Category: Blog

January 6, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

A measure of sanity now leavens New Jersey’s public policy on the enforcement of child support delinquencies (New Jersey Law Journal, 1/2/19).  State Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson has struck down as violating the state’s constitution that portion of a New Jersey statute mandating automatic driver’s license suspension in all cases in which “a child support arrearage equals or exceeds the amount of child support payable for six months or court-ordered health care coverage for the child is not provided for six months.”

In those cases, child support obligors in the Garden State were afforded neither notice of the state’s action against them nor a hearing.  To say the least, that’s an astonishing breach of the most basic tenets of due process of law, a fact Judge Jacobson explicitly noted.  She also wrote in her 187-page opinion that the 1988 law violated the principle of “fundamental fairness.” 

She’s right on both counts.  The idea that a state can or should deprive a person of one of the most basic necessities of modern life without providing an opportunity to be heard and prove, if the facts support it, the inability to pay, is obviously at odds with constitutional precepts.

She explained that “both due process and fundamental fairness require courts to provide counsel to indigent obligors at any hearing at which a hearing officer may recommend a driver’s license suspension to a court, or at any hearing when the family court itself is considering a driver’s license suspension.”

Judge Jacobson issued an injunction against enforcement of the law and gave the state 120 days to establish policies that afford delinquent obligors an opportunity to be heard.

The linked-to article is a good one.  The editors of the Law Journal clearly know the basics about child support and the process of enforcement.

Delinquency is concentrated among low income parents with support obligations…

We find that Judge Jacobson’s ruling addresses an important public problem. We hope that the governor, attorney general, and the Division of Family Development will work diligently and earnestly to produce the new regulations which the court has granted 120 days to formulate. Judge Jacobson declined to make her order retroactive. Thousands of parents—especially low income—doubtless remain stranded without driving privileges. Their status is something which the Legislature can and should address.  

Indeed.  The federal Office of Child Support Administration has long known and stated that some 63% of child support obligors behind on their payments report earnings of less than $10,000 per year.  The heavy weight of draconian enforcement methods falls most heavily on those least able to bear it.

Meanwhile, Judge Jacobson cited some pithy facts about the impact of driver’s license suspension.

In her comprehensive opinion, Judge Jacobson took note of a 2006 study by the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission—“Motor Vehicles Affordability and Fairness.” The report “found that 42 percent of individuals who had their licenses suspended lost jobs as a result of the suspension, 45 percent of those who lost jobs could not find another job, and 88% of those that were able to find another job reported a decrease in income.” Jacobson wrote that “[e]ven though most of the Report’s findings addressed license suspensions in general and did not focus on child support-related suspensions, it is reasonable to assume that the affected dependents likely included many children who are the subject of child support orders, and the very individuals that the automatic license suspensions were intended to benefit.” The Bloustein/MCV report also found that in low income areas “child support suspension rates for drivers…were ten times higher than the statewide average.”

In other words, what child support reform advocates have been saying for decades is the truth – suspending drivers’ licenses makes paying child support much harder.  It acts to defeat the very end the state claims to be pursuing – money to support children.  That the state legislature did so in such a patently unconstitutional manner was outrageous in 1988 when the law was passed and has remained so ever since.

The late 80s of course were the heyday of the notion that fathers had no interest in their children and sought any way possible to avoid supporting them.  That of course is so much bunk and has been proven to be so many times by scrupulous social science.  But still public policies based on exactly that willful misunderstanding of fathers and their attachment to their children (and vice versa) continues to inform public policy regarding family law.

Kudos to Judge Jacobson.  She’s struck a much-needed blow for sanity in the public policy that governs child support and its enforcement.

January 4, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The Washington Post is at it again (Washington Post, 1/1/19).  In the linked-to article, the Post pulls out all the stops to reinforce the notion that men, but not women, are dangerous to their families and kids.  The most remarkable part of the piece is that it uses a case in which a mother murdered her two children to try to make the point.

On about September 5, 2018, Noera Ayaz shot and killed her two sons and then herself.  Not one word of the article even suggests that she should be criticized for doing so.  On the contrary, the entire piece extols her virtues as a mother and human being generally. 

I of course have no reason to doubt what her friends and relatives say about her.  The gist is that (a) she was a wonderful person, (b) everyone who knew her is astonished and dismayed at what she did and (c) she was depressed and taking anti-depressants at the time of her crime. 

While all of that can be seen in retrospect to point to Ayaz’s suicide, it doesn’t explain why she had to murder her kids first.  Apparently she was married, although the article doesn’t name her husband who seems to wish to keep out of the news as much as possible.  Ayaz left a diary or journal that may hold clues to her state of mind and perhaps her motivation, but, since her husband is her heir, he has it.  So just why she chose to murder her children remains a mystery.

But that doesn’t keep the Post from exonerating her which it does from Word#1.  But, as I read the piece, its raison d’etre is less Noera Ayaz than the Post’s need to continue the fiction of male corruption and female innocence.  (A glance at the comments reveals how well it’s done that insidious work.  Many commenters parrot the claim that the husband must be the true culprit, despite the fact that he’s not a suspect and the police have never viewed him as one.)

So the first sally in that direction made by Post writer Justin Jouvenal is to elide the differences between various forms of murder-suicide.

About 90 percent of the perpetrators who carried out murder-suicides in the first half of 2017 were men, and the majority of the victims were wives or girlfriends, according to the most recent data on the phenomenon by the Violence Policy Center.

But murder-suicides aren’t all alike.  Not infrequently, a couple will decide to take their own lives together, so one of them kills the other and then himself.  The other type of murder-suicide is similar to the Ayaz case in which there is clearly no agreement to depart this life, but only the desire of one person to kill another and then herself.  In the former, it can be said that the killer indeed killed another person and that person is therefore a victim.  But it’s still vastly different from the latter type of case.  The Post wants us to believe that all cases of murder-suicide are non-consensual matters.  They’re not.

Then the article offers us this:

Cases in which mothers kill their children are rare.

That too is technically true, but misleading.  Fortunately, child murder itself, irrespective of by whom, is rare.  About 450 children per year are murdered according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.  Therefore, mothers killing their children is a rare event.  By the same token, fathers who kill their children are also rare, as are grandparents, teachers, strangers, etc.  Jouvenal could have just said “Child murder is a rare phenomenon,” but that wouldn’t have served the real and greater purpose of the article.

Had he wanted to, Jouvenal could have easily located some real data on the question of who murders children.  This took me about 10 seconds to locate.

A 1999 United States Department of Justice study concluded that between 1976 and 1997 in the United States, mothers were responsible for a higher share of children killed during infancy, while fathers were more likely to have been responsible for the murders of children aged eight or older.[1]

Furthermore, 52% of the children killed by their mothers (maternal filicide) were female, while 57% of the children killed by their fathers (paternal filicide) were male. Parents were responsible for 61% of child murders under the age of five.[2] Sometimes, there is a combination of murder and suicide in filicide cases. On average, according to FBI statistics, 450 children are murdered by their parents each year in the United States.[3]

So did this.

By now, most readers have gotten the point – women, even when they murder their children, must be understood and forgiven; men, not so much.  But just to gild the lily, the article ends this way:

David Adams, co-director of Emerge, a domestic-violence counseling program in Massachusetts, said men and women engage in the acts for different reasons.

“With men, it’s pretty typically a scenario where they are possessively jealous and looking to punish a partner for thinking about leaving them or having left them,” Adams said. “For women, it’s sort of operating out of hopelessness and despondency.”

Never mind that there’s essentially no evidence for either proposition and of course neither Adams nor Jouvenal cites any.  For both, sufficient unto the point is the naked assertion of it.

That’s the more remarkable because it’s immediately preceded in the piece by this:

There is little research on women who carry out murder-suicides…

So we don’t know why women carry out murder-suicides, but the WaPo will tell us why they do anyway.  Again, its agenda is the innocence of women, so why not make up a few facts as support?

The idea that, had the murderer of the Ayaz children been their father, the Post would have run a similar article hymning his virtues and entirely ignoring his heinous crime, is beyond belief.  The article aims at a single thing – maintaining the fiction of male corruption and female innocence. 

In so doing, it encourages not only society, but judges and juries to view female perpetrators differently from male ones.  It encourages the already unequal treatment they receive by all parts of the legal system.  In the criminal system, women are treated far more leniently than men at all stages of the process, beginning with arrest and including charging, bail, plea bargaining and sentencing.  In the family system, children are routinely denied meaningful relationships with their fathers and vice versa, while women receive the lion’s share of child custody and disproportionate shares of the family’s assets.  And of course they continue to do so in the form of child support and alimony long after the marriage is over.

Those massive inequalities are fine and dandy with the Post.  That’s why an article about a four-month-old case that’s otherwise of no interest except to the families and friends associated with it appeared in the first place.

Echoing the God of the Old and that of the New Testaments, we treat men and women differently in this culture.  For men we reserve our harshest judgements, our condemnation, but women receive our love.  By that I mean that, when faced with male wrongdoing, we condemn and punish him, much like the Old Testament God who assured us that he was “quick to anger.”  But with female perpetrators, we give our love, meaning that we seek to empathize.  We try to “stand in her shoes” and “see things from her point of view” and ask “what made her do it?”  The God of the New Testament is a god of love and it is that we give to female criminals like Noera Ayaz.

In the process, we necessarily make different assumptions about men and women.  If male wrongdoing is to be condemned without inquiring into his motivations, we assume that he is responsible for the choices he makes and, if they’re the wrong ones, must be punished.  But with women like Ayaz, we do the opposite, our assumption being that, in some way, she was the helpless victim of forces beyond her control.  In other words, she’s not responsible for her actions, she lacks the agency that we unquestioningly attribute to the male perpetrator.

The above of course can be mediated by factors such as race and class.  Ayaz was a successful D.C. lawyer.  What if she’d been a single black mother on welfare?  Would the Post defend her?  Would it mention her at all?

Whatever the case, the point is that the Post embraces the inequality of the sexes as long as it’s men who hold the short end (harsher treatment by the criminal and family court systems) of the equality stick.  In doing that and in seeking to absolve women of all responsibility for their own foul deeds via the expedient of removing normal human agency from their makeup, it does no one any favors.

January 3, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Some articles say a little in a lot of words, but some, like this one, say a lot in a few (TMZ, 12/31/18).  Now, I doubt that the anonymous writer knows how much he/she’s actually communicating, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the piece is a small gold mine or information.  It weighs in at a bantam-weight 140 words, but those with eyes to see and ears to hear know it speaks volumes.

It’s about former NBA journeyman Matt Barnes who played with a number of different teams over his 14-year career, his ex-wife Gloria Govan and their twin sons Carter and Isaiah, aged 10.

Matt Barnes just got a massive reduction in how much he’ll have to pay Gloria Govan in child support for their twin boys.

Barnes — who was paying Govan $20,000 a month — will now have to pay just $7,500 per month. 

So in this case, the term “child support” sufficient to raise two boys meant $20,000 per month.  Really.  On what planet does it require $20,000 per month to raise two children?  Not on this one, but, if the non-custodial parent makes enough money, on Planet Family Court, $20k per month isn’t an unusual figure.

And that of course is the point.  No one anywhere believes that it takes that much to raise kids and yet courts solemnly issue their orders for those amounts and more.  Should anyone take issue with those orders, the standard retort is “What’s the matter?  You got a problem supporting your kids?  Hey, you brought them into the world, you be responsible for them.”

That would be an acceptable point except that, according to state child welfare agencies it take about $650 – $700 per month to raise one child and of course somewhat more to raise two.  We know this because that’s about the amount states pay foster parents to care for children the state’s taken from their parents due to abuse or neglect.  We don’t believe that states would force foster parents to go in the hole to raise those abused and neglected kids, so we have to conclude that $650 – $700 per month is a reasonable sum.

Let’s say it would take $1300 per month to raise Barnes’s two kids.  So where did the balance – $18, 700 per month go?  Into Mom’s pocket, that’s where.  Now, the standard dodge is that the Barnes/Govan kids are used to an extravagant lifestyle because their dad was a highly-paid professional basketball player.  I’m sure they are.

Bu there are a couple of things wrong with that argument.  The first is the most obvious – by funding the kids’ “lifestyle” Barnes was also funding Govan’s.  I can’t guess at what the cost of the children’s extracurricular activities might be, but I can guarantee that special tutoring in math, a personal soccer coach and the like don’t cost $18,700 per month.  Whatever it takes to support the Carter and Isaiah, it’s not $20,000 per month.

And of course the latest court order renders the matter entirely unambiguous.  The judge lowered Barnes’s “child support” burden by a hefty 62.5%.  So who out there wants to make the case that, on, say, December 20, the kids required $20k to support them every month, but on December 30 they needed “only” $7,500?  Clearly, that makes no sense. 

Here’s what does: at no time before or after the modification of the child support order did it take $20,000 to support Carter and Isaiah.  Truth to tell, it doesn’t take $7,500 although the new order is at least a nod in the direction of sanity.  Each amount mostly constitutes Gloria Govan support, not child support.

The other reason the “we must maintain the children’s lifestyle” argument isn’t viable is that children are able – and need – to grasp the concept that, because Mommy and Daddy divorced, things are going to be different.  On one hand, children need protection from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as much as possible, but on the other, they’re flexible; they can roll with the various punches life throws at them.

More importantly, we do them a grave disservice when our family courts send the message that, when Mom divorces the family’s primary source of income, things don’t change financially.  The notion that, in some way, Daddy doesn’t live with us anymore but we continue to live as if he did is simply not a good preparation for living in the real world.  A more beneficial message would be that change does occur in life and we must all be prepared for it as best we can be.  Change requires emotional adaptability and the more we allow our kids to experience the vicissitudes of everyday life, the better they’ll be able to do so as adults.

Needless to say, I’m not arguing for some Spartan upbringing for kids.  Again, there are things that can damage their psyches and from those they should be shielded to the extent we can.  But family courts disguising as protection of fragile children what’s in fact protecting Mom from working for a living isn’t the way to do so.

Then there’s this:

The reduction comes on the heels of Barnes getting awarded sole legal and physical custody of the twins last month … and an 18-month restraining order against Govan.

Say what?  Barnes has sole legal and physical custody of the kids.  Indeed, this article informs us that Govan is entitled to see the kids just four hours per week, supervised by a professional (New York Daily News, 9/5/18).  That’s because she apparently “flew into a rage” back in September, weaponized her Cadillac Escalade and injured one of the boys.

So Barnes has an 18-month restraining order against her and sole legal and physical custody of the children.  Reasonable minds therefore ask “Why’s he paying her ‘child support?”  She never has the children in her care, so how can she possibly be out any money on their behalf?  The answer of course is that she spends nothing on them she doesn’t want to.

So why is Barnes required to pay her a penny?  Indeed, why isn’t she paying him?  After all, the standard excuse for child support is that both parents participated in bringing the child into the world and both should be responsible for little Andy or Jenny’s upkeep.  Fair enough, so the questions remain – why isn’t Govan contributing to Carter and Isaiah’s support?  And why is Barnes paying her?

There is but one explanation – child support is Mom support.  The facts support no other conclusion.

As I said, the writer packed a lot into those 140 words.

Everyone at National Parents Organization wishes you and your loved ones a joyous new year as we begin another year in the fight for family court reform. 

December 31, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that, under state law, a mother who abused a variety of addictive drugs during pregnancy did not violate the law prohibiting child abuse, despite her baby being born addicted to opiates (Bucks County, Courier Times, 12/29/18).

The case involves a girl who spent 19 days in Williamsport Hospital last year after she was born, being treated for drug dependence that caused severe withdrawal symptoms. Her mother had relapsed into drug use after getting out of jail, and two weeks before the girl was born in January 2017 the mother tested positive for opiates, marijuana and benzodiazepines, [Justice Christine] Donohue wrote.

The court ruled that the applicable statute, the Child Protective Services Law, defines “child” in such a way as to exclude the unborn.  Therefore, it would be fair to say that pretty much anything a mother does to a fetus is acceptable as far as the CPSL goes.  The fact that ingestion of alcohol and many drugs can have horrific effects on newborns and that at least some of those effects can last a lifetime still doesn’t mean the law on “child protection,” as it currently exists in Pennsylvania, can be used to protect unborn children.

Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled Friday that mothers who use illegal drugs while pregnant cannot be considered perpetrators of child abuse against their newly born children under the state’s child protection law.

The Supreme Court’s main opinion said the law’s definition of a child does not include fetuses or unborn children, and victims of perpetrators must be children under the Child Protective Services Law.

Assuming the justices are right, it’s a law that cries out for reform.  Abortion of course is a constitutionally protected act, but addicting a fetus to opiates, cocaine or alcohol knowing that it will be carried to term and thus become a person protected by the law must be called abuse.  It’s pure madness to pretend it’s not.  We know far, far too much about what fetuses, babies and older children suffer when their mothers abuse alcohol or drugs while pregnant to pretend that it’s anything but an abusive practice.

Here’s just one article on what babies go through when born addicted to opiates (Behavioral Health).

Meanwhile, the mother’s lawyer has a different opinion.

The mother’s lawyer, David S. Cohen, called the decision a victory for public health and the rights of women and children.

“There are many states that have decided by statute to label this type of behavior child abuse, but the majority do not,” Cohen said Friday. “We think that’s the right way to approach this, because this is a health issue and the worst thing you can do with a health issue is punish people. It drives people from treatment and it results in worse outcomes for everyone.”

No, Mr. Cohen, this is in no sense “a victory for the rights of children.”  There’s no way to spin that to make it make sense.  A child spent the first 19 days of her life in a hospital, without a mother, withdrawing from opiate addiction.  That’s not a victory for her, it’s a tragedy.  Whatever negative consequences will hound her for the next months and years will also not be a victory.  They’ll be like dragging an anvil chained to her ankle.

Now, Cohen has a point that it’s better public policy to de-criminalize most forms of drug use.  Addicts need help and they don’t get it in prison.  And yes, the threat of incarceration may well discourage users from seeking help for their problem.  But of course the issue before the court wasn’t a criminal matter; it was a matter of whether abusing drugs while pregnant constituted child abuse for the purposes of state intervention into the mother-child relationship.  That is, could the child be taken into foster care by the state due to the mother’s clearly abusive behavior during her pregnancy?

Fortunately, this mother pretty much solved that problem for everyone.

While her daughter was hospitalized, Donohue wrote, the mother did not check in on her or stay with her. Clinton County Children and Youth Services was granted protective custody.

So Mom first addicted the child and then, having given birth to her, abandoned her.  That of course gave the state all it needed to start finding the child a real home with real parents.

What’s remarkable about Cohen’s statement is that he considers it “punishment” by the state to take away a child who’s been abused by its parents.  It’s not.  The reason states do that is to protect children from future abuse, not to punish the parents.  Yes, parents may feel the effect as punishment, but the alternative would be to allow abuse to continue unabated and to ignore its consequences for children.  Surely even Cohen understands the danger of such a policy that naturally no jurisdiction anywhere follows.

Pennsylvania needs to change its laws.  Children born addicted to opiates, cocaine or alcohol have abusive mothers.  Period.  If the law doesn’t define abuse that way, it should.  The Pennsylvania Legislature is on notice.  Reform of the CPSL should be Job#1 for the next legislative session.

December 30, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s one of those ‘Ask the Lawyer’ type of articles that appear in so many publications (Lebanon Democrat, 12/27/18).  This one’s short, but reveals so, so much.  The lawyer is Jim Hawkins of Tennessee.  He begins his piece with a fact:

Striking fact: During 2017, 43.6 percent of all Tennessee babies were born to unmarried mothers.

That is indeed a striking fact.  The national average for births to unmarried mothers is a little under 41%, so Tennessee is somewhat above the norm.  But suffice it to say that, whether in the Volunteer State or in the country beyond, nearly one in two babies is born to a mother who’s not married to its father.  In short, unmarried childbearing is common.  So we might think that our legal system would long ago have come to grips with the fact unmarried childbearing and the disparate consequences for fathers and mothers. 

It hasn’t, as Hawkins makes clear.

Q. Who has custody when a child is born to an unmarried woman?

An unmarried mother of a child has full and sole control over her child, unless and until a court order says otherwise.

Q. How does a father get a court order for parenting rights?

The father of an unmarried woman’s child must file a written request called a petition through the juvenile court to establish paternity and parenting time.

The law in Tennessee, like the law in every other state, places no requirements on mothers (whether married or not) for them to claim parental rights.  A married father is assumed to be the father of any child born to his wife, whether he is or not.  But an unmarried father – i.e. over 40% of all fathers – has no such rights.  In order to claim his rights, he first has to know about the child.  No law anywhere requires a mother to inform the father of her child that he has a child.

Second, he has to know that the law requires him to jump through various legal hoops to secure his parental rights. 

Third, he has to hire a lawyer, file the correct documents in court and have genetic testing performed.  That latter of course means obtaining tissue samples from the child.  If Mom doesn’t want that to happen, she can make his parental rights very, very difficult to come by.  Having spent all that money, Dad’s lawyer must then present the evidence in court.  That establishes his biological relationship to the child and therefore parental rights and obligations.  But of course it doesn’t get him parenting time.  To do that, he must demonstrate that he’s a fit parent.

All of that takes time and money on Dad’s part.  Many, many fathers don’t have that money and, even if they do, don’t know the legal requirements placed on unmarried fathers.

All that is an artifact of long bygone days when it was assumed, not just by the law, but by society generally, that women were generally uninterested in sex, that men were interested in nothing but and that unmarried men were ravening wolves forever lying in wait to prey upon innocent young girls.  Unmarried women who became pregnant were assumed to have been “seduced and abandoned” by one of those wolves.  Because unmarried men were assumed to be bad actors, the law imposed duties on them in paternity cases it didn’t impose on women.

And naturally, prior to the advent of genetic testing that proves biological paternity, everyone knew who the mother of a child was, but the father’s identity was less certain.  So we demanded that he come forward and claim his rights, assuming that, if he were the father, he’d want to do that.  The well-known phenomenon of paternity fraud we preferred to ignore.

But, as the saying goes, that was then and this is now.  Or at least now should be now.  Unfortunately, when it comes to our laws regarding paternity, now is very much then.  That is, we have ready access to genetic testing, but we refuse to use it.  That refusal transfers onto fathers the financial burden of proving paternity that should have been established at the birth of the child.

As I demonstrated above, proving paternity is a costly process for unmarried fathers, one that many of them can’t bear.  And, whether they can pay the freight or not, the question of why they should have to arises. 

We test babies at birth for something like 32 different medical conditions, so we take samples of their blood.  Why not take a bit of Dad’s as well and find out if he’s the father or not?  Doing so would effectively place the cost of establishing paternity on the insurance companies that pay the costs of childbirth and, in some cases, the public.  Therefore, the cost would be spread to millions of people instead of just one, who very often can’t afford to pay it.

And of course, as I’ve argued many times before, testing every baby at birth would mean that, with very rare exceptions, we’d never be in the dark about who is and who isn’t the father of a child.  That would mean a vast saving of money to sort out paternity later and every child would know his/her genetic inheritance.  That would help immeasurably with medical diagnosis and treatment in cases of inherited conditions like cystic fibrosis.

But important too is how we treat fathers.  Despite having the wherewithal to establish paternity with complete certainty from the first days of a child’s life, we instead place the burden on individual fathers to do so, while mothers have no such burden.  DNA testing of all children at birth would send an unmistakable message to dads that they’re valued by society.

The message we send now is exactly the opposite.

December 28, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Now we come to the nut of Bud Dale’s claims to the Family Law Advisory Committee of the Kansas Judicial Council.  In my first piece, I dealt with the fact that Dale intentionally misrepresented to the committee NPO’s report on the parenting time guidelines of Ohio family courts.  In my second, I pointed out that he relies on the current system for at least part of his income, a fact that may better explain his opposition to salutary change than any principled opposition to children having meaningful relationships with their father post-divorce.  I also noted that, although he was on the AFCC committee that promulgated guidelines for the use of scientific literature in forensic settings, Dale violated at least three of the ten guidelines in his letter to the Family Law Advisory Committee.

His letter gives a glimpse of his take on shared parenting and the science on parenting time and children’s well-being.

The facts support the best interests of the child as an individualized determination, which includes prioritization of the well-being of children when allocating the rights and responsibilities of parents.

Of course no one has ever suggested that each case shouldn’t be decided on its own facts.  What shared parenting advocates do say is that, given fit parents who are willing to do the job, something close to equal parenting time is best for kids.  In any case in which a parent isn’t fit, then clearly he/she shouldn’t have time with the child or certainly not unsupervised time.

On the other hand, Dale’s is a claim we read frequently from attorneys and others with a monetary stake in the status quo.  Their excuse is that, in some way, a presumption of shared parenting constitutes a “one-size-fits-all” approach to custody and parenting time and implicitly the existing system does not.  Both are frankly false.

A presumption of equal parenting in the law in no way prevents parents from agreeing on their own parenting plan and indeed most parents do that anyway.  It also doesn’t prevent a judge from ordering something different for parents who are child abusers, otherwise unfit, live far apart, etc.

Meanwhile, what we find when we analyze the actual orders issued by family courts is an astonishing similarity among them.  The “cookie cutter” approach finds father after father consigned to four days per month plus a few hours during the week, i.e. far less than what’s best for kids according to the literature.  That’s Bud Dale’s idea of “individualized determination” of parenting time.  It’s anything but.

Finally, several studies of the attitudes of family court judges reveal that, on average, they’re significantly biased in favor of mothers and against fathers.  Shared parenting laws are, among other things, efforts to counteract what family lawyers see every day and what some family court judges admit to be true – that mothers tend to get a better deal in divorce cases than do fathers.  Again, Dale’s “individualized determination” is made all too often by a judge who’s predisposed to rule in favor of Mom.  It’s therefore not “individualized” at all.

Dale moves on.

[The data] support what we already know – healthier parents lead to healthier children and healthier parents self-select joint custody arrangements.

It’s the old chestnut that the only thing pro-shared parenting studies demonstrate is that good parents naturally gravitate toward shared parenting, so all the studies measure is children who’d receive high-quality parenting anyway. That of course has been debunked many times by the scientific literature on parenting time and child well-being.

So for example, in 2014 Prof. Linda Nielsen reviewed 40 different studies and found that the children of parents who were far from ideal fared better in shared parenting than in sole parenting arrangements.

In yet another study with small samples, high-conflict parents who had volunteered for free counseling to resolve their co-parenting issues reported, at the end of 1 year, the 13 shared children were better off in regard to stress, anxiety, behavioral problems, and adjustment than the 26 sole residence children.

Notably, the children whose parents needed the most intensive counseling at the outset to make the shared parenting work ended up faring as well as the children whose parents initially got along best.

And,

Importantly, after controlling for their parents’ incomes and educations, the shared children were not significantly different from the intact family children in regard to having stress-related health problems and feeling comfortable talking to their parents about things that bothered them (Carlsund et al., 2012)…

Importantly, this study took account of parental conflict, socioeconomic status, and the quality of the parent-child relationship. 

In short, Dale has it wrong again.

At this point, I’d like to ask Bud Dale one question: Given that you criticize the existing scientific literature that supports shared parenting, will you kindly provide us a list of citations to studies that find sole parenting to achieve better outcomes than shared parenting, making sure that each of the studies you list meets the demands of methodological rigor that you make of the pro-shared parenting work?

I won’t hold my breath. 

Last, a reader has sent along a blog that Dale posted back in 2010.  In it he includes this claim:

My position [in an amicus curiae brief] was that the children deserved both parents when both were able and willing to support them.

Dale’s statement leads inexorably to the question “when did he lose his support for children deserving both parents?”  That’s another one I’d like Dale to answer.  But again, I won’t hold my breath.

December 27, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

As I mentioned in my last piece, Bud Dale’s letter to the Family Law Advisory Committee of the Kansas Judicial Council is riddled with inaccuracies and at least one outright lie. But it gets worse. Dale opposes any change in the law that would promote shared parenting arrangements for kids post-divorce. His letter would have the committee believe that he does so out of the highest of high principles, but a closer examination of Dale himself suggests otherwise.

Dale is both a lawyer and a psychologist. Wearing his latter hat, he earns money as a custody evaluator. Wearing his former, he earns money as a mediator. In short, he feeds at two troughs provided by the existing family court system, troughs that might well run dry and be upended by a presumption of shared parenting. Dare we to deduce that his opposition to shared parenting is more of a matter of self-interest than of the best interests of kids?

It’s a good question. If he were truly interested in children’s well-being, why would he stoop to the level of lying about the NPO report on parenting time guidelines in Ohio? That’s a move borne of desperation, not of a reasoned effort toward bettering children’s outcomes following their parents’ divorce.

But it gets worse yet.

Among other things, Dale got himself placed on the AFCC (Association of Family and Conciliation Courts) committee that promulgated “Guidelines for the Use of Social Science Research in Family Law” whose stated purpose is “”to promote the effective, responsible, and ethical use of social science research in family law–related practices, programs, and policies.” Now, having served on that committee and helped draft those guidelines, you might think Dale would be encouraged to, well, follow them himself. But, as President Nixon once memorably said on tape, “That would be wrong.”

Indeed, Dale’s communication to the Kansas committee violated most of the Guidelines he himself helped draft. For example,

5: BE CURRENT AND COMPREHENSIVE.

Ensure that claims about the state of research evidence on any issue are based upon complete reviews of the cumulative body of foundational and current research studies on that issue.

But Dale’s claims to the committee are anything but. He dismisses some 60 studies that support shared parenting out of hand and misrepresents Prof. Linda Nielsen’s analysis of them as having “numerous inaccuracies” and “numerous additional errors,” but fails to mention what they are. And, as I said in my previous piece, at least some of those errors were trivial issues of copy editing.

9. IDENTIFY CONSENSUS AND DISAGREEMENT ON QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF RESEARCH

Identify areas of broad consensus and disagreement about the state of the research on an issue, acknowledging strengths and deficits in quantity and quality of research studies.

And yet Dale has apparently never (and certainly not in his letter to the committee) mentioned Warshak’s consensus report on shared parenting and the best interests of children under the age of three. By any stretch of the imagination, it’s a pretty remarkable omission. After all, when 110 scientists working in the field explicitly endorse such a report, you’d think it would carry some weight. But Dale, having urged others to behave professionally in their representations of scientific research, does the exact opposite, not only in his letter to the committee, but apparently to everyone else as well. Amazing, but true.

And then there’s

10. DISCLOSE CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

Identify and disclose potential conflicts of interest that may influence or bias research claims in support of specific interventions, services, or child custody policies.

Yes, Dale makes at least some of his living as a custody evaluator and mediator, both of which areas could be adversely impacted by a legal presumption of shared parenting. But he neglects to mention same to the committee, some of whom might be naïve enough to believe that he’s a disinterested commentator. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Then there’s the remarkable fact that Dale promised the committee his own meta-analysis of the pertinent literature on parenting time post-divorce. No, he’s not qualified to do the analysis himself, so he had to hire a graduate student to do it for him, but his prose informing the committee of the said meta-analysis positively bubbles with the notion that it will sweep away all that’s gone before it.

I doubt it. As recently as 2016, Baude, et al published a meta-analysis of the existing literature (that’s barely been supplemented since).

The studies included here defined joint custody as a proportion of time spent by children in each home ranging from a one-third time division (70%/30%) to an equal share (50%/50%). The overall results of the 19 selected studies revealed better outcomes for children in joint custody, with a weak effect size (d = .109). Moreover, this association was moderated by the amount of time that children spent with their 2 parents.

In other words, the positive effect of shared parenting on children is present, but not a strong influence as long as all those studies are taken together. The effect grows stronger the closer to 50/50 the parenting time gets. In these blogs, I’ve said time and again that the shared parenting benefit tends to kick in at about a 35/65 division of time and improves as it approaches 50/50.

So what will Dale add to that? My guess is nothing. He’s an opponent of shared parenting and will do whatever it takes to come up with an analysis that seeks to cast doubt on the practice.

More on this later.

Everyone at National Parents Organization wishes you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas filled with joy and cheer. 

December 24, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Someone named Bud Dale has decided to set himself up in Kansas as (apparently) the sole arbiter regarding the science on shared versus sole parenting. Dale advertises himself as a “licensed PhD. psychologist and attorney in Topeka, Kansas.” In all the studies on shared parenting I’ve read and read about, I’ve never seen his name mentioned nor cited as a researcher in the field. The finest scientists in the field of parenting time and children’s well-being gathered in Boston in May of 2017 for a conference whose aim was to distill the state of knowledge about that topic. Dale wasn’t there, nor was he mentioned.

Nevertheless, Dale seems to have insinuated himself into the good graces of the Family Law Advisory Committee of the Kansas Judicial Council. His purpose appears to be to take issue with proponents of shared parenting, most notably Profs. Linda Nielsen and Richard Warshak. To that end, Dale’s written a letter to the aforesaid Committee. If his letter is any indication of his overall trustworthiness, no one should take Dale seriously.

Weirdly, stuffed willy-nilly into his claims about Prof. Nielsen, Dale included a swipe at me and at NPO. Here’s what he had to say, among other things.

Your committee should also be aware of a recent exchange between the NPO and the Ohio Association of Domestic Relations Judges (OADRJ). After the NPO issued a report on August 30, 2018, which “purported to analyze and evaluate the parenting time ordered Relations and Family Courts in Ohio and provided a “failing grade,” the OADRJ responded. The OADRJ found the NPO grading system fundamentally defective and called the conclusions in the NPO report “inaccurate, misrepresentative and speculative.

Sigh, where to begin? I suppose the most important item to point out is Dale’s claim that the NPO’s report “purported to analyze and evaluate the parenting time ordered Relations and Family Courts in Ohio.” That of course is nothing but a lie. I don’t like to call people liars, preferring to give most of them the benefit of the doubt. But when Dale has had the opportunity to read the report or, failing that noisome task, my response to the absurd letter written by the president of the OADRJ, he can be expected to at least know what the report is and what it isn’t. Accordingly, Dale lied to the committee.

The simple fact is that, as explained in so many words by the report itself, by me on this blog and by the co-author of the report, Don Hubin, the report is in no way an analysis of actual parenting time orders. It’s an analysis of the guidelines on parenting time promulgated by each of Ohio’s counties and used by their family court judges.

But Dale’s mendacity doesn’t end there. Notice that he placed in quotation marks the words “purported to analyze and evaluate …” as if he were quoting either the report itself or some accurate description of it. But, like his previous claim, that too is meant solely to mislead whoever reads his letter. Indeed, his quotation comes from the response by OADRJ president, Judge Paula Giulitto, to the report. The only problem with that response was that it too failed to tell the truth about what the report is and what it isn’t. The claim was false then and still is. That fact I pointed out in my blog piece on the OADRJ response as did Don Hubin elsewhere.

In short, Dale, like the OADRJ, has no material response to the NPO report and, not being intellectually honest enough to address its merits, he chooses to make stuff up instead. This is the man who hopes to derail shared parenting in Kansas.

But, as I said, his real target is Prof. Nielsen. Having apparently done no research of his own, Dale nevertheless seeks to take on someone who has. In his letter, he repeatedly claims that Nielsen’s work contains “numerous inaccuracies” and “numerous additional errors.” Gee, that would sound serious if Dale were himself a serious critic. But, as I said above, his false statements regarding the NPO report let us know just how scrupulous a critic Dale is. I suspect his claims about Nielsen’s work are every bit as shady as his representations about the report.

Dale’s idea of grievous errors on Nielsen’s part include things like the fact that she put the wrong page number in a citation, put quotation marks around a phrase when she was in fact paraphrasing, etc. In other words, Bud Dale looks every inch the copy editor. He knows his commas and semi colons, just not his facts.

From what I can gather, the Kansas committee should pay Bud Dale no more attention than it would some troll commenting on its website. But I’ll get into that in more detail next time.