Category: Blog

May 1, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Why the retreat from marriage?  Marriage rates have been declining for years in this country, but exactly why they have remains unclear.  That’s because, while overall marriage rates are down, more affluent Americans tend to get and remain married.  Indeed, non-marital childbearing among women with a college education is about 8%, i.e. almost exactly what it was in 1960.  The decline in marriage is pretty much confined to blue collar workers and the poor.

And that’s a brain teaser.  Why would the very people who financially need marriage the most be the ones who tend to forego it?  Married men, particularly those with children earn significantly more than their unmarried and/or childless counterparts.  And in any case, the simple fact is that almost any adult can earn more than the incremental cost of his/her presence in the household.  Mom and baby require X amount to meet their expenses; add Dad and the household requires more money, but the increased amount is something all but the most dysfunctional adults can easily earn.  Two earners are better than one in almost all cases.

Plus, it turns out that, while declining earnings tend to be associated with a decline in the marriage rate, increased earnings don’t produce the opposite.  Journalist Timothy P. Carney makes the point here (Institute for Family Studies, 4/26/19).  Towns that may have seen a factory closed, reducing wages and the marriage rate, were economically rejuvenated by the fracking boom.  That created an excellent opportunity to study how people reacted to increased earnings.

[E]conomists Melissa Kearney and Riley Wilson of the University of Maryland studied similar fracking towns from Texas to Pennsylvania. Does boosting the wages of blue-collar men also boost marriage? If it did, this would strengthen the case that income determines marriageability.

But that’s not what happened. “[I]n response to local-area fracking production,” Kearney and Wilson found, “both marital and non-marital births increase and there is no evidence of an increase in marriage rates.” Furthermore, they concluded, “We find no evidence to support the proposition that as the economic prospects of less educated men improves, couples are more likely to marry before having children.”

 So the idea, advanced by some, that the economics of blue collar work (e.g. the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs) explain reduced marriage rates among that segment of society is dubious at best.  Why wouldn’t those rates move back up once the new oil field money improved the bank accounts of those workers?

According to Carney, it comes down to more than just money.  When the plant closes, that’s not all that goes.

[David] Autor’s study showed that the disappearance of jobs in a place led to a retreat from marriage in that place. This is true, but it skips a step: the factory closure is often the first domino to fall. The second domino to fall may be the coffeehouse next door—a complementary businesses that also serves as a community hub. Then people move out, and one of the churches closes. The old parishioners don’t want to go to the parish a town over, and so they stay home on Sunday. Social isolation spreads. The chain reaction, one by one, takes out the local institutions of civil society.

Tipping over the first domino can cause a chain reaction but standing the first one back up doesn’t cause the opposite reaction. Similarly, the death of blue-collar jobs can kill a community fairly quickly, but bringing back those jobs doesn’t bring back marriage. That’s because job restoration alone cannot instantly restore the local community institutions that support marriage—like churches, clubs, and local meeting places. These take time to re-emerge organically.

It’s an interesting idea and seems to comport with the science on the matter.  Certainly the many ways in which this society discourages marriage and encourages divorce apply equally to all people regardless of economic status.  And yet not all people react to those influences the same.  Specifically, the better educated you are and the more affluent, the less likely you are to produce children outside of marriage or to not get married in the first place.

And yet…

If the local church closes, it does to for the well-to-do as well as the blue-collar worker.  So why doesn’t the loss of those social resources impact elites the way they do others?  Carney’s answer doesn’t persuade.  

America’s elites still enjoy strong communities, planted thick with institutions—even if they call it “networking,” and don’t view it as anything special. In places where college degrees are rare and where factory jobs used to dominate, though, the little leagues, the swim clubs, the rotary clubs, and most of all the churches are fading away, delivering a death blow to family formation.

So “networking” is the all-purpose social institution of America’s elites?  I don’t buy it.  Carney does no more than make the assertion and that’s not nearly good enough.  He may be right, but he needs to demonstrate the fact, not just make the claim.

Plus, in Carney’s analysis, whatever happened to the well-known tendency of humans to band together when faced with catastrophe?  We see it invariably in natural disasters, so why not in economic hard times?  If the first domino to fall is the closing of the factory, why don’t people impacted by that band together?  Why don’t couples realize that now is the very time to marry, to pool resources?

Those are good questions that Carney doesn’t answer.  Still I think he’s on to something.

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

It’s sometimes amusing to watch the mainstream press grapple with family court issues.  Often enough, the MSM simply gets facts wrong.  This article doesn’t do that and it definitely tries to inform about the gravity of the situation in child custody matters (KFOXTV, 4/24/19).  Unfortunately though it reads like it was written by a reporter with too many facts and too little time to sort out what they all mean.

Still, the piece contains some valuable gems.

It’s raison d’etre is that Thursday was Parental Alienation Day.  That in itself is good news since dedicating a day to PA goes at least some way toward undercutting the notion, advanced by some, that PA either doesn’t exist at all or is merely a clever ruse on the part of fathers to deny “protective” mothers sole custody of children.

Meanwhile, Fox in El Paso has discovered a few items that, had the writer just read the NPO blog, wouldn’t have been quite so revelatory.

From Parental Alienation, the piece leaps to child support and the fact that states get a big paycheck from the federal government for the amount each collects.  That makes child support enforcement very important for state officials who always seem to find themselves short of cash.

Now we’re finding, while parents fight for time with their kids the state is cashing in big on their child support payments…

“There is a financial incentive for the State of Texas to collect the funds,” said [PA advocate Wendy] Perry…

States receive money as incentives from the federal government based on what they collect. At least 6% percent of what is collected goes back to the state…

“The states figured out, this is a paycheck for us,” said father Andrew McRae who is part of an advocacy and support group in El Paso.

Indeed.  They also figured out what isn’t a paycheck for them – enforcement of visitation – a fact the article doesn’t hesitate to point out.

The system is frustrating for parents who say, they’re paying child support but can’t get their visitation enforced.

“You’re going to pay us money, but we aren’t going to enforce visitations,” said [advocate Andrew] McRae.

That’s something both Fox and the El Paso Times have covered in great and embarrassing detail.  The simple fact is that the Texas Penal Code makes it a crime to interfere with child custody, but neither the police nor prosecutors enforce that law.  They claim to believe it’s a civil matter for family courts to deal with, but the Penal Code is entirely clear on the subject, a fact they must know by now.

“Lack of enforcement of court-ordered custody schedules is a huge problem across the country, and definitely here in Texas,” said Perry.

KFOX14 Investigates has documented the lack of enforcement.

Records show there were more than 4,000 reports taken by the El Paso Police Department for child custody interference from 2016 to 2018. Of those, 229 cases were presented to the district attorney’s office. Only 4% of cases were prosecuted by Jaime Esparza’s office.

I fully understand that at least some of those reports were of the “Dad returned the child to Mom three hours late” variety.  No one is going to waste the time of police, prosecutors and courts over something like that.  But my guess is that the great majority of complaints were about more serious infractions.  Whatever the case, a 4% prosecution rate is a disgrace.

And we can make an educated guess as to why visitation orders aren’t enforced.  Washington doesn’t pay states to do so.  Let Uncle Sam start paying states for enforcing those orders and overnight their attitudes would change.  I guarantee it.

Washington pays states $5 billion per year to enforce child support orders, but just $10 million for visitation, a 500:1 ratio.  It’s a pretty accurate picture of how much the feds value dads, who of course make up the overwhelming number of parents with orders of visitation.

Thanks to Fox in El Paso for an informative, if somewhat haphazard article.

April 26, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

It was one year ago today that the Kentucky Legislature passed, by an overwhelming margin, the nation’s first equal parenting bill.  Governor Matt Bevin wasted no time in signing it into law.  Now Gov. Bevin has taken shared parenting one step further.  He’s named April 26^th Shared Parenting Day.  From here on out, we’ll commemorate the importance of equal parenting on April 26^th.

Making sure that children don’t lose one parent when the adults divorce is perhaps the single most important social cause in this country and others.  Keeping kids in meaningful relationships with both parents will tend strongly to ameliorate a host of problems our society grapples with.  For example, single parent families produce

63% of teen suicides;

70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions;

71% of high school drop-outs;

75% of children in chemical abuse centers;

85% of those in prison;

85% of children who exhibit behavioral disorders; and

90% of homeless and runaway children.

Now, Kentucky shows the way for other states to establish a presumption of equal parenting and in so doing strikes a blow at each of those social deficits and more.  The National Parents Organization is justly proud that our Kentucky affiliate guided this equal parenting legislation through to final passage.

And guess what else.  In the year since its enactment, there’s no evidence that any of the apocalyptic claims of anti-shared parenting forces has come true in Kentucky.  Those folks routinely claim that children will be ill-served by equal parenting, that parental conflict will be exacerbated, that parents don’t really want equal time with their kids and the like.  But has an earthquake struck Kentucky?  Are its children of divorce in some sort of danger?  If they are, no one’s seen fit to mention it.

Indeed, polls in various states show that support for shared parenting is preferred by huge majorities of residents.  Now, a national poll finds the same thing.  And that support cuts across all demographic lines of sex, race, ethnicity and political persuasion. 

Shared parenting is the right policy.  It helps kids and parents alike.  It mitigates a range of social ills.  It saves taxpayers money because the more shared parenting we have, the lower the rate of those various ills.  It’s preferred by the vast majority of voters.

So it’s a fine thing that Governor Bevin has decided to highlight Kentucky’s milestone achievement.  They should shout it from the highest mountain top so that all can hear. 

Slowly but surely, others are listening.

April 25, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The 49-year-old helicopter pilot choked up, recalling the tightness in his chest, the shortness of breath, the panic that gripped him Oct. 20, 2016, when his son was abducted from the family home in Langley.

That pilot is Demetri Urella of British Columbia.  Did mysterious, black-clad strangers enter his home and make off with his child?  Did they break down the door, grab the screaming two-year-old and run for a battered but running van parked on the curb?

No, nothing so Hollywood-inspired.  The abductors were the little boy’s mother, aided and abetted by a judge and a system that makes child abduction – the denial to a child of a parent’s love – all too easy (Vancouver Sun, 4/7/19). 

Urella’s (now ex-) wife, Beatriz Dominguez-Herrero, did what anyone can do.  She went to a judge, claimed that Urella was abusive and, without a scintilla of evidence to back up the claim, was handed not only sole custody of Julian, but a restraining order against Urella.  He wasn’t even there in court to defend himself, his presence being considered unnecessary due to the “special nature” of domestic violence allegations that, for some reason, are allowed to circumvent the most basic of due process rights.

That day, Provincial Court Judge Ellen Gordon granted Herrero a custody order for Julian and a one-year restraining order against Urella.

At the ex-parte proceedings, Gordon banned Urella from contacting his wife or son, attending any residence, workplace or educational facility connected with them, and ordered police to remove him if he did. She also prohibited him from possessing weapons.

Yes, with nothing more to go on than an affidavit signed by Herrero, Judge Gordon prohibited Urella from doing all those thingsfor a year!   Urella described Herrero’s proffer to the court as “no proof‚ no pictures of abuse, no doctor reports, no neighbour reports, no nothing, just a four-page because-I-say-so.”  On that basis, a child was deprived of its father and everything he had known for over eight months.

And those aren’t just the conclusions of an understandably distraught father.  They’re the explicit findings of a second judge, Provincial Judge Deanne Gaffer, who held a hearing at which, oddly enough, Herrero appeared via telephone from parts unknown.

Herrero had little credibility, the judge concluded, and the evidence — banking records, travel documents, more than 600 pages of social media messages featuring “loving nicknames,” and numerous family photographs — completely contradicted her portrait of Urella.

Gaffer decided Gordon had been misled: “By concealing, withholding and fabricating material information, I find that Ms. Herrero obtained the October 18th orders by fraud … those orders were invalid at the time they were pronounced. … Herrero has unlawfully removed Julian from B.C.”

Herrero had committed fraud on the court.  She’d lied outright in order to commit the crime of child kidnapping.  But the system that she defrauded all but begs aggrieved spouses to do exactly that.  By suspending the requirement of notice and an opportunity to be heard for the target of the DV action, it announces loudly and clearly that it’s open for business to anyone, irrespective of whether they tell the truth or lie.

And, in Herrero’s case, it still does.  Over the period of eight months, Herrero fled with Julian, first to her native Spain, then to Colombia and finally to Mexico.  Eventually, her whereabouts there were discovered and the Mexican police captured and returned the child to his father in Canada.

But what of Herrero?  She actually returned briefly to Canada, a fact well known to authorities there.

Nearly four months later, on Sept. 21, Herrero, too, unbelievably returned to B.C.

Despite warnings from the RCMP, the Border Services Agency allowed her and her 22-year-old son from a previous relationship into Canada on a 14-day visa.

“We don’t know what they did, but then they left,” Urella said. “There was an opportunity to grab her, but she was not detained.”

That’s because, unbelievably, provincial and national law-enforcement authorities hadn’t charged her with any form of wrongdoing.

RCMP Const. Keith Wilson told Urella in a December 2017 email that he pleaded with Crown prosecutor Kimberly Wendel that the strange visit “further reinforced the importance of laying these charges at the earliest convenience.”

He repeated that recommendation in a supplemental report to Wendel in June 2018…

More than a year ago, [Urella’s] lawyer Jeff Scouten, of Hakemi & Ridgedale LLP, also implored Wendel to approve charges to prevent further harm and ensure Herrero’s international movements triggered warnings…

Incredibly, Wendel refused.  Having committed a fraud on the court, having illegally abducted a little boy, having therefore abused that child, having illegally denied parental rights to the boy’s father, having stolen $100,000 and having fled prosecution, nothing will be done to Herrero.  There will be no consequences for her actions.  None.

Meanwhile, Demetri Urella raises the important question.

“I can’t help thinking that if I had done this, I would be in jail — any man would be in jail,” he complained. “There’s no consequence for what she did.”

Changes were needed, he insisted.

“I think we’d all like to see less gender bias,” Urella said. “I think if I went into that courthouse with a four-page affidavit and no proof‚ no pictures of abuse, no doctor reports, no neighbour reports, no nothing, just a four-page because-I-say-so, as a man? Do you think I would have got those orders? I don’t think so. And I think if I were to kidnap my kid and went all over Europe and Colombia, I think I would be in jail. What do you bet?”

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

Just 1% of British parents who were eligible to take parental leave in 2018 did so (Huffington Post, 4/5/19).  That’s according to data from the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

A new study indicated that only 9,200 new parents took up the shared leave in 2018 – just 1% of those eligible to it.

If this were an election, parental leave lost – big.  People “voted with their feet” and either remained at work or weren’t there to begin with and therefore didn’t need leave to care for their newborn.

So, are British parents simply unconcerned with their kids, or is something else at work?

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) said the take-up was poor because the scheme’s low payment of £145 a week made it unaffordable for most fathers…

Fathers in insecure jobs such as agency work or those on zero-hours contracts are not eligible, as well as self-employed men and women, said the TUC.

It’s interesting how the article linked-to moves from “parental” leave to “fathers.”  It makes it hard to figure out how many fathers took leave and how many mothers did.  But whatever the case, 9,200 in a whole year isn’t many.  And the TUC knows why.  The simple fact is that parental leave is parental leave in name only if parents, particularly dads, can’t afford to take it.

Here in the U.S., data demonstrate that, when men become fathers, they tend to start spending more time at work earning to cover the family’s needs.  My guess is that British dads do much the same.  So when Parliament tells fathers that, in order to bond with their child, they need to take a huge cut in pay, many of them simply can’t.  With another mouth to feed and Mom likely wanting to (and for a while needing to) take time off work, taking a pay cut isn’t in the cards for the great majority of men.

Our friend Dr. Anna Machin made the same point quite forcefully in her book The Life of Dad.  She called current family leave laws “unworkable” due to “a lack of financial backing.”

She goes on:

One of the starkest representations of the gulf that still exists between maternity and paternity rights is the fact that only ninety-two of the world’s 196 countries have statutory paternity leave and in half of these this is limited to three weeks or less.  This is in contrast to the global right to maternity leave.  It is hard not to view these statistics as evidence of society’s continuing belief that dads just aren’t that relevant in the childcare story.

Here in the U.S. this may all sound a bit arcane, given that we have no federally-guaranteed right to parental leave.  Still, Machin makes a salient point; we assume that fathers aren’t interested in their kids and then “prove” the point by providing them a form of leave that’s financially impossible for them to utilize.  We can then say “See?  We were right all along.  Fathers just aren’t that interested in their kids.”

Machin also cites the experience the Province of Quebec had when, in 2006, it initiated non-transferrable (i.e. for individual parents only) and well-funded paternity leave.  The result was a 250% increase in fathers’ usage of leave.

Machin adds:

It is only with adequately funded, non-transferrable paternity leave that fathers will be empowered to becoming more involved in the home, caring for their children and contributing to domestic life.

I would add that mothers becoming willing to give up their hegemony over childcare is at least as important as paternity leave to creating an even balance between mothers and fathers in domestic and work life.  Again, there’s no parental leave in this country, save that provided voluntarily by individual employers, but the ratio of stay-at-home mothers to stay-at-home fathers is still about 30:1.  Psychologists study maternal gatekeeping because mothers sometimes stand between Dad and his child.

And most importantly, our laws and courts routinely sideline fathers when Mom and Dad separate or divorce.  It’s far too much to ask men to dive into parenting wholeheartedly knowing that their marriage can end at any time and their time with their children will be reduced to occasional visits.

In short, there’s more to increased paternal investment in children than laws on paternity leave.  But those laws are part of the picture that we’re attempting to paint with oh so much pushback from those who oppose even modest improvements to kids’ relationships with their dads.

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

Dr. Michael Lamb is possibly the most knowledgeable person about the benefits to children of paternal involvement in their lives.  He is extremely highly respected by his peers.  So it’s always a pleasure and a learning experience to read his work.  Here’s a short article of his that expounds on the effects of father-child relationships and children’s well-being, both at the time and later in life (The Good Men Project, 4/21/19).

Put simply, close, active father-child attachment is associated with a host of benefits for kids.

Where there is a strong father-child attachment in the early period, research shows a link with the child’s later social skills, better behaviour and stronger cognitive skills (such as language and IQ). Fathers influence their children’s futures.

Interestingly, these links between strong father-child attachment and later child development are weaker in traditional families where the mother is a primary carer. This suggests that the difference an involved father makes is greater in non-traditional family structures.

I’m going to guess that latter observation comes about due to what Ruth Feldman’s team at Bar Ilan University in Israel found about fathers’ and mothers’ brains.  They found that fathers tend to come “hard-wired” to be the backup parent, to fill in when Mom can’t or won’t do the lion’s share of the parenting.  So it makes sense that, in traditional families, Mom is likely the primary caregiver, Dad fills in and therefore, his impact on the child’s social and cognitive skills later in life is less.

Supportive parenting of two year olds by fathers (and also by mothers) predicts later academic achievement. Anne Martin and her team found that supportive mothers and fathers at the age of 2 both appeared to promote better arithmetic and language scores when their children were aged 5…

Eirini Flouri and Ann Buchanan found that British children with more involved fathers had higher IQs at 7 years of age. Other researchers have found similar associations at 11 years and 16 years of age.  

Some researchers have worked hard to distinguish fathers’ influences on educational performance from the effects of other wider family and community influences. The links remain: fathers who are supportive appear to promote language and cognitive development.

That last is, I suspect, Lamb’s academician’s swipe at those who do indeed try their hardest to undermine and cast doubt on the value of fathers to children.  Theirs is a losing battle as Lamb points out.  Try as they might, the fathers’ many benefits to children keep showing up in the literature and, of course, in the lives of children.

In a large British study, when mothers reported father involvement at the age of 7, children were more likely to report being close to their fathers at 16 and to have lower levels of contact with police. Other researchers have found even longer-lasting links – paternal involvement at the age of 6 appears to influence the feelings of the child in his/her 30s, over 25 years later. High paternal involvement predicts adult social interaction styles, married relationships, parenting skills and mental health. The converse has also been shown – low paternal involvement and poor child-father attachments predict more psychological and social problems later.

Ross Parke and his colleagues found that a physically playful and affectionate father-son relationship predicts the son’s later popularity with his peers. Other researchers found that fathers who are more sensitive to their 5-year-olds’ emotional states have more socially competent children 3 years later.

Lamb doesn’t advocate for any particular public policy, but his reprise of some of the latest scientific findings on father-child involvement and children’s well-being fairly shouts for policy reforms.  To read the countless ways in which children attach to their fathers and benefit from their relationships with them is to gasp in horror at our public policies that frankly interfere with and even prevent those very relationships.  We still fail to promote shared parenting in divorce cases, refuse to enforce visitation orders, financially incentivize divorce, remove fathers from the adoption process, exclude fathers when mothers are found to have abused or neglected their children.  And on and on.

It’s a dysfunctional public policy that damages the institution of marriage and denies fit fathers to children.  It’s a policy that is content with greater individual deficits when those kids grow up.  We know better, but fail to do better.  The chasm between what the science teaches us and what public policy and law do about fathers and children grows ever wider.

April 21, 2019 by Rober Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Two Nebraska courts have gotten it right on shared parenting.  More importantly, the case may be a harbinger of things to come.  The case of Leners v. Leners was probably not easy to decide, particularly for the trial court, but it reached the correct decision which the state Supreme Court upheld.

Sharon and Stacy Leners were married in 1997 and divorced in 2016.  They had two children, one of whom was almost an adult when the case was decided and therefore not part of the custody findings.  The younger child was 15. 

Sharon was a nurse and Stacy seems to have operated a tractor-trailer rig for the Union Pacific Railroad.  He had a somewhat odd work schedule.

Because Stacy’s employment takes him to different locations around the country from the 1st through the 8th day of the month and then the 16th to the 23d day of each month, the court provided him parenting time every month on the 9th to the 15th day and on the 24th to the last day of the month.

Such a week-on/week-off schedule was tailor-made for and equal parenting arrangement post-divorce and that’s exactly what the trial court ordered and the Supreme Court upheld.

What’s perhaps more important though is the fact that both courts saw through the parents’ high conflict within the confines of the divorce action to the fact that both were fit parents.  They were good enough parents, just not good enough mates, particularly while the divorce was in progress.  To their credit, the courts separated their parental behavior from their conduct of their litigation. 

Sharon particularly abused both Stacy and the judicial system.  Here is a part of the trial court’s findings:

The court found that Sharon “doused in diesel fuel” some of Stacy’s clothing and destroyed Stacy’s grandmother’s dishes by “intentionally shooting [them] with a gun.”…

[Sharon’s] testimony regarding the creation of the calendars she purported to have been created simultaneously with the events proved to be inaccurate in that the calendars were printed in March of 2017 and purported to reflect events dating back six months prior[, and] was not credible. [Sharon’s] testimony regarding her lack of knowledge of the birthdate, approximate age or address of the gentleman she had been dating for seven months prior was suspect. [Sharon’s] testimony that [the older child] lived in the marital home through the date of trial was admitted to be false on cross examination when she admitted that [the older child] had not stayed overnight in the home since May of 2017. [Sharon’s] testimony that [the older child] has never stayed overnight with [Stacy] since separation was admitted to be false on cross-examination. [Sharon’s] testimony that she did all of the transporting of [the younger child] during the marriage was also admitted to be false on cross examination when she admitted that when [Stacy] was not working, he picked [the child] up from school each day. [Sharon’s] testimony in her affidavit for temporary custody and her matching testimony at trial that [Stacy] promised to pay one-half of the current cheer bill of $260 a month was also admitted by her on cross examination to be false when she admitted that [Stacy] told her he could not afford to pay the increased fee of $260 a month (com- pared to the $110 a month) for [the cheer bill] and further she admitted that he had never agreed to pay it.

Yes, both parents behaved badly in litigation, but not toward their daughter.  Each is fit to care for the child and both will do so because the courts remained focused on the important issue – the girl’s well-being.

But the Supreme Court didn’t stop there.  It opened the door, at least a bit, for future courts to deviate from the judge-made precedent in Nebraska that shared custody isn’t favored.

[W]e recognize that we have said joint physical custody must be reserved for those cases where, in the judgment of the trial court, the parents are of such maturity that the arrangement will not operate to allow the child to manipulate the parents or confuse the child’s sense of direction, and will provide a stable atmosphere for the child to adjust, rather than perpetuating turmoil or custodial wars. While generally sensible, this is not a hard-and-fast rule. A statute specifically provides that a court may order joint custody “if the court specifically finds, after a hearing in open court, that joint physical custody or joint legal custody, or both, is in the best interests of the minor child regardless of any parental agreement or consent.”

I can easily see attorneys whose clients seek equal parenting time citing the phrase “this is not a hard-and-fast rule.”  It certainly shouldn’t be.  Even a rule favoring shared parenting shouldn’t be “hard and fast.”  But when both parents are fit to care for a child, the child shouldn’t lose its meaningful relationship with one of them.

We’ve been saying that here at the National Parents Organization for many years.  It’s good to see a court coming around – however slowly – to our point of view.

April 19, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

As if children’s welfare agencies don’t have enough problems, now comes this (Chronicle of Social Change, 4/9/19).  It’s a piece by Tom Morton, a veteran of some 39 years’ experience in social work.  Although tactful, Morton is none too pleased with the training social workers receive.  Specifically, despite making up a large percentage of caseworkers for CPS agencies, graduates of schools of social work tend strongly to receive little-to-no training in understanding, assessing and addressing child maltreatment by parents.

Is social work training the right answer to child welfare’s workforce training needs?…

[T]he relevance of social work training hinges on whether or not it reliably produces the necessary and sufficient set of skills in each of these areas to effectively serve maltreating families, their children and related parts of their ecosystem.

In my experience, social work training does not do this.

We might think that, given that CPS agencies are one of the chief employers of graduates in the field of social work, those schools would offer training that focuses on how to assess and assist families who abuse or neglect their kids.   

But the [social work school accreditation] guidelines do not require specific instruction in these practices with maltreating families and children nor standardization of this instruction across schools. So, it is possible to graduate with either degree having never taken a course specific to assessing and treating maltreating families, let alone a comprehensive course of study in this area.

But not to worry.  Once hired, child welfare agencies provide their own training to fill in where schools of social work failed. 

With or without with social work training, [child maltreatment training] also begins with relatively short pre-service training provided by child welfare agencies.

So all is well, right?  The agencies pre-train their new employees, so how could there be a problem? 

If social work training does not provide a comprehensive basis for child maltreatment practice reliably across all graduates, does the pre- and in-service training provided by public child welfare agencies reliably fill the gaps? Again, I’d say no. The limitations on these training programs are many, not the least of which is their length which significantly limits comprehensiveness.

That of course comes as no surprise.  From the Atlantic to the Pacific, state CPS agencies are strapped for cash.  They routinely burden caseworkers with far more cases than they can handle effectively.  To the too-high workload, they add poor pay and record-keeping demands that often keep caseworkers in the office instead of kids’ homes and lives.  That means a high turnover of caseworkers that only continues the problem and makes it worse.

So naturally CPS agencies tend to spend little time and money on training.  They need “boots on the ground” far too much to delay their entry into the field.

For his part, Morton sees no way out of the conundrum of too little academic and on-the-job education.

It seems highly unlikely that schools of social work, given the economies of scale they face, would ever likely be able to devote necessary resources to such a degree of specialization in child maltreatment practice. Nor does it seem likely that individual schools of social work would be able to attract a sufficient pool of students to justify this allocation of such resources to a true child maltreatment specialization…

So, for the time being, public and private child welfare agencies along with the families and children they serve are left holding a Gordian knot, forced to satisfice rather than optimize when it comes to the capacity to reliably produce the outcomes for which the federal government and public hold them accountable…

 [O]ne is left to ask, “How are we working to solve this problem rather than just live with it?”

It’s a pithy question, indeed.

I’ll say more about social workers next time.