Category: Blog

May 30, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Just three years after his appointment, Hank Whitman is stepping down as Texas’ Commissioner of the Department of Family and Protective Services (Texas Tribune, 5/28/19).  The DFPS oversees Child Protective Services in the state.

Whitman’s appointment raised eyebrows back in April of 2016 because the man has a law-enforcement background with the Texas Rangers.  What that had to do with children’s welfare, the foster care system, cases-to-caseworkers ratios, etc. few people could figure out, myself included.  Still, on the face of it at least, Whitman’s done what was needed.  My guess is that he’s happy to be returning to law enforcement, but today, three years later, CPS is in much better shape than it was when he arrived.

Whitman will perhaps best be remembered as an outsider with little experience in social services who shepherded the child welfare agency through a period of crisis by advocating fiercely at the Texas Capitol for pay raises for his frontline staff.

“We strengthened investigations by building expertise, improving processes and streamlining management,” he said in the announcement video. “We worked for well deserved pay raises for program staff to help reduce turnover and caseloads. And we made significant progress on many other fronts.”

That’s all to the good of course, but giving Whitman the credit might be considered, shall we say, generous.  The reality is that, when he took over at the DFPS, the Lone Star State couldn’t reasonably have done anything else but provide large amounts of additional funding to salvage a child welfare agency that could charitably have been called dysfunctional.

After all, how much horrible press can one agency stand before something gives?  The regular drumbeat of children, known by CPS to be at risk, dying due to lack of attention from CPS alternated with reports of caseworkers carrying up to 70 cases, some five times the industry standard.  Then there was the scathing report of an audit of CPS that painted a gruesome picture of caseworkers leaving the agency as soon as they could for better jobs and better pay, paperwork obligations that kept those caseworkers in the office and away from the children they were supposed to be protecting and procedural manuals that ran to thousands of pages and often contradicted each other. 

No one reading the news about Texas DFPS could have failed to get the message that the state was trying to do child protection on the cheap and children were suffering the consequences – all too often, the ultimate consequence.

Then came Federal Judge Janis Jack’s findings in a class action suit against the DFPS that revealed a system that turned out kids at age 18 in worse condition emotionally and physically than when they’d entered. Anyone with an understanding of recent Texas history knew that could mean the takeover of the child welfare system by a federal judge-appointed special master. That had happened back in the 70s when Federal Judge William Wayne Justice took over the operations of the Texas Department of Corrections to prevent the ongoing civil rights violations that were a daily part of prison life there.

In short, the governor and the legislature had read the writing on the wall before Hank Whitman took the oath of office.  Casper Milquetoast could have been appointed commissioner and the same thing – massive additional funding – would have happened.  Or so I strongly suspect.

I don’t begrudge Whitman’s taking credit for improving the agency.  After all, it was done on his “watch.”  Still, there was always a distinct air of inevitability in the proceedings.

What I question though is the timing of his departure.  Three years was barely enough time for him to dip his toe in the chilly water of the Texas child welfare system, particularly given that he had so little background in the applicable issues.  So why jump ship now?

Yes, Whitman’s first allegiance is surely law-enforcement and maybe he’s just getting back to what he knows best.  Or maybe he sees that Texas has done all it’s going to do for the time about cleaning up the horrendous mess that was CPS.  Do lawmakers figure that the crisis has been averted and plan to scale back funding again?  Do they count on privatization of the system to solve all problems?

Did Hank Whitman find himself on a wild horse he couldn’t ride?

We’ll see soon enough.

May 28, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

We say that we want children to have financial support.  They need it, after all, and if an adult makes the decision to bring a child into the world, he/she should be obliged to provide what’s necessary to give it a full, healthy life.  When parents divorce, neither of them magically loses that obligation. 

Fair enough.

But if we do want children to be supported financially, why do we make it so hard on non-custodial parents to do so?  Why don’t we, for example, order equal parenting in the great majority of divorce and custody cases?  That would mean each parent could simply bear the costs of caring for the child when little Andy or Jenny is with them, plus half of the non-everyday expenses.  In short, most child support orders would simply become moot and a huge area of conflict between parents would vanish.

Or, if we’re bound and determined to force one parent to pay the other, why not provide equal funding for enforcement of visitation and child support orders?  As things stand now, the federal government pays states $5 billion per year to enforce child support orders, but only $10 million for visitation, a 500:1 ratio.  And that $10 million is explicitly prohibited from being used for what non-custodial parents trying to see their kids need most – legal representation.  That gross imbalance between child support and visitation enforcement exists despite the known fact that NC parents who don’t encounter barriers to seeing their kids are far more likely to pay what they owe.

Then there are the even more obvious absurdities of the current system of child support enforcement, which bring us to the current case, that of Jamie Wesley (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 5/25/19).

Wesley started adult life as a genuinely bad person.  Among other things, he spent 12 years in a federal prison for drug and weapons offenses, but eventually, he was released, having paid his debt to society.  At the encouraging of Federal Judge Richard Webber, Wesley began getting his life together.  He got a commercial driver’s license and a job as a long-haul truck driver earning a pretty good salary.

Then the state of Missouri came calling.

It was Sept. 10, 2018. Wesley was about 120 miles outside of Lansing, Mich., when his boss called.

The family support division of the Missouri Department of Social Services had suspended his driver’s license because Wesley was behind on child support.

Of course he was behind on child support.  The State of Missouri had ignored the fact that he was in prison and, for all those 12 years, kept upping his indebtedness, doubtless with interest added on.  How it expected him to pay while in prison is one of the many mysteries of the child support enforcement system.

But Wesley’s no fool.  He knew what had been going on and had filed for a modification of his child support order.  He had a hearing date of September 24.  The state authorities ignored that too and suspended his license without a hearing.

Now he had no driver’s license. He was fired on the spot, hundreds of miles from home.

“I had to pull over and sit and wait for somebody to come get me,” Wesley says. He slept in his truck on the side of the road.

Missouri is the “Show Me” State.  So I’m certain that someone there can show me how suspending Wesley’s license and getting him fired from the only decent job he’s had in over 12 years helps anyone.  Does it help him?  His kids?  His ex?  Will his children be assisted in receiving the support he owes by depriving him of the ability to earn a living?  By all means, show me.

The same problem of course exists nationwide.  We indulge in the fantasy that, in some way, taking away a parent’s livelihood makes him/her more likely to be able to support their child.  We don’t do that for married parents, only divorced ones.  It must have taken a sort of evil genius to think up this system and convince an entire country to implement it.

Not all is madness in Missouri, though.

St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell announced a plan to stop prosecuting most child support cases in criminal court. And it’s why two civil rights organizations — Equal Justice Under Law and St. Francis Community Services — filed a federal class action lawsuit in March seeking to end Missouri’s practice of driver’s license suspension in child support cases.

May 27, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

In his paper written for publication in a hard-copy book to be published by the Oxford University Press in October, William Fabricius goes on to other considerations that militate in favor of a presumption of equal parenting to be written into family law.

He points out that, whatever our culture may have favored 50 years ago, it now supports children having as much time as possible with each parent following divorce.  In that, We the People once again demonstrate ourselves to be smarter and more humane than elites who govern- and not occasionally decide what’s good for – us.  I of course have reported many times on the increasing number and variety of surveys demonstrating popular support for equal parenting.

In connection to the long-term historical trend toward gender equality and involvement of fathers in child care, there is now consistent evidence of a strong public consensus that equal parenting time is best for children. The first indication of this consensus was found by Fabricius and Hall, who asked college students, ”What do you feel is the best living arrangement for children after divorce?”. Regardless of how the question was phrased over the course of several semesters, whether students were male or female, or from divorced or intact families, approximately 70% to 80% answered, “equal time”. Subsequent surveys have found that large majorities favor equal parenting time in all the locales and among all the demographic groups in the United States and Canada in which this question has been asked, and across several variations in question format, including variations that ask respondents to consider differences in how much pre-divorce child care each parent provided, and differences in parent conflict.

I hate to break it to Dr. Fabricius, but he and Hall aren’t the first ones to find a strong preference for equal parenting time.  For at least two decades, reaching back into the 90s, Canadians have responded to surveys with strong support (in the 70% – 80% range) for equal parenting.  Here in the U.S., that support crosses all demographic boundaries of race, class, educational attainment and political affiliation.  Indeed, it would be difficult to name an issue with such broad-based popular support that enjoys so little elite support.  Offhand, I can’t think of any.

Fabricius goes on to briefly summarize the state of equal parenting laws in the U.S. and Canada.  To date, there’s only one state – Kentucky – that has a statute requiring the presumption of equal parenting time.  But the momentum toward equal parenting becomes clear when we look at the larger picture, which Fabricius does.

Arizona law doesn’t presume equality, but courts and attorneys assume that its language has that intention.  For several years now, Arizonans have had the benefit of that de facto equal parenting law.  Other states, like Wisconsin, Louisiana, Nevada and Alaska are edging toward equal parenting.

In Canada, there is no law requiring equal parenting, but a series of judicial precedents seems to be heading in that direction.  Statute law established the “maximum contact” rule and courts seem to be taking heed.

At least 34 cases have used the maximum contact principle to order equal parenting time. For example, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal in Ackerman v. Ackerman (2014) noted that, although there was no presumption in favor of shared parenting by the maximum contact principle, “maximum contact between a child and each of his or her parents is desirable,” and upheld the trial judge’s alternating-week equal parenting time order.

In Fraser v. Fraser (2016), Justice McGee noted, “Ongoing relationships with each of one’s parents is a right. When a parent argues for unequal parenting time, the onus is on that parent to demonstrate why the proposed schedule is in the child’s best interests.”

Shifting the burden of proof to the parent opposing equal time is, by itself, a landmark.  The importance of which party bears the burden of producing sufficient evidence to overcome what is in fact, if not in law, a presumption can scarcely be overstated.

Indeed, one judge encapsulated the arguments for equal parenting very nicely.

I do not [order equal parenting] in an attempt to be fair to the parents, but rather because it will allow for more meaningful interaction between the children and both parents, particularly the father. It will, in my opinion, be better for the children’s mental, emotional and physical health; reduce the disruption in the children’s sense of continuity; foster the love, affection and ties that exist between not only the children and parents, but the children with the paternal grandmother and with the extended families of both parents; and will provide the children with a secure environment.

Those are the words of a judge who’s been properly educated in the science of equal parenting.  Too bad there aren’t more of them.

Fabricius ends with a call for a presumption of equal parenting.

As Joan Kelly has pointed out, the current child custody statutes were written in the absence of evidence of how well they promoted children’s well-being. The evidence that is now available is compelling that failure to enact presumptions of equal parenting time risks unnecessary harm to children’s emotional security with their parents, and consequently unnecessary harm to public health in the form of long-term stress-related mental and physical health problems among children of divorce.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

This continues from yesterday my discussion of Dr. William Fabricius’ paper “Equal Parenting Time: The Case for a Legal Presumption,” that will be published in hard copy in October of this year in the Oxford Handbook of Children and the Law, edited by J.G. Dwyer and published by Oxford University Press.

Is there a causal effect of equal parenting on increased child well-being or are the 60+ studies finding better outcomes for children with equal parenting merely correlational?  Dr. Fabricius finds that equal parenting tends to cause those improved outcomes.

One of the arguments against causation is that those parents who chose an equal or near-equal parenting arrangement were simply predisposed in that direction.  Therefore, the only thing measured by the studies is the selection bias of those with shared parenting arrangements.  Fabricius disposes of that claim.

The first reason is that better fathers are not able to choose to have more parenting time.

Still the best study conducted of what parents want and what they receive from judges’ orders is the Maccoby and Mnookin study from 1992.  Its findings were corroborated by a study conducted by Fabricius and colleagues.

Maccoby and Mnookin reported that about a third of fathers wanted joint physical custody, and another third wanted primary physical custody. In Arizona, Fabricius and Hall found that similar proportions of college students reported that their fathers had wanted equal or nearly equal living arrangements, or to be their primary residential parent. Yet in both studies, children’s living arrangements were twice as likely to reflect the mothers’ than the fathers’ preferences.

Plus, as I’ve said many times, what parents agree to is heavily influenced by what they perceive a judge is likely to do.  If Dad’s lawyer tells him it’s not worth the money and heartache to try for equal parenting time, there’s a fair likelihood that he’ll do the sensible thing and accept less.  That and other factors mean that it’s not possible for selection bias to be at work.

The second reason that parenting time is likely to play a causal role in benefits to the father-child relationship is that there is a “dose-response” pattern, which means that even small increases in parenting time across the range from 0% to 50% are significantly associated with increases in father-child relationship security.

The chances that only children who would be responsive in a “dose-response” way to paternal parenting were the ones who were studied by the many researchers in various parts of the world who’ve found better outcomes for children in equal parenting arrangements are vanishingly small.  A dose-response effect strongly suggests causation.

The third reason is that the beneficial effects of shared parenting do not seem to be due to better, more cooperative parents agreeing between themselves to share parenting time.

Indeed, the children of parents who had equal parenting time more or less forced on them by a judge still were better off than those in sole or primary custody.

We examined the publicly available data from the Stanford Child Custody Study  and found that the great majority of parents with shared parenting had to accept it after mediation, custody evaluation, trial, or judicial imposition. Nevertheless, those with shared parenting time had the most well-adjusted children years later. In a recent study, we asked parents to report whether they had agreed about overnight parenting time when their children were 0 to 2 years of age, or whether they disagreed…  If the children had equal overnights with each parent by the time they were 2 years old, it did not matter whether their parents had agreed to it or not; the two groups had equally good relationships with their fathers as well as with their mothers, and better relationships than those who had had fewer overnights.

The final reason stems from studies of parents who relocate.  Sometimes custodial Mom moves away, depriving the child of much time with Dad.  Sometimes non-custodial Dad does so, resulting in the same thing.

[C]ompared to non-relocating families, relocation of more than an hour’s drive from the original family home was associated not only with long-term harm to children’s emotional security with parents and their emotional security about parent conflict, but also with more anxiety, depression, aggression, delinquency, involvement with the juvenile justice system, associations with delinquent peers, and drug use. These associations held after controlling for parent conflict, domestic violence, and mothers’ family income.

The important factor in those studies was that the child’s negative response could not have come about due to anxiety about being uprooted to a new home, new school, new peers, etc. by the move.  When Mom moved with the child, obviously, those effects could have been felt, but not when Dad moved without the child.  Then the child remained where he/she had always been and in Mom’s primary care.  Therefore, the negative outcomes were due to losing much time with Dad.  And those outcomes again were found in the children from a variety of backgrounds and ethnicities.

In short, we have pretty a pretty firm empirical foundation for the proposition that equal parenting causes better children’s outcomes.

This continues from yesterday my discussion of Dr. William Fabricius’ paper “Equal Parenting Time: The Case for a Legal Presumption,” that will be published in hard copy in October of this year in the Oxford Handbook of Children and the Law, edited by J.G. Dwyer and published by Oxford University Press.

Is there a causal effect of equal parenting on increased child well-being or are the 60+ studies finding better outcomes for children with equal parenting merely correlational?  Dr. Fabricius finds that equal parenting tends to cause those improved outcomes.

One of the arguments against causation is that those parents who chose an equal or near-equal parenting arrangement were simply predisposed in that direction.  Therefore, the only thing measured by the studies is the selection bias of those with shared parenting arrangements.  Fabricius disposes of that claim.

The first reason is that better fathers are not able to choose to have more parenting time.

Still the best study conducted of what parents want and what they receive from judges’ orders is the Maccoby and Mnookin study from 1992.  Its findings were corroborated by a study conducted by Fabricius and colleagues.

Maccoby and Mnookin reported that about a third of fathers wanted joint physical custody, and another third wanted primary physical custody. In Arizona, Fabricius and Hall found that similar proportions of college students reported that their fathers had wanted equal or nearly equal living arrangements, or to be their primary residential parent. Yet in both studies, children’s living arrangements were twice as likely to reflect the mothers’ than the fathers’ preferences.

Plus, as I’ve said many times, what parents agree to is heavily influenced by what they perceive a judge is likely to do.  If Dad’s lawyer tells him it’s not worth the money and heartache to try for equal parenting time, there’s a fair likelihood that he’ll do the sensible thing and accept less.  That and other factors mean that it’s not possible for selection bias to be at work.

The second reason that parenting time is likely to play a causal role in benefits to the father-child relationship is that there is a “dose-response” pattern, which means that even small increases in parenting time across the range from 0% to 50% are significantly associated with increases in father-child relationship security.

The chances that only children who would be responsive in a “dose-response” way to paternal parenting were the ones who were studied by the many researchers in various parts of the world who’ve found better outcomes for children in equal parenting arrangements are vanishingly small.  A dose-response effect strongly suggests causation.

The third reason is that the beneficial effects of shared parenting do not seem to be due to better, more cooperative parents agreeing between themselves to share parenting time.

Indeed, the children of parents who had equal parenting time more or less forced on them by a judge still were better off than those in sole or primary custody.

We examined the publicly available data from the Stanford Child Custody Study  and found that the great majority of parents with shared parenting had to accept it after mediation, custody evaluation, trial, or judicial imposition. Nevertheless, those with shared parenting time had the most well-adjusted children years later. In a recent study, we asked parents to report whether they had agreed about overnight parenting time when their children were 0 to 2 years of age, or whether they disagreed…  If the children had equal overnights with each parent by the time they were 2 years old, it did not matter whether their parents had agreed to it or not; the two groups had equally good relationships with their fathers as well as with their mothers, and better relationships than those who had had fewer overnights.

The final reason stems from studies of parents who relocate.  Sometimes custodial Mom moves away, depriving the child of much time with Dad.  Sometimes non-custodial Dad does so, resulting in the same thing.

[C]ompared to non-relocating families, relocation of more than an hour’s drive from the original family home was associated not only with long-term harm to children’s emotional security with parents and their emotional security about parent conflict, but also with more anxiety, depression, aggression, delinquency, involvement with the juvenile justice system, associations with delinquent peers, and drug use. These associations held after controlling for parent conflict, domestic violence, and mothers’ family income.

The important factor in those studies was that the child’s negative response could not have come about due to anxiety about being uprooted to a new home, new school, new peers, etc. by the move.  When Mom moved with the child, obviously, those effects could have been felt, but not when Dad moved without the child.  Then the child remained where he/she had always been and in Mom’s primary care.  Therefore, the negative outcomes were due to losing much time with Dad.  And those outcomes again were found in the children from a variety of backgrounds and ethnicities.

In short, we have pretty a pretty firm empirical foundation for the proposition that equal parenting causes better children’s outcomes.

May 24, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

As Joan Kelly has pointed out, the current child custody statutes were written in the absence of evidence of how well they promoted children’s well-being. The evidence that is now available is compelling that failure to enact presumptions of equal parenting time risks unnecessary harm to children’s emotional security with their parents, and consequently unnecessary harm to public health in the form of long-term stress-related mental and physical health problems among children of divorce.

That’s how Dr. William Fabricius closes his latest paper on the science underpinning equal parenting and children’s well-being.  It’s about as succinct and powerful an endorsement of equal parenting as I’ve ever seen.  It captures the historical context of present-day law, i.e. laws on child custody were written by lawmakers who had no access to scientific evidence about how the laws they passed might influence the very people they were supposedly designed to serve – children.

It points out that we now have that scientific evidence and that we should use it, a point I’ve made countless times myself.  After all, when the weight of empirical evidence is so great on one side of an issue, why not make policy based on it?

It states that the failure to align law with science poses a risk to children’s well-being.

It states that damaging children’s emotional well-being constitutes a public-health risk due to the long- and short-term impacts the damage to children’s emotional well-being has.  We as a society end up trying to pick up the pieces, to try to make right what family courts made wrong.  We do that in countless, often unproductive ways.  We do that with increasingly large prison capacity, drug and alcohol abuse programs, educational interventions, mental health interventions and the like.

Unstated by Fabricius, but nevertheless true and important is the amount of public money we spend every year on all those attempts to cure the symptoms of a disease that began in divorce court.

Fabricius’ paper, entitled “Equal Parenting Time: The Case for a Legal Presumption,” touches all the bases, but also does more.  It responds to the claim that, after all, the science on shared parenting is merely correlational and so we can’t say that shared parenting causes improved child welfare over sole or primary parenting.

Of course the studies deal only in correlations for the good and sufficient reason that they can’t do otherwise.  Scientific evidence doesn’t permit the type of study that could draw the causal connection between parenting arrangements and children’s welfare.  But the argument is still nothing more than a vain hope on the part of anti-dad advocates.

I’ve argued many times before that (a) fatherlessness tends strongly to result in bad outcomes for kids and (b) divorce courts are a prime source of fatherlessness.  Those are known facts.  Further, (c) the effects of fatherlessness on kids cross all demographic boundaries of race, class, family income, educational level, religion and geographic area.  So, given (c), why can we not infer causation between family courts’ sidelining of fathers and poorer outcomes for kids.  Stated another way, once we’ve eliminated the usual variables associated with poorer emotional, behavioral, educational and other outcomes, what’s left?  What’s left is fatherlessness as the common denominator.  So why can’t we infer a causal relationship between fatherlessness and poorer children’s welfare?

Such is the reasoning of a non-scientist.  I’ll discuss Fabricius’ approach to causation tomorrow.

May 23, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

To watch this article try – really try – to be gender-neutral in its treatment of domestic violence and child custody arrangements, only to cave into blatant anti-father sentiments that are only too well known to readers of the BBC, would be amusing were the subject not so grave (BBC, 5/15/19).

The issue seems to be whether courts treat claims of DV by one parent or the other too casually and whether that results in unnecessary harm to children.  Apparently, five children in the U.K. have died while in a parent’s care who was allowed access by a family court.  Needless to say, five children killed is five too many and nowhere in the article is the rate of other, less serious injuries mentioned.

Plus there’s the problem that British family courts act in almost complete secrecy, meaning that neither the BBC nor any other news outlet can investigate the matter.  That of course creates quite the irony.  The secrecy provisions were instituted and are invariably defended as protecting children from unwanted publicity.  That such secrecy might be contributing to their injury and death would very much turn that policy on its head.

In any case, more than 120 members of Parliament want an investigation into family courts to see if there’s really a problem or not.

Meanwhile, the BBC piece scrupulously hews to its gender-neutral tack for all of 300 words.  Then it reverts to form, relating the case of a man who killed his two children. Then it’s on to “Mary’s story,” of how her brutal ex injured her and their children.

The anti-dad snowball continues rolling when we hear from M.P. Louise Haigh:

Labour’s shadow policing minister, Louise Haigh MP, said it was “horrifying that even in proven cases of sexual assault, severe domestic abuse, rape, murder in some cases, men are still being encouraged and granted access to their child”.

Then there’s “Barrister Charlotte Proudman, who specialises in cases involving violence against women…”  Proudman digs up the old chestnut that parental alienation by mothers against fathers is really just their protecting the children against violent Dad.

What we don’t get of course is any notion that mothers might harm their children or their exes.  Here in the U.S., mothers are by far those most likely to abuse or neglect children.  The Administration for Children and Families has for years reported mothers committing about twice the abuse and neglect of children as do fathers.  My guess is that much the same holds true in the U.K.  My further guess is that many, many of those abusive and neglectful mothers have an order of a court granting them custody and parenting time.

So where’s the outcry about that?  Not in the BBC, nor indeed anywhere else.  I’ve yet to read an article excoriating family courts when little Andy or Jenny meets with death or other misfortune at the hands of his/her custodial (or non-custodial) mother.  She may be criticized, but never the court or the family law system that shoved Dad to the curb in her favor.

The point of course is what it always seems to be: as long as major news sources like the BBC engage in the denigration of fathers, how are we ever going to convince legislatures to pass equal custody bills?

The simple fact is that courts throughout the English-speaking world are required by law to tailor their orders to findings of domestic violence or the lack thereof.  That’s a good thing.  They’re also required by law to keep parents in children’s lives if possible.  Sometimes the two require them to walk a fine line between protecting children from DV and the loss of a parent.  That line is not always a bright one.

The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) said in a statement: “One of our most challenging professional tasks is to assess what level of parental involvement is safe and in the child’s best interests, in cases where a parent has a history of domestic abuse.

“We must continue to reduce [the risk of parents harming children] by understanding these cases better and looking wider than the court process.”

A spokesperson for the UK judiciary said judges were “required to consider all the evidence put forward and to reconcile any conflicting interests at a time that they know is exceptionally stressful for all those involved.”

In short, it’s not an easy task and no sensible person expects judges to make the right call every time.

What’s absolutely guaranteed to not make the task easier is the unwritten assumption, apparently made by the BBC, Louise Haigh and others, that only fathers abuse children.  We all know that’s not true, a fact that raises the question of why the BBC would publish such a patently one-sided and therefore misleading article.

May 22, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This continues yesterday’s discussion of a New York Times piece that excoriates fathers for not doing their share of childcare, but ignores mothers’ failure to pull their weight in earning (New York Times, 5/4/19).

In so doing, the author, Darcy Lockman, produced one figure on the percentage of childcare done by mothers with no citation that contradicted the best survey data on what men and women do every day. Plus, she ignored all figures on how much time at the office or plant men and women spend.  And of course, she also failed to mention that, when hours spent in paid and unpaid labor are aggregated, men and women are as close to identical as statistics-gathering allows.

All that tends to maintain the popular fiction that women are done dirt by men who in turn are lazy louts, unconcerned about their children and wives.  There’s a lot of commentary in the press and among politicians to the effect that we live in very conflicted times.  That’s right; we do.  And the Times contributes to that conflict by imagining issues that don’t exist.  I understand that the message “men and women spend almost equal time in childcare and paid work and the two together are equal” won’t sell a lot of papers, but then you’d think there’d always be room for the truth, especially when the truth is good.

But Lockman’s intention is to lower still further her readers’ opinions of men.  It’s not easy, requiring her to ignore her own biases that fairly scream out from the page.

The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance.   

Again, there is no labor imbalance.  The only way Lockman can use that phrase is her dogged insistence that paid work isn’t part of the equation.  But the great majority of couples know better.  Partners all but invariably sort out who’s going to earn most of the money and who’s going to do most of the childcare.  If both work full-time, then some form of daycare comes into the equation. 

The permutations of who does how much of what and why verge on the infinite, but essentially no one turns a blind eye to how much time the primary source of income spends doing so.  No one, that is, except Lockman.  She pretends to be terribly concerned about “unfairness,” but never pauses to consider how unfair it would be for John to work an hour a day longer at the office than Jane and still be expected to do an equal amount of domestic work.  No, for her, unfairness is a phenomenon that only affects women.

 The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isn’t “maternal gatekeeping,” the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out.

Actually, that’s exactly what it is.  To a ‘T.’  Indeed, one of the main ways that mothers sideline fathers in childcare is by “letting” them try it, finding their efforts wanting and then taking over.  The simple truth is that, likely due to the biological imperatives of motherhood, men often have to fight to do hands-on childcare.  That sometimes includes real conflict with Mom who relinquishes her role only begrudgingly.  If Lockman knew even a little bit about maternal gatekeeping, she’d know that what she and her interlocutors are describing is a form of it.  Instead, she casts the concept aside without explanation.

Meanwhile, one father said,

So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and I’m happy to do it, but if you’re going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.

Lockman could have actually listened to him, but again, that would have interfered with her anti-dad narrative, so she ignored the fact that the man is happy to do the laundry, but not if he’s denigrated by his wife.  What would be the point?  Men and women parent differently and they keep house differently.  One is neither better nor worse than the other, but very often we see women hewing very closely to the traditional role of “queen of the house” compared to whom no man can measure up.  Women who truly want men to take an equal share of domestic tasks need to accept that the men have an equal say in how they’re done.  NOW president Karen DeCrow long ago understood the concept that, “if women want power in the workplace, they have to give up power in the nursery.”  Too bad Lockman’s not as enlightened, balanced or respectful of men.

The “other two” “explanations for this labor imbalance” are actually just more of the same, i.e. men’s and women’s differing approaches to domestic work tricked out as men’s oppression of women.

The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness…

A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting weren’t important enough to remember: “I just don’t think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.”

Again, if we listen to the man, we learn that the disparity in the time he spends on domestic chores is mostly a function of his wife’s choices.  He wants it done differently and, rather than agreeing to do it that way, she spends more time and does it hers.

Finally, some men blamed their wives’ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. “She wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I don’t keep lists. I think there’s a belief that if she’s not going to do it, then it won’t get done.”

More of the same.  But whatever the reasons why mothers do more childcare than do fathers, the simple fact is that, on average, the difference requires just 29 minutes a day.  If Lockman were to admit that, she’d undermine her thesis that women are hard used and men are the reason.  That amount of time is not, for most people, reason to rush to the barricades, so of course Lockman omits the salient point.

For many decades now, certain segments of the commentariat have been doing their best to exacerbate female-male conflict.  The New York Times is a reliable part of that, one of the generals in the anti-father/anti-male army.  That it can only do so by ignoring important facts and is willing to do so speaks volumes about its editorial integrity.

But despite it all, men and women keep right on doing what they’ve always done – living together, loving each other and raising the next generation.  That they never manage to suit the editorial page of the Times seems to concern them not at all.  Who’d have guessed?

May 20, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This being the New York Times and a pre- Mothers Day piece, we’re not surprised to find it astonishingly anti-dad and utterly incurious about the realities of family life and the “work-life balance.” (New York Times, 5/4/19)  Put simply, the writer, Darcy Lockman ignores the obvious, the not-so-obvious and basic common sense in order to excoriate fathers.  Doubtless, come Fathers Day, she’ll turn her sights on moms. In the meantime, as an attack on dads generally, it’s also an attack on their right to have meaningful relationships with their kids post-divorce.  After all, if fathers are as bad a bunch of ne’er-do-wells as Lockman pretends, why should they have even part-time custody of their kids?

It’s the same old complaint we read every year, usually several times a year: mothers, even working mothers pull a second shift; they do the lion’s share of the childcare and that’s not fair to them; fathers are clueless louts who not only don’t parent the kids correctly, they don’t do it very much.  Needless to say, mothers are angry about the matter.  Of course they are.

Lockman treats us to statistics.

Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. 

In an article that’s chock full of links to other information, it’s interesting that there’s none in that sentence to a dataset.  I found it so because, as is commonly known, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has long maintained the best such set of figures in this country.  It’s called the American Time Use Survey in which people keep logs of what they do every day, broken down into numerous categories.  Two of those categories include childcare and working outside the home. 

Nowhere in the ATUS over the past 16 years do women do anything like 65% of the childcare.  In 2017, for example, mothers performed 56% of the childcare and fathers 44%.  That broke down into 2.17 hours for mothers and 1.69 hours for fathers, a difference of 29 minutes per day.  In 2003, mothers spent 2.13 hours per day in childcare and fathers 1.55 hours, a 57.8%/42.2% ratio and a 35 minute difference.  In 14 years, the difference in time spent in childcare changed by six minutes.

And paid work?  In 2017, men worked 8.66 hours per day versus women’s 7.67 hours.  That’s a split of 53%/47% and 59 minutes per day.  In 2003, men worked 8.46 hours and women 7.40, a split of 53.3%/46.7% and 63 minutes per day.  In 14 years, the difference between the time spent by men and women at paid work changed by four minutes.

Or, another way to say all of that is that there was no statistical change in the way men and women spent their time regarding paid work and childcare.  Men did more paid work, women did more childcare.

In the world of the New York Times that’s cause for outrage and Lockman doesn’t disappoint.  There seems to be a sort of pathological inability in this type of article to turn the coin over and look at the other side.  So, according to Lockman, the imbalance in childcare is unfair to women.

Why are [women’s] partners failing to pitch in more?

The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel they’re getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick.

See what I mean?  According to Lockman, the only inequality in families is in childcare.  That there might be another in the world of paid work is an idea neither mentioned nor countenanced.  She indignantly asks why men fail to pitch in more with childcare, but the same could be asked about why women fail to do as much paid work.  But of course she doesn’t.  Sufficient unto her need for outrage are the data on childcare.  Those on paid work might interfere with that and are therefore avoided.

And then there’s Lockman’s real gripe that men’s behavior is all about privileging men at the expense of women.

By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”

Exactly how men’s spending an hour a day more in the rat race than do women privileges them, neither Lockman nor the authors she quotes explain.  They don’t explain, I suspect, because to attempt to do so would require them to take a broader and, yes, fairer look at what men and women actually do.  When that is done, it’s impossible to escape the realization that, when all work activities – paid and unpaid – are added up, men and women spend almost identical amounts of time each day, week and year.  Given that, it’s hard to sustain a sense of righteous indignation which is what articles like Lockman’s are all about.

What publications like the NYT will never admit is that there’s actually a quite benign explanation for men’s and women’s behavior.  Men tend to do more paid work because they’re evolutionarily “hard-wired” to be resource providers.  Women tend to do more childcare because they too have a powerful biological tendency in that direction.  Are people capable of reversing roles?  Of course they are, but overwhelmingly, they don’t want to.  They tend to be more comfortable in their age-old roles than out of them.  Some 70% of men are in the workforce versus 56% of women.  Stay-at-home mothers outnumber stay-at-home fathers by a 30:1 margin according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

For men, parenting is also part of their genetic makeup, but, as Ruth Feldman’s team at Bar Elan University in Israel have demonstrated, fathers’ parenting role is secondary to mothers’.  When Mom can’t or won’t do that job, Dad can and does step in.  And when he does, he’s every bit as good a parent as she is.  But until she drops out, he’s likely to be the fill-in parent.

Seen in that light, how mothers and fathers spend their time loses both its mystery and its ability to anger.  That of course is highly unsatisfactory to the NYT that often seems to prefer men and women to be each others’ enemies, but alas for the Times, sometimes reality just doesn’t conform to our desires.

More on this next time.

May 18, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Texas Child Protective Services has dropped its appeal of a $127,000 sanctions case against it (Houston Chronicle, 5/16/19).  I first wrote about the case here.

Last July, little Mason Bright, then five months old, fell forward and hit his head on the driveway.  His mother, Melissa, took him to Texas Children’s Hospital where doctors found two skull fractures and what seemed abnormal bleeding on his brain.  That spurred a “child abuse pediatrician” to say that abuse of Mason must have been the cause.  Later, better-informed medical opinions said that Mason had a rare clotting disorder that could explain the bleeding and that it’s not unusual for such a fall to cause more than one fracture.

But CPS had already acted.  They took Mason from his parents, Melissa and Dillon Bright, and placed him 40 miles away with a relative.  That arrangement didn’t work out and soon Mason was back with his parents.  The Brights had understood that his placement with the relative was temporary, so, when a caseworker contacted them to ask how the little boy was, they happily responded with updated medical information and happy-child photos.

All was well for over three weeks.

Then suddenly, CPS appeared at the Brights’ door and took Mason into foster care.  After a lapse of 22 days, they’d gone to Judge Michael Schneider and demanded an emergency hearing, at which they demanded an order taking the child from his parents.

When the Brights were finally allowed their day in Schneider’s court and informed the judge what CPS had done, Schneider was none too pleased.  Among other things, he called CPS’s actions “illegal, fraudulent and unreasonable,” and ordered it to pay the Brights and their attorneys $127,000 in sanctions.

That was six months ago.  CPS appealed and has now dropped that appeal.  Why?  That’s uncertain, but a good guess has little to do with the boilerplate claims by CPS spokesperson Patrick Crimmins.

“With so many other CPS cases pending in Harris County that demand our attention, we have decided to forgo an appeal and to focus our attention on those children and families, and their needs,” said agency spokesman Patrick Crimmins. “We will have no additional comment on this matter.”

We’d all like to believe that, but there’s another, more likely explanation.

 Had the court of appeals ruled against them it could have set a precedent that would make it easier for other families to win sanctions in similar cases.

When Judge Schneider first hit CPS with the sanctions, the agency’s lawyers claimed he had no power to do so.  What their theory was at the time was unclear.  But what now seems apparent is that the judge exercised his authority appropriately and CPS doesn’t want an appellate court so stating.  The court in question governs the district courts of the City of Houston, the state’s largest city.  So CPS’s leeway with parents would be officially hamstrung throughout that population.  More importantly, other appellate courts throughout the state might follow the Houston’ court’s lead.  CPS preferred to keep its head down and out of sight to the extent possible.

Sadly, the cynical view is the one that sounds most accurate to me.  Texas CPS doesn’t have the most savory reputation in the state, a fact made concrete by Federal Judge Janis Jack’s scathing opinion and order against the agency almost three years ago.  Attorneys for the Brights are similarly dismayed.

But the agency still hasn’t admitted wrongdoing, a fact that irked the family and their attorneys.

 “To this day, they just can’t admit that they screwed up — to me that’s the saddest part for all of the children in Harris County,” said Stephanie Proffitt, one of the attorneys representing Melissa and Dillon Bright. “They could have at least said we may have messed this one up and we’ll do better next time. Instead they’re basically taking no responsibility. Shame on them.”

To be clear, whatever the medical facts of Mason’s injury, CPS went to court claiming an emergency when there plainly was none.  Mason had lived with his relative for a time and been back home safe and sound with his parents for 22 days, a fact known to and documented by CPS.  The idea that there was an emergency such that no notice of the court hearing had to be given to the Brights is patent nonsense.  Had they received notice, they could have appeared (as they later did) and produced evidence that Mason was healthy and in good medical condition (as they later did).  That’s precisely what CPS didn’t want, so it declared a fraudulent emergency to bypass the parental rights of the Brights and their little boy.

Judge Schneider has been angered by CPS for that very behavior in the past and with good reason.  Given CPS’s attitude about the Bright case, we shouldn’t be too surprised when another judge somewhere levies sanctions against the agency.