the father — has no recourse to the authorities for help seeing their children, he says.

Japan’s Justice Ministry says its rules are designed to work in the best interests of children, and that when marriages end badly, it is more practical to give one parent the sole authority to raise their children. But studies show that depriving children of access to one of their parents can be traumatic and psychologically damaging, says Noriko Odagiri, a professor of clinical psychology at Tokyo International University.

“Children feel like their father abandoned them, that he doesn’t love them anymore,” she said. 

Young children suffer behavioral problems and from a feeling of hopelessness, she said. Teenagers often drop out of school, and many have low self-esteem.

In short, Japanese law, tradition and courts effectively endorse kidnapping by one parent even though it’s detrimental to the child.

The same thing happens to non-Japanese parents, but they’re not burdened by the sense of stigma Japanese parent feel in trying to fight the legal system.  The Post article reports on one French and one Italian father who are trying to change the system after their children were kidnapped.

A year ago, Vincent Fichot came home to an empty house in the Tokyo suburb of Setagaya. The Frenchman’s wife, 3-year-old son and 11-month-old daughter had vanished. All he had done, he said, was suggest that he might want a divorce. 

He hasn’t seen or heard from his family since, and every effort to contact his children has been blocked by his wife, the courts and Japanese police. 

“Abduction is child abuse,” he said in the course of several interviews about his case.

Tommaso Perina, an Italian resident of Tokyo, said his wife took their two children for a break at her parents’ house and a few days later decided she wanted a divorce. 

Perina hasn’t seen his son and daughter since August 2017. Although a Japanese court granted him visitation rights, his wife has refused to accept the order, and has moved. The police will not tell him where she now lives, he said, or even talk to Italian Embassy officials.

Another dad, Jeffrey Morehouse found that the Japanese consulate in Portland had actively assisted his wife in abducting their children.

Jeffery Morehouse was living in Washington state, where he had won permanent custody of his son, Mochi. In June 2010, he dropped the 6-year-old off with his Japanese mother for a visit; she promptly took him to Tokyo.

Japan’s government refuses to help, even though its consulate in Portland, Ore., played a key role in the kidnapping by issuing the boy a passport in just one day.

That brings to mind our old friend Tommaso Vincente, whose Australian wife abducted their children to Australia with the knowing help of the Australian Embassy in Rome.

Fortunately, Fichot’s and Perina’s cases have become something of an international cause célèbre.

In June, French President Emmanuel Macron met with Fichot and other French fathers and raised their cases with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, describing their situation as “unacceptable.”

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also spoke with Abe about Italian parents’ rights at the Group of 20 meeting in the Japanese city of Osaka in June. Now, with French and Italian media outlets taking up the issue, the two European leaders are under pressure to speak up again when Group of Seven leaders meet in Biarritz, France, starting Aug. 24.

Japan is among the worst countries in the world for winking at child abduction.  What much of the world understands to be child abuse, Japan actively promotes in its laws, customs and policies.  It signed the Hague Convention in 2014, but has a poor-to-non-existent record of enforcement.

That needs to change.  Here’s hoping international pressure will speed the process.

September 6, 2019 by Ginger Gentile, Deputy Executive Director of the National Parents Organization

Philadelphia will host the Parental Alienation Study Group Conference September 12th-14th. This will feature leading experts on the worst side-effect of divorce: when a loving, fit parent is cut out of their child’s life by the other parent, often aided by the court system. For the first time, the conference will offer a track just for targeted parents, in addition to tracks for the legal system and researchers. I will be there to talk on a panel about how the media covers Parental Alienation, as well as to show my film, Erasing Family. If you are attending, please make sure to say hello!

There is a lot of overlap between the Parental Alienation advocacy community and Shared Parenting activism. Researchers have found that shared parenting reduces conflict and the need for parents to “win” custody. Equal contact with both parents allows children to develop relationships with each parent, and also allows them to see that what one parent says about the other is not always true.

Shared parenting is indicated even in high-conflict divorce cases, where “parallel parenting” (where parents each raise the child with separate rules in each house and minimum communication), can be effective if combined with coaching, parenting classes, and even new apps that will have mediators jump in if they see angry text messages. That isn’t to say that it is easy! Just that IS possible with the correct support for the entire family.

We need to keep educating parents that badmouthing the other parent wounds the child. Courts need to view this behavior as abusive and take firm steps to stop it and provide tools to re-educate the parent who is doing it.

These cycles of abuse are passed on to younger generations. I have met many parents who tell me they were alienated from a parent when they were a young child. I’ve also been told the parent who is alienating their child had a similar experience from their own parents. The cycle of alienation has been passed down through generations.

For more information on the conference (which can be attended on-line) please visit: https://events.eventzilla.net/e/pasg-2019-conference-2138724768

September 5, 2019 by Robert Franklin, JD, National Board of Directors

The Nebraska Supreme Court has taken a giant step toward shared parenting in the state.  It expressly overruled existing Supreme Court precedent in Trimble v. Trimble that stated that shared parenting was disfavored and should only be granted in rare instances.  Those were instances in which the divorcing parents got along well, communicated well and exhibited a high degree of maturity.  The Court strongly suggests that the Trimble holding, that’s governed parenting time cases since 1984, is “clearly incorrect.”

In State of Nebraska on behalf of Kaaden S. vs. Jeffery T., et al, the high court ruled that, in child custody cases, there is no blanket presumption about what parenting arrangement is in the child’s interests, but that each case is to be decided on its own merits.  The best interests of the child will be the trial court’s sole guide in deciding parenting time.

We can conceive of no principled justification for continuing to apply a blanket rule that disfavors joint legal or physical custody, especially when the rule is based on generalized concerns regarding parental maturity and possible behavioral consequences to a child from spending substantial amounts of time with each parent. Such concerns may well be valid in any given case and in that event should be considered in light of all the other factors and circumstances in arriving at a custody and parenting time arrangement that serves the best interests of the child at issue. But a blanket rule disfavoring joint legal or physical custody is difficult to reconcile with the Parenting Act, under which the best interests of the child are the polestar of all child custody and parenting time determinations.

What Kaaden S. does is sweep away a pernicious and ill-considered precedent that, for decades has hamstrung trial courts that may have wanted to order equal parenting time.  What Kaaden S. does not do is require or even encourage trial courts to order shared parenting.

Therefore, in Nebraska, the ball is now squarely in the legislature’s court.  The state’s Parenting Act should be amended to presume that equal parenting is in the child’s best interests.  That’s what the overwhelming weight of social science and neurobiology dictate and that’s what lawmakers should enact.

Kaaden S. was a bit of a remarkable case factually for the justices to take their stand against Trimble and its progeny.  Jeffery T. and Mandy S. apparently had a one-night stand.  They had no relationship before or after.  But Mandy became pregnant and Jeffery was shown to be the child’s father.  The trial court gave Jeffery limited but increasing parenting time under its temporary order.  As his parenting time increased, so did Mandy’s resistance to it.  That included things like screaming at Jeffery during a handover of Kaaden, pepper-spraying him and then calling the police to claim that he’d attacked her.

A Guardian ad Litem and a therapist for Kaaden both indicated that Mandy was alienating the boy from his father and would likely continue to do so.  The GAL recommended sole legal custody for Jeffery and that’s what the court ordered.  It also ordered equal parenting time on a week-on/week-off basis.  Jeffery appealed based on Trimble, since, clearly, this couple wasn’t the type of mature and easily-communicating pair conceived of by that case.

But the Supreme Court upheld the trial court’s order.

In short, the Supreme Court chose a case involving highly contentious interaction between two otherwise fit parents with which to overturn prior case law.  No future Nebraska court will be able to say that parental conflict trumps equal parenting.

That, clearly, is a step in the right direction, but it’s only one.  The Nebraska unicameral legislature must now acknowledge the science on shared parenting and enact a presumption thereof into state statute law.

September 4, 2019 by Ginger Gentile, Deputy Executive Director of the National Parents Organization

When parents who have limited or no contact with their children after divorce or separation become advocates for family court reform their emotions can influence their actions and messaging. Their motivation is to save their relationships with their own children and this blossoms into activism for all children. But this desperation can turn into frustration with society that turns a blind eye to the over 22 million adults in the US who report being alienated from their kids. That is why the entry of the ACODs (Adult Children of Divorce) into advocacy for shared parenting is so exciting; their trauma has passed and they are infusing new energy into the movement. 

Having grown up with a parent erased from their lives or the stress of a high conflict custody battle clouding their childhood, ACODs have a visceral reaction to this issue. Instead of wanting to change a law or a statute, they want systemic change. Their focus is making sure parents reduce conflict and have the tools to do so–not through court orders but through mediation that works, collaborative law, mental health services, and a system that doesn’t pit parents against each other. Default Shared Parenting, which assumes that both parents will have equal access to their kids if both parents are fit, is a big part of this solution, but ACODs view it as part of a holistic approach. 

The ACODs, who grew up immersed in the Silicon Valley ethos of disruption, want to move quickly. As one activist told me, “I want to solve this problem in five years so I can do something else with my life!”

Remember, millenials are older than you think, as the top age bracket was born in 1980. They are forming families of their own and overwhelmingly support shared parenting. Here are some key phrases to use when talking with them:

Justice – equality -fairness – modern – trauma prevention – both genders are equal – moms and dads should have equal responsibility –  kids need to know their family heritage and cultural history – justice should be restorative and helpful, not punitive – access to justice should not depend on income. 

ACODs can be turned off when parents focus on their own trauma. They want to be part of a movement that is focused on change and has clear goals. We at National Parents Organization are excited to welcome this group into our ranks and as allies to work together to ensure that kids have the right to love both parents equally.

August 30, 2019 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Gabe Batstone pleaded with the court to transfer custody of his eight-year-old daughter Teagan to him.  His ex-wife, Lisa, had been acting erratically and had been involuntarily hospitalized as an acute risk for suicide.  That all came within the context of Gabe’s concern about Teagan’s safety with her mother.  His efforts to gain custody seemed to exacerbate Lisa’s emotional problems, making her behavior even more problematical.  But the judge refused Gabe’s request and maintained Lisa’s primary custody.

That was true despite the fact that neighbors had long feared for Teagan’s safety in her mother’s custody.  Church members too were concerned.  Apparently due to Lisa’s behavior toward Teagan, there was a breach in the relationship between the congregation and Lisa.

Not long after the judge’s refusal of a modification of custody, Lisa and Teagan had a “camp out” in their living room.  As Teagan slept, Lisa first considered stabbing her to death, but instead put a plastic bag over the little girl’s head and smothered her. 

She then loaded Teagan’s body into the trunk of her car and got stuck in ditch.  Police discovered the body and arrested her.

A mental health professional who interviewed Lisa immediately after her arrest recounted that Lisa had told her that she’d killed their daughter “to spite Gabe.”

This past March, Lisa Batstone was convicted of second-degree murder in Teagan’s death.  Sentencing will take place in September.

I write this to demonstrate a few things.  First, I did so because a similar incident leads off this article (Washington Post, 7/29/19).  One difference between the two crimes is that the sexes are reversed.  In the Batstone case, a mother is the murderer, in the WaPo article, the father is.   The point being that, whatever the Post wants readers to believe, neither sex has a monopoly on injuring children.

The main difference though is how the Post article treats the tragic killing of a child and how I do.  The Post piece leads with a horrifying crime in order to encourage its readers to accept what’s to come, i.e. the notion that family courts routinely ignore mothers’ truthful claims of abuse in order to give custody to violent fathers who then harm the kids.  That idea is dubious on its face, but is more easily swallowed when there’s a heart-rending incident to ease down the pill.

By contrast, I in no way want readers to believe that family courts commonly ignore claims of abuse.  Indeed, they’re fairly often confronted with those claims and have to make a call one way or another.  Do they sometimes err in making those calls?  Of course they do.  Judges are human and don’t always get matters right.  Clearly they didn’t in the Batstone case or the one cited by the Post.  But the idea that they cavalierly ignore mothers’ claims of abuse is absurd.

But there’s another difference between my piece and the article in the Post.  The latter swallows hook, line and sinker claims made by law professor Joan Meier and a study she’s conducted of outcomes in family court cases.  Post writer Samantha Schmidt quotes just one person, law professor Nicholas Bala, who criticizes Meier’s work and he does so only mildly.

Bala said the study, while important and credible, does not distinguish between different severities of physical abuse, such as the difference between a shove and a brutal beating. He added that the most severe cases of child abuse don’t even make it to family court — they are handled by the police or child protective services. So the cases in Meier’s study are “already in a gray area” and are a “very skewed kind of sample.”

Hmm.  It’s hard to say how the study can be both “credible” and one that relies on a “very skewed kind of sample.”  After all, the latter tends strongly to belie the former.  But I won’t quibble with Bala when it’s Meier’s work that’s questionable.

I’ll have more to say about that later, but for now, it’s worth remembering that Meier’s work is at least in part an attack on the very concept of parental alienation.  As such, it and the Post article come to us in the context of other work that try and fail to cast doubt on a fact that’s all too well known in family courts.  I refer of course to the phenomenon of one parent’s trying to turn the child against the other parent.

Meier’s work and the Post piece are also contradicted by a welter of known facts about family courts.  To the extent they urge us to believe that fathers are favored over mothers in custody cases, too much data refute the claim to list.  Certainly the fact that over 81% of custodial parents are mothers is important as is the fact that researchers like Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen have found that mothers tend to file divorce matters far more than do fathers because they know they won’t lose their kids.  Dataset after dataset show mothers getting custody far more readily than fathers.  And that’s not because dads don’t ask courts for custody.  They do, but, as Maccoby and Mnookin showed long ago, courts are much more likely to grant mothers’ requests than they are fathers’.  And then of course there are the surveys of family court judges and lawyers who say quite candidly that there’s a heavy pro-mother bias in family courts.

Against all that and more, the assertion that family courts routinely dismiss mothers’ concerns in order to deprive them of child custody can only be doubted.  I do, for reasons I’ll detail next time.

Read part two here. 

August 27, 2019 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Last time I wrote about how schools often thwart fathers’ relationships with their kids.  As researcher Dr. Jessica Troilo found in her latest study, school officials often assume that Mom is not only the primary parent, but the only one needing to be kept up to date on little Andy or Jenny’s academic progress/problems.  It turns out that it’s not just family courts that keep kids apart from their dads; other institutions do too.

British evolutionary anthropologist and author of the book The Life of Dad, Dr. Anna Machin of Cambridge University, agrees.  But Machin was writing about the medical profession, not schools.

Machin’s work includes interviewing fathers.  They report being reduced to second-class citizens throughout their partners’ pregnancies.  Here’s how Machin describes their experiences:

[T]heir experience is that [fathers’] dedication is often unrecognized, even actively belittled.  In a world where the role of mum is paramount, even sanctified, the lack of focus and support available to fathers and the enduring stereotype of the inept dad leave many of the dads I study with the overall impression that, while paying lip service to their needs, our society would very much prefer it if they would kindly get back in their box.

Much of that, says Machin, is the fault of the “medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth.”  To me, approaching those as a medical phenomenon has much to recommend it.  After all, there’s much of a medical nature that can go wrong during pregnancy, birth and afterward.  We’d be fools to pretend otherwise.  Still, if bringing a baby into the world is viewed exclusively as a medical issue, then, by definition, fathers aren’t part of the process.  They’re not pregnant and they won’t give birth, so why pay attention to them?

Actually, as many people have pointed out, fathers are extremely important, even if we consider pregnancy and childbirth to be an exclusively medical thing.  Machin refers to a 2010 report by the Royal College of Midwives:

It referred to the increasing scientific evidence for the impact of father involvement on the health of the mother and child and on his child’s development.

The report went on to encourage the medical profession, including midwives to “engage with fathers as important figures in maternity care.”  It said midwives “should be working with fathers to encourage their involvement and support.”  But Machin adds, “unfortunately, words have not been followed by action.”

That includes the efforts of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) that consults on and develops guidelines for the health care provided by Britain’s National Health Service.  Machin again:

There is now a growing body of evidence that the healthcare outcomes for mum and baby are significantly improved if dads are included in discussions and decisions taken as labour proceeds.  But nowhere in NICE’s 88-page document are the terms ‘dad,’ ‘father’ or ‘partner’ referenced…  But the sole aim of medicalized childbirth is to increase the chances of survival for mum and baby.  When a major factor that positively impacts this chance – having an involved and informed father – is excluded, that should be of concern.

Well, that’s putting it mildly.

The above quotations come from the final chapter of Machin’s book.  The previous 260 pages are devoted to the many ways in which involved fathers improve their own lives, those of their children and their children’s mothers.  Indeed, without that involvement, the many biochemical changes that make possible father-child attachments may not take place.  With weak or non-existent attachments between fathers and children, the many benefits of fathers to children become attenuated or may be lost altogether.  Is Daddy a remote and chilly figure?  Maybe it’s because he’s been told by countless people “in authority” that he’s neither wanted nor needed.  Maybe it’s because he’s been denied the opportunity to form those biochemical attachments without which parents either don’t parent or do so indifferently.

MenCare’s 2015 report, ‘The State of the World’s Fathers’ was the first of its kind to carry out a global assessment of the status of fathers – the extent to which they are included, supported and advocated for.  It found that there were still considerable barriers to dads being involved.  Some of these were economic, particularly in porter countries, but the larges hurdle was in our minds.  The hurdle is social and cultural…

Fathers collide with those barriers in doctors’ offices and hospitals.  They also find them in schools. 

August 26, 2019 by William Fabricius, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology, Arizona State University

Many state legislatures are considering bills that would make it the norm for more children of divorce to live equal time with each of their parents, modeled on landmark laws in Arizona in 2013 and Kentucky in 2018. But in some states, legislators feel caught between supporting the Me Too movement, which holds men accountable for changing behaviors toward women that were countenanced in the past, and supporting equal parenting time, which holds fathers as equally good parents as mothers.

What is the connection between equal parenting time and Me Too? Is one about men’s rights and the other about women’s rights? Both are demanding deep-seated cultural changes, but are they at odds?

For the last 20 years, I have been studying the long-term effects on children associated with the different amounts of parenting time they had with each of their separated parents. It turns out that the standard, every-other weekend schedule with dad has had an unintended and largely unnoticed consequence.

Children who had the standard visitation schedule are unsure, into their 20s, about how much they actually matter to their fathers. Those who had more parenting time with their fathers are more assured that they matter to them, and those who had equal parenting time with both of their parents have equally strong, close, and emotionally secure relationships with both their parents, on a par with young adults whose parents stayed married.

Why should this be? My colleagues, students, and I have interviewed hundreds of children from divorced and intact families, and it has become clear that spending time together tells children they are important. For the younger children of divorce, suddenly not seeing dad for long stretches of time between visits means that he doesn’t want to be with them. That’s the only way they can understand it, and that plants the seeds of doubt that they matter to him.

We have been struck by this finding about equal parenting time and perceived mattering, because it aligns with a well-established finding from long-term studies of stress-related physical health. Lingering doubts about how much one matters to a parent release low, chronic levels of stress hormones into the brain and bloodstream, which over time are harmful. Insecurity and uncertainty about one’s relationship with either parent in young adulthood puts that child at risk for stress-related major mental and physical health problems in later life, including relationship difficulties with others, susceptibility to infectious and chronic diseases, and risk for early mortality.

If there is any more convincing evidence about what amount of parenting time is in children’s best interests, I am unaware of it. But what does this have to do with Me Too?

Real changes in the culture of men’s behavior toward women will come about on a person-to-person level. Individual men will have to see sexual advances as women do. In the following true story, the 30-year-old college graduate didn’t.

He was a new member of a work team at a multinational corporation. The team met for an after-hours work function, and a young woman member was being congratulated by the senior partners for her work. He soon put his hand on her body below her belt, and later tried to kiss her in the presence of her junior male work team members. They reported him. Her mental focus was broken by doubts and questions (“Why did that happen?” “What did I do?”); her preparation for leading a meeting the next day was interrupted; and her performance suffered.

He wasn’t a psychopath. He wasn’t a rapist. He just assumed he could do that to her. He may have otherwise gone on to a successful career in that organization, but the senior partners questioned him about the incident, he lied despite the witnesses, and he was fired.

He and she were at the same organizational level, and hence in competition for the few high performance evaluations given out each year. It is hard not to see his behavior as having given him a competitive edge, because it did — or would have before Me Too. In the strategic tool box for getting ahead has always been a drawer marked “For Men Only.” It’s hard to resist the temptation to use those tools when they are camouflaged by layers of cultural meaning (“It was consensual.” “She should be flattered.” etc.). He may not even have been fully aware he was using one. She was.

The organization did the right thing to enforce a level playing field for its talented, competitive, rising stars. But what is also needed is cultural change for prevention to protect both our sons and daughters, and this is where I think equal parenting time has a role to play.

Divorced fathers with close, open relationships with daughters who are assured that they matter to their fathers will learn how their daughters experience the world of boys and girls, and men and women. They will certainly learn more than the “weekend dads” whose relationships with their daughters are much more likely to be in need of repair. Equal parenting time affords not only the closeness and trust, but also the time and leisure for daughters to share, and for dads to learn. And with equal parenting time, what fathers learn will surely transfer to their sons. Equal parenting time does not result in any loss of closeness and security with mothers, and also allows them the time and leisure to perform the equally important function of teaching their daughters and sons what the world has been, and is, for them.

Divorced fathers who learn to see the world of men and women from their daughters’ points of view will be a force for cultural change. They will reinforce these norms in how they interact with other men, and in what they model for their sons and daughters.

Equal parenting time and the Me Too movement are not at odds, and state legislators should not have to choose between them. Equal parenting time can help advance the Me Too movement, one divorced father at a time.