Category: Blog

December 8, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act will be considered by Congress in 2019. The reauthorization bill, H.B. 6545, is dangerously flawed and must be substantially amended. It contains a definition of domestic violence that is almost certainly unconstitutional, makes behavior actionable that non-violent couples routinely engage in and that can be part of healthy adult relationships. It likely would worsen domestic violence by overburdening police and courts with non-serious claims while increasing state intervention into family life.

Here is the definition proposed by H.B. 6545:

The term ‘domestic violence’ means a pattern of behavior involving the use or attempted use of physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, economic, or technological abuse or any other coercive behavior committed, enabled, or solicited to gain or maintain power and control over a victim…

People who commit domestic violence can experience a range of punitive measures. They can be forced to vacate their residence, be separated from their children, charged with a crime, convicted thereof and incarcerated. They can be placed under a court order restricting where they can go and with whom they can associate. They can lose jobs and the right to possess a firearm.

In short, how we define domestic violence can have grave consequences for everyday people.

H.B. defines various forms of protected speech as domestic violence and so runs afoul of the First Amendment. The terms “verbal” and “emotional” refer either explicitly or necessarily to speech, while the definitions of “economic abuse” and “technological abuse” include speech. Given the long history of Supreme Court pronouncements on what constitutes protected speech, there is no doubt that H.B. 6545 violates the free speech provisions of the First Amendment.

For example, the 1971 case of Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe and the 1982 case of NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. demonstrate that even speech that is coercive is protected from prior governmental restraint as long as it doesn’t exhort others to violence. And of course offensive speech is likewise protected. Put simply, spouses can verbally berate each other without fear of governmental reprisal.

Further, H.B. 6545’s definition is constitutionally void for vagueness and overbreadth. Words like “verbal abuse,” “emotional abuse,” “technological abuse,” “coercive,” “enabled” and “power and control” are all subject to a wide range of imprecise interpretations. The Supreme Court has explained the void for vagueness doctrine thus:

The Government violates the Due Process Clause when it takes away someone’s life, liberty, or property under a criminal law so vague that it fails to give ordinary people fair notice of the conduct it punishes, or is so standardless that it invites arbitrary enforcement.

H.B. 6545 would do exactly that.

But H.B. 6545’s deficiencies don’t end there. Even if the bill were constitutional, it still seeks to criminalize everyday constructive interaction between partners and spouses. Does a man, mindful of his family’s limited financial resources, repeatedly plead with his wife to reduce her spending on non-essential items? If he does, he violates H.B. 6545 and can be arrested and barred from his home and family.

Does a woman, suspecting her husband may be unfaithful, open his emails in search of incriminating evidence? If so, she violates H.B. 6545 and can be arrested and barred from her home and family.

Does a mother, in an effort to improve her daughter’s grades, restrict her access to social media? She’s committed domestic violence against the girl, according to H.B. 6545.

Meanwhile, the wife who shoots her husband with a 12-gauge shotgun does not commit DV. Why? Because she’s never been violent toward him before and H.B. 6545 demands a “pattern” of behavior. Indeed, it’s one of the bill’s major shortcomings that, in any court case in which DV is alleged, it would be insufficient for the state to prove a single incident of DV.

Finally, H.B. 6545 stands to make the domestic violence situation worse, not better. By vastly expanding the definition of DV, it threatens to overburden already-strapped police departments, district attorney’s offices and courts. Perhaps worse, it invites ever greater intervention by the state into the family. That can be justified when a family member is truly at risk of harm, but H.B. 6545 opens families up to intervention by the police on the slimmest of pretexts.

The National Parents Organization opposes domestic violence and calls for a sensible, constructive approach to reducing its incidence. Who commits domestic violence, why they do and how to treat perpetrators so they don’t reoffend is by now fairly well understood by the mental health community. We must put aside the ideology that H.B. 6545 embodies and promote the therapeutic treatment of DV offenders while providing safety and security to victims.

H.B. 6545, in its current form, will do none of that. It must be amended to provide fact and science-based approaches to domestic violence that will constitutionally work to reduce the incidence of DV.

December 7, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

As Washington Post articles go, this isn’t bad (Washington Post, 12/3/18).  It raises a real issue – the parental rights of incarcerated parents – and provides readers valuable information.  But of course, this being the Post, it also ignores vast swaths of the issue in order to maintain intact its preconceived notions about parents and those of much of its readership.

Its gist is that state child welfare officials too readily take children into foster care and move to terminate their parents’ rights based solely on the fact that the latter have committed a crime and been imprisoned.

According to the Marshall Project analysis, at least 32,000 incarcerated parents since 2006 had their children permanently taken from them without being accused of physical or sexual abuse, though other factors, often related to their poverty, may have been involved. Of those, nearly 5,000 appear to have lost their parental rights because of their imprisonment alone.

Now, what the article doesn’t go into is that, in the 11 years from 2006 to 2017, that’s about 2,900 kids per year placed into foster care, i.e. a tiny percentage of the whole.  (About 680,000 complaints of child abuse or neglect are deemed founded by CPS agencies each year.)  It also doesn’t mention that, while those parents may not have been “accused of physical or sexual abuse,” neglect is another reason for taking kids into care.  Indeed, about 70% of kids taken by child welfare agencies have been neglected, not abused.  So, just because there was no abuse involved, the quoted figures don’t mean the children were taken for no reason.

Further, the article makes no effort to distinguish between parents serving one-year sentences and those serving 30-year sentences.  That’s a pretty big omission.  After all, a child can spend a year with grandma and grandpa, go to see Mommy in prison occasionally and be reunited with her when she gets out without too much harm being done.  But a child with no alternative parent or blood relative and whose primary caregiver is facing a long stretch in prison realistically needs foster care and adoption.  Permanence and stability are generally good for kids and no child should be held hostage when Mommy or Daddy are truly not coming back for most or all of their childhood.

Still, according to the article and to the Marshall Project, it’s not unusual for a parent facing a relatively short stint behind bars to lose his/her parental rights.  If true, that’s an issue in need of resolution.  As with so much about families, courts and family laws fail to adequately protect the biological family.  We far, far too readily separate children from their parents despite our knowledge that the biological parents are, on average, the best caregivers for children and their home the best place for kids to grow up.

In about 1 in 8 of these cases, incarcerated parents lose their parental rights, regardless of the seriousness of their offenses, according to the analysis of records maintained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services between 2006 and 2016. That rate has held steady over time.

Those quoted by the article who support the current practice need a lesson in the facts about adoption.

To some adoption proponents, immediately finding children a nurturing home should always be the priority. Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that while some parents turn their lives around when they leave prison, their children should not have to wait for a family.

“You never know if they’ll just go right back to a life of crime,” she said, “and kids deserve better than that.”

That’s fine in theory, but not in fact.  The fact is that we complete about 125,000 adoptions in the U.S. each year, but most of those – about 75,000 – are stepparent adoptions.  Only about 50,000 are “stranger” adoptions, i.e. those in which the child is basically unknown to the parents prior to the adoption.  With 425,000 kids in foster care whose parents are either dead or have had their rights terminated, the adoption system can’t find parents for the overwhelming majority of children who need them.  Any unnecessary addition to the number of kids needing homes only makes a bad situation worse.  So every public policy on adoption must take into consideration the paucity of adoptive parents.

To its credit, the article takes to task the Adoption and Safe Families Act that, as I’ve written before, is largely responsible for the tendency on the part of state child welfare agencies to err on the side of taking kids from their parents.

In 1997, with first lady Hillary Clinton’s vocal support, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which mandated that federally funded state child-welfare programs begin termination of parental rights in most cases in which children had been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. The measure’s supporters hoped it would pave the way to adoption for kids who had been languishing in temporary, often unstable homes while their biological parents tried to kick a drug habit or find housing.

The legislation also created bonuses for states that facilitate adoptions. Since 1998, the federal government has doled out more than $639 million in these rewards.

But the law’s largely unintended consequence was to make incarcerated parents, who now spend well more than 15 months on average behind bars because of the tough prison sentences of the same era, more vulnerable to losing their children.

And it gets right the most basic of all concepts about family policy.

Amanda Alexander, executive director of the Detroit Justice Center and a senior research scholar at the University of Michigan Law School, sees the dichotomy between what’s best for parents and what’s best for kids as a false one. The child-welfare system, she said, certainly must find young people a stable home. But it should also help their mothers and fathers stay in their lives in a productive way, along with siblings and other relatives.

“In most cases, kids are better off by all kinds of metrics when they have a relationship with their birth families,” she said.

That’s a message that every judge, lawmaker, CPS employee, mental health expert, etc. should be required to know by heart.  Public policy designed to break up families is bad public policy. 

But that’s the one we have.

More on this next time.

The following by long-time friend of NPO and staunch advocate for family law reform Paulette MacDonald.

Dear Santa,

My name is Paulette MacDonald and I am a Family Law Reform Advocate in Canada and that came to be once I witnessed firsthand the devastation that occurs in the hands of our Family Law System. – And all I want for Christmas is a presumption of equal parenting at the onset of divorce or separation in the absence of abuse, neglect or violence. Tall order, I know but I’m confident together we can do it.

While I am extremely proud to be Canadian; I’m ashamed of our governments Family Law System, one that is profoundly broken and has been for decades – A System that was put in place to help families when they are most vulnerable going through divorce or separation and instead of helping them, it destroys them with its bias “winner-take-all” approach. According to Ontario’s former Chief Justice Warren Winkler, “family law is in a state of crisis. We see a system in disarray – one that is beyond tinkering and that needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up using new concepts and fresh ideas. In short, we see a need for fundamental change.”

That was in 2011 when Justice Winkler was advocating for; free court based, mandatory mediation for family law litigants and in 2010 we had the release of the Law Commission of Ontario in-depth report on the family law system and the report deplores a system that can bankrupt litigants and routinely ignores the wishes and interests of children.

Sadly our Governments Divorce Industry has grown to the size of the Auto Industry so Santa, you can imagine what we’re up against –

We need your help with the Canadian Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights who are currently studying Bill C-78. You see Santa, this Bill is proposing changes to the Divorce Act to reflect the Best Interest of the Child and yet it has no mention of equal parenting what so ever.

Regrettably, Bill C-78 is not intended as the much needed and overdue overhaul; instead it’s targeted as more of a legal housekeeping exercise. Still, through the action of the Standing Committee, I believe that Bill C-78 represents the best opportunity in more than 20 years to make select changes in the Divorce Act demonstrably supported by Canadians and backed by authoritative Social Science research.

Equal parenting is in the best interest of the child. Equal parenting should be the starting point for judicial consideration – if both parents are deemed fit while the marriage/relationship is intact, then both parents should be deemed fit when the marriage/relationship ends. Social science informs us that children do much better with both parents. Conversely, children raised without both parents generally underachieve, are prone to more medical and social problems, and have significantly higher rates of incarceration- all at taxpayer expense.

Continuity of parental and family relationships to the maximum workable extent is what is in the best interest of the child. Hence, fit parents should not have to spend their life savings in family court simply to maintain a pre-existing relationship with their children as is all too often the case.

Equal parenting- is fully endorsed by social science research as the preferred child arrangement post dissolution barring issues of abuse, neglect or violence. In fact, 110 eminent researchers publicly endorsed this scientific conclusion in 2014. Moreover, in a 2018 special edition of the prestigious Journal of Divorce and Remarriage, a panel of social science experts went further by stating the scientific body of research was sufficiently powerful to now justify a rebuttable presumption of equal parenting. I submit this evidence- based consensus should be reflected in Bill C-78.

Not only is equal parenting supported by science, it is overwhelmingly supported in many countries and jurisdictions according to polls, as is the case in Canada. In polls commissioned in 2007, 2009 and 2017 Canadians supported a presumption of equal parenting by a ratio of more than 6:1. Notably, this strong support was generally the same regardless of gender, age, geographical region or political affiliation. This is a non-partisan issue for Canadians.

In 1998, all parties endorsed the equal parenting recommendations of the “For the Sake of the Children” Report” by the Special Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access. Likewise, the Liberal government of the day commissioned a poll in 2002 which found Canadians supported equal parenting even then. The Conservative and Green Parties currently have shared parenting as part of their policies. Now is the time for the other parties to reaffirm their commitment to equal parenting as a non-partisan issue.

I’d like to share with you public perception of equal parenting after its adoption in other jurisdictions. A recent example is Kentucky which became the first US state to adopt an explicit rebuttable presumption of equal parenting in April, 2018. Subsequent poll results of July, 2018 indicate favourable support of equal parenting by a ratio of 6:1- about the same as in Canada. The poll also provides valuable insight on children’s rights vs parental rights. As you know, detractors of equal parenting paint it as a parental rights issue on the erroneous assumption that parental and children’s rights are somehow mutually exclusive rather than overlapping. Here’s what the poll reported. Two questions were asked on children’s rights and two on parental rights.

For children’s rights:

a) It is in the best interests of the child to have as much time as possible with their parents following divorce –a ratio of 12:1 agree/disagree;

b) Children have a right to spend equal time or near equal time with both parents following divorce or separation, or not –a ratio of 16:1 agree/disagree;

For parental rights:

a) Both parents, whether living together or living apart, should have equal access to their children and should share responsibility for raising their children-a ratio of 12:1 agree/disagree;

b) Separating parents should have equal parenting rights vs either father or mother should have more-a ratio of 11:1 agree/disagree;

The results strongly indicate that children’s rights and parental rights are not mutually exclusive but complimentary, oftentimes flip sides of the same coin, while recognizing the primacy of the child.

In that respect, the Minister of Justice was badly advised by her staff for her testimony before the Standing Committee on Nov 5th when she framed equal parenting as a parental issue rather than a child’s rights issue. Social Science research and the public at large are telling you that they are indivisible. To treat them as disjoint is not only scientifically incorrect, it is openly disingenuous. Children’s best interests are served by having both parents actively involved while parental rights are satisfied by allowing fit parents to raise their children. Canada has no better public example of the benefits of equal parenting than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who was raised by Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Sinclair-Trudeau.

I conclude Santa by urging you to tell the Standing Committee to do what’s right, rather then what’s easy – tell them to be a voice for Canadian children and amend Bill C-78 to incorporate presumptive equal parenting reflecting social science consensus and the long standing wish of Canadians of all persuasions.

And please Santa, tell divorcing parents to take their revenge, anger or control issues out on their therapist and not their ex-partner and tell them to love their children, more than they hate their ex.

Thank you Santa and Merry Christmas!

Paulette MacDonald

Leading Women For Shared Parenting

Minden Hills, Ontario

December 5, 2018 by Don Hubin, PhD, Member, National Board of Directors and Chair, National Parents Organization of Ohio

I like Saturday Night Live, even though I’m at an age when it would be more appropriate to call it “Saturday Night DVRed”. Sure, lots of sketches don’t work; some are complete flops; and some make you wonder how the writers ever thought they would be funny in the first place.

But, as they say, “if you’re serving all aces, you’re not serving hard enough”. Good comedy experiments and pushes boundaries; failure is part of the creative process. And, when the writers and comedians of SNL get it right, they can really nail it.

Last week’s show, though, included a truly appalling and offensive sketch demeaning divorced dads. (You can see the “Dad Christmas” sketch, here, beginning at moment 24:55.)

Belittling fathers is, apparently, a go-to solution for advertisers, sit-com writers, and stand-up comedians whose creativity is flagging. But I don’t remember SNL ever sinking to this depth to disparage divorced dads in an attempt to provoke a laugh.

The false and offensive stereotypes flow freely in the SNL sketch: while Mom is a caring, concerned, competent parent, Dad is self-centered, foolish, and completely dysfunctional. His children obviously hate going to Dad’s for Christmas. And why wouldn’t they? The refrigerator has only a bag of restaurant left-overs, ketchup, a carton of eggs and, of course, lots of beer. Dad’s involved with a floozy—apparently one he left his wonderful wife for. Dad is explicitly described as trying to buy the kids’ affection with gifts. Though the kids hate the thought of spending Christmas with Dad, there’s an “uplifting” ending: the kids are told that, when they’re older, Dad will let them do drugs at his house!

I’m sensitive to how fathers are portrayed in popular media but perhaps I was especially offended by this sketch for a personal reason. My entire family, children, step-children, children’s spouses, and grandchildren were just at our house for a holiday my wife and I call ‘Chrisgiving”. We celebrate Chrisgiving as a family during an extended weekend between Thanksgiving and Christmas because we never want to create conflict for our kids about whose house—“other parent’s”, in-law’s, or their own homes—they’ll spend Thanksgiving or Christmas at.

It was a full house. We ate together, played together, and exchanged gifts. The refrigerator was stocked with great food which, in fact, Dad cooked (though one wouldn’t believe that possible from media representations of fathers). And it was shortly after the last of our kids left town that my wife and I settled down to watch SNL. What a contrast between fathers’ lived reality and the way we’re portrayed in the media!

One might say that SNL is an equal-opportunity offender—everyone gets demeaned at some point. I’ll believe that when SNL does a sketch where Mom is a selfish, incompetent, lout and Dad is the competent, compassionate, caring parent. Don’t hold your breath.

Shame on SNL for contributing to a demeaning and destructive false stereotype of fathers.

If you agree with Don’s views, please let NBC know by going to https://www.nbc.com/contact-us. Select the options: I have feedback on NBC programing / Saturday Night Live / I have a Complaint or Concern. And let them know what you think.  

December 3, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

What looks like an excellent non-profit organization in Vermont has issued a report on the state’s child welfare system.  Predictably, the picture it paints isn’t pretty.  This is the first I’ve heard of the Vermont Parent Representation Center, but if its report is any indication, it’s a professionally-run group that produces quality work.

I’ll have more to say about the report later, but for now this article hits the high points (Vermont Digger, 11/26/18).  Writer Lola Duffort is to be commended on a thorough, fair and balanced piece.

In “Bending the Curve to Improve Our Child Protection System,” a report out from the Vermont Parent Representation Center, the nonprofit uses an analysis of more than 70 cases it has worked on over the course of eight years and state data to make the case that the state reflexively removes children instead of supporting parents in need…

“We’ve gotten to this point where we really can’t separate out, in our administrative approach, the children who are being abused or neglected or at serious risk of that happening, from the families that just need assistance,” VPRC executive director Larry Crist said. “There’s really no distinction any more.”

It’s the same story we hear in state after state.  Child welfare agencies are encouraged by a flow of federal dollars to take children from parents.  Those agencies are underfunded, understaffed and overworked.  Occasional cases make the headlines in which children die who should have been in foster care but weren’t due to the agency’s inability to meet the needs of all children at risk.  In turn, those scandal-creating headlines drive policy.  And that policy is to err on the side of taking children from parents so no more children die who shouldn’t.

None of that is the way it should be, but all of it is the way it is.

So now Vermont has an organization that’s working intelligently and responsibly toward reform.

The 117-page report contains more than 80 recommendations, including that the state create a dedicated ombuds office to monitor the outcomes and costs of the child protective system, as well as a parent representation office to offer counseling and legal representation to parents who could lose custody of their children. Currently, attorneys for both parents and children are provided through the Defender General’s office, an arrangement that the report says leads to poor representation for parents.

Those are all fine recommendations, but naturally they all take money.  And, as in so many other states, in Vermont money for children’s welfare is in short supply.  As we’ve seen in Texas and Arizona, if states really want to protect children as they all claim, they’re going to have to budget substantially more money to do so than is currently the case.

Meanwhile, Vermont’s Department of Children and Families is doing what other similar agencies have found expedient. 

The nonprofit also argues that assessments – a voluntary process created to get families access to services – have turned into “investigations by another name, and simply a mechanism by which families are monitored and children removed absent a court order.” It suggests reviewing whether the state should continue assessments at all or substantially reform use of the tool.

Yes, we’ve seen that too.  States have discovered that one easy way to avoid the inconvenience of due process of law, hearings, judges, evidence, lawyers and the like is to simply get parents to sign a “voluntary” plan to assess their kids, homes and selves.  Sometimes in other states that includes temporary placement with other adults.  By entering into a “voluntary” plan, the state is relieved of its obligation to produce sufficient evidence to convince a judge that taking the children into care is warranted.

What’s wrong with that?  The main thing is that sticky word “voluntary.”  The overwhelming majority of parents in the crosshairs of CPS are poor and poorly educated.  They’re also scared of the agency that has the power to take their kids from them.  Who wouldn’t be?  So when the caseworker forks over a document with a plan and tells them that it means they don’t have to go to court and promises that it’s only an “assessment,” many parents agree.

But the upshot is much the same as if it were part of the usual process for taking kids out of the home.  As Crist said, it’s a mechanism to get the kids but without the time and tedium required by due process of law.

Unsurprisingly, DCF Director Ken Schatz disagrees with the VPRC’s findings.

“I know the report takes issue with some of those, but the reality is we do have a system that does actually appoint lawyers for the parents, for the children, separately,” he said.

The problem with that is that, like the rest of the child welfare system, it’s underfunded.  The result is due process is name only.

Crist, for his part, said that lawyers who represent parents are so overloaded and unfamiliar with the child protective system that they effectively tell families to go along with that the state asks for.

“Most parents have an attorney assigned that they never meet until the day that they walk into court,” he said.

Still, Schatz has at least on good idea.

He said he’s most interested in early intervention programs that will help families get the support they need before there’s a need for DCF to get involved.

Of course, for such programs to be effective, they’d have to be administered by an agency other than DCF or, if by DCF, then its culture of “intervene first, ask questions later” would have to radically change.  If parents knew that early intervention programs were just a precursor to the usual DCF process, they’d likely decline to take part, negating the programs’ potential effectiveness.

More on the VPRC’s report in due course.

December 2, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

When shared parenting bills come before state legislatures, members are usually faced with opposition from two groups – family lawyers and gender feminist groups.  As I’ve written many times, their arguments don’t make sense.  They recycle old, worn-out tropes, all of which have been debunked countless times.  The simple truth is that equal parenting is best for kids and good for both mothers and fathers as well.  Large amounts of social science demonstrate the fact and, faced with that, opponents arrive at the legislative battlefield unarmed.  Briefly, they have no argument on the merits to make.

But, since the issue before any given legislator is whether to vote for or against a shared parenting bill, there’s always another consideration – how will it affect him/her at the polls?  Now, we all know that elected officials would prefer to do the right thing in any given situation, not just about shared parenting.  But in the mental struggle between doing the right thing and getting re-elected, often enough, the latter prevails. 

And so it is with shared parenting bills.  Proponents can and do present all the arguments on the merits of shared parenting, but if a legislator fears that a ‘yea’ vote will present a problem come next election day, he/she may find it hard to do the right thing.

That raises the question of whether voting in favor of shared parenting constitutes a threat to legislators’ political well-being. 

Now we know the answer: it not only doesn’t harm his/her chances of winning, it powerfully enhances them.  Indeed, a ‘no’ vote may be the kiss of electoral death.

This past year, Kentucky legislators passed the first law anywhere containing a presumption of shared parenting.  That is to say that, sensible as that vote was in terms of children’s welfare, it was going out on a limb politically.  And of course three weeks ago, voters went to the polls.  How did shared parenting supporters and opponents in Kentucky fare?  NPO’s Matt Hale has analyzed the impact at the ballot box (Daily Independent, 11/29/18).

There was a direct correlation between winning percentage of contested races and lawmakers’ support of the bill. Of the contested House races, 100 percent of the sponsors won, 90 percent of those who voted yes won, 80 percent of those who did not vote won and zero percent of those who voted no won. In fact, every sponsor of the bill running won despite 14 seats changing parties. 

There was only one shared parenting opponent, Linda Belcher, on the ballot. She was crushed by 20 points after her vote against the joint custody law even though she easily won her last election by 37 points.

Belcher even had a large fundraising advantage as of Sept. 17 of $39,695 to her opponent, Thomas Huff’s, $15,369. Worse yet, Belcher was the only incumbent educator to lose in the year of unprecedented teacher energy. Belcher’s unforced error on the shared parenting bill appears to have cost her dearly…

Webb sponsored a shared parenting law herself in previous years. She met with shared parenting advocates repeatedly and spoke out in committee meetings in support. She even appeared on the front page of her local paper (which officially endorsed the shared parenting law) supporting joint custody a few weeks before the election.

[Democrat Robin] Webb was the only Democrat to win a contested Senate election this year. One final senate note, the only open senate seat was won by, you guessed it, a shared parenting supporter. Matt Castlen won Senate district 8 by a comfortable 16 points after voting for the law.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that.  This was an election year of considerable change at every level of the electoral hierarchy.  Incumbents were in greater danger of losing their seats than usual and of course challengers had greater opportunities for success.  But in Kentucky, there was a new dynamic at work – the vote for or against shared parenting.  Voting in favor appears to have been a boon to a legislator’s chances and voting against had the opposite effect.

That is no surprise.  After all, when surveyed, huge percentages of Kentuckians across every demographic category, expressed their support for shared parenting.  They repeated that support in no uncertain terms at the ballot box.

Apart from its many benefits for kids, shared parenting is a winner among voters as well.  Plus, its appeal is strongly non-partisan.  Republicans and Democrats alike support shared parenting.  So do blacks and whites and people across the whole range of income and education.  In an era that longs for civility and agreement, shared parenting is that rarest of issues that affords both.

So now we know.  Not only do opponents of shared parenting fail on the issue itself (we’ve known that for years), but they also have nothing with which to threaten lawmakers.  Quite the contrary, shared parenting is ballot-box gold.  You can bet that, in the next legislative season, NPO will be making that point again and again, right beside shared parenting’s benefits for kids.

Please join us tonight on our Facebook page at 6 pm EST for an important shared parenting development! We can’t say anymore right now but remember to set your alarm for 6 pm EST tonight, November 30!

November 29, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The Washington Post is at it again (Washington Post, 11/26/18).  In a bid to further erode the institution of the family, the WaPo offers an article entitled “UN Finds Deadliest Place for Women is Their Home.”  The only problem with that headline is that the UN did no such thing.  Indeed, the intellectual distance between the headline and the UN study on which it pretends to report tends to produce vertigo in the reader.  It’s a complete misrepresentation.

What the UN study actually reports on is the number of women and girls killed each year in domestic violence incidents worldwide.  That number is about 50,000.  This being the UN, the number of men killed in DV incidents goes unmentioned.

When the study gets to rates of victimization we learn that, in Africa, homicide victimization of women and girls in DV incidents is about 3.1 per 100,000 women.  In “the Americas,” it’s about 1.6 per 100,000 and in Europe, it’s 0.7.

To pretend, as the Post does, that those figures mean that the home is the most dangerous place for women and girls is nonsensical.  It’s of course utterly untrue.  As but one example, here in the U.S. about 1,600 women and 690 men were killed in a DV incident in 2016.  By comparison, about 33,000 people were killed in automobile accidents.  If, say, one-third of those were women (based on their lower use of motor vehicles), that’s 11,000 killed on our roads and highways, about seven times the rate of DV deaths.

Needless to say, similar data from other parts of the world give the lie to the WaPo headline.  And, also needless to say, the UN report nowhere makes such a claim.

That raises the question of why the paper would print something that’s not only false, but obviously so.  

From the late 70s to the early 90s, it wasn’t uncommon to read claims identical to the one in the WaPo headline.  That was when we were frequently told that the family was the seat of the oppression of women, so, to destroy that oppression, the family should be either done away with or radically marginalized.  As veteran DV activist Pamela Johnston told journalist Cathy Young for her 1998 book Ceasefire!, the DV establishment assumed that “the nuclear family, as the primary unit of patriarchy, is inherently oppressive to womyn.”  People like Anna Quindlen and Bob Herbert at the New York Times claimed much the same thing as today’s Post headline.

But then reality intervened, as it has a way of doing.  Someone once said that reality is what holds true whether you believe it or not.  Those who sought to destroy the family found that to be the case.  Large sets of data revealed that, in fact, women and children are far safer in their nuclear families than anywhere else.  Boyfriends are far more likely to injure both than are husbands/fathers.  And of course lesbian relationships are much more violent than either heterosexual or gay male ones.  (That last was once again revealed by the most recent data out of Canada that found lesbians reporting twice the incidence of DV as male-female relationships and over three times that of gay males.

So, the WaPo piece falls within a definite historical context and not a positive one.  At a time when many people are trying to rectify the wrongs of the past, i.e. solidify the family as an institution that’s best for men, women, children and society generally, a return to the bad old days of using flagrant untruths to attack that core institution of society is the worst of ideas.

But it’s not only bad for us generally, it’s bad for actual victims of DV.  Domestic violence is a genuine problem, but the idea that the way to deal with it is to undermine the family verges on the insane.  Face it, people form relationships, whether married or not.  Within those relationships, sometimes violence occurs.  We could destroy the family completely and do nothing to eradicate DV.  Indeed, we’d make it worse, not better.

What to do?  We could begin taking a sensible, constructive, non-gendered approach to the problem of DV.  The simple fact is that those who perpetrate DV can be, in most cases, treated successfully and their perpetration either end or greatly diminish.  That would require us to take DV for what it is – a personal pathology, usually rooted in having been victimized or witnessed DV frequently as a child.  That would mean we’d have to start acknowledging facts like men and women perpetrate DV equally, that women are more likely than men to initiate intimate violence, that mothers abuse children more often than do fathers, that women tend to be more controlling in relationships than are men, that because women commit DV, they need services to help them stop, etc.

In short, we’d have to admit that most of what we’ve done to combat DV is wrongheaded and hasn’t worked.  Sadly, as ever, we’re not likely to do that in the current political atmosphere.  By intentionally misrepresenting the reality of DV and by suggesting a cure (destruction of the family) that would be far worse than the disease, articles like the one in the WaPo make the matter worse.  It belongs in the ash heap of history along with all the rest.

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

A new study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science finds bias in judges’ rulings in child custody cases (Science Daily, 4/3/18).  Now, it’s worthwhile to note that this is a study, not of judicial behavior in the courtroom in actual cases, but in hypothetical ones.  Still, the methodology of the case suggests the pro-mother/anti-father bias we’ve come to know all too well.

The study was conducted by Andrea Miller, who’s an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  Miller accomplished one amazing thing; she got 500 state court judges to take part in the study.  They did so anonymously due to the fact that the results could be embarrassing for the state and the judiciary thereof.  So we don’t even know which state the study took place in.  Miller also received the participation of 500 lay people.

The judges and lay people analyzed two mock court cases, including a child custody case and a sex discrimination lawsuit where the plaintiff was presented as either a man or woman. The participants also completed surveys about their beliefs in traditional gender roles, such as stereotypes that women are more interested in raising children than in their careers and that children are better off if their fathers are the primary breadwinners for the family…

In the divorce case, the father and mother both sought primary custody of their two children. Both spouses worked full-time jobs and sometimes had conflicts with caring for their children. Judges and lay people who supported traditional gender roles allocated more custody time to the mother than to the equally-qualified father, but the judges were even more biased in favoring the mother than were laypeople. Only three percent of the judges in the sample gave the father more custody time than the mother.

“In both of these cases, support for traditional gender roles was associated with decisions that encouraged women to engage in more family caregiving at the expense of their careers and discouraged men from participating in family caregiving at all.” Miller said.

What’s most interesting about those findings is that the judges tended to be even more anti-father than were the lay people.  I’ll be fascinated to read the study itself to flesh out that finding.  But whatever the details, the reality is as we’ve known for decades: even in the face of significant change in the behaviors of men and women, judges seldom manage to abandon the notion that mothers’ place is in the home with the kids and fathers’ is at work earning a living.  And the idea that children need both parents, regardless of their marital status, gets lost entirely.

Now, the Science Daily article’s quotations of Miller are freighted with the language of social justice.  So we learn from her that,

“This state court system has become a leader in the search for evidence-based solutions to the problem of implicit bias.”

The notion of implicit bias is among the most dubious in all of current public discourse (City Journal, Autumn, 2017).  In the area of race, for example, it assumes that, although demonstrable racial bias or discrimination has much decreased in the last 40 years, it still exists in all of us, hidden deep within our unconscious selves.  As Heather MacDonald said here,

The need to plumb the unconscious to explain ongoing racial gaps arises for one reason: it is taboo in universities and mainstream society to acknowledge intergroup differences in interests, abilities, cultural values, or family structure that might produce socioeconomic disparities.

Given that taboo, the academy searched for and claimed to have found implicit bias.  The problem being that the methodology used to do so was laughably unsound.  I won’t go into the details, but read the MacDonald article linked to for a taste.  In brief, the methodology used to supposedly reveal implicit bias is both scientifically unreliable and invalid.  Even the originators of the “science” of implicit bias now abjure its findings as scientifically unsound.

Greenwald and Banaji now admit that the IAT does not predict biased behavior. The psychometric problems associated with the race IAT “render [it] problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination,” they wrote in 2015, just two years after their sweeping claims in Blind Spot. 

So, despite Miller’s reference to implicit bias, I suspect that the reality driving the judges’ decisions is far more explicit than implicit.  Put simply, judges see women doing the lion’s share of childcare, were probably cared for mostly by their mothers and know that the human race has forever had mothers as our primary caregivers.  It wouldn’t be unusual for them to conclude that mothers should be primary caregivers to children post-divorce.

The problem with that of course is that it ignores the children, specifically their best interests.  Yes, mothers have always done most of the childcare, but children still need their fathers too.  We’re a bi-parental species, so, whatever the proclivities of men and women, if we’re paying attention to children’s needs, we’ll make sure that they maintain real, meaningful relationships with both parents following divorce.  Children attach to both parents very early in life; damaging that attachment is the source of much emotional/psychological damage to the child.  Sadly, that’s what family court judges do every day.

However wrong she is about implicit bias, Miller certainly gets one thing right.

“The significant expertise that judges possess doesn’t inoculate them again decision-making biases, and we can’t expect much change until we see policy reforms that address decision-making procedures in the courtroom.”

One of those policy reforms of course would be to ensure that judges learn the science on what parenting arrangements are best for kids when the adults split up.  I strongly suspect that, once that’s done on a consistent and regular basis, we’ll start to see far greater equality in parenting time than we do now.

November 26, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Canada is not poised to make meaningful change to its divorce and custody laws.  As I mentioned here, it’s poised only to make trivial changes to the wording of existing statutes.  And Barbara Kay isn’t happy about it (Post Millennial, 11/23/18).

Kay of course has for many years been a redoubtable champion of equal parenting, so, when the Canadian Parliament once again simply punts the issue, she’s right to complain.  So is everyone else in the country.  After all, as Kay points out, it’s now been 20 years since the task force specifically appointed to make recommendations for reform did so.  And in those 20 years, essentially nothing has been done.

Everyone agrees that government reforms on divorce law were necessary, as Canada’s Divorce Act has not been re-evaluated since it was passed in 1985.

Yes, you’d think that, with something as important as child well-being hanging in the balance, the august members of Parliament might want to actually do something.  And they’re about to.  They’re about to change the words “custody and access” to “decision-making responsibility” and “parenting time.”  Just think: it only took them 20 years to accomplish that.  Such a flurry of activity positively makes the head spin.

If they’d only take about 10 minutes and read Kay’s article, they’d have everything they need to make the right decisions about family law reform.

Shared parenting should be the default for custody

The elephant will only go away with a presumption in law of Shared Parenting – also known as Equal Parenting – as the default for custody (rebuttable in cases of abuse).

Shared/Equal Parenting means children spend literally equal, or near-equal time with each parent, unless a parent is a demonstrable risk to the child…

Winner-takes-all mentality around divorce litigation.

In family court litigation, mothers are overwhelmingly favoured to win sole custody. Everyone knows of this court advantage, which motivates women to refuse compromise and motivates fathers (especially those without the deep pockets to take an odds-against chance) to pre-concede defeat (i.e. they make this decision “in the shadow of the court”), and become visitors in their children’s lives.

That last is a vital point.  Opponents of shared parenting occasionally claim that fathers don’t really want equal time with their kids post-divorce.  They point to the fact that the huge majority of child custody cases are agreed to by the parents.  “If Dad wanted equal custody, why isn’t that reflected in his agreement?” is the argument.

Kay’s point is the answer.  Family judges’ pro-mother bias is well known and the great majority of fathers don’t have the money to fight out the matter in court, particularly since they figure the outcome will be the same whether they do or don’t.  That commonsense approach by fathers is backed up by the still-important study by Maccoby and Mnookin called “Dividing the Child.”  In it they found that, even when fathers request custody, they only get it in about  9% of cases.

And of course,

Canadians support shared parenting

Every credible government survey on this issue, going back to 2000, indicates that Canadians strongly support Shared Parenting as the fairest and most child-friendly model. A 2017 Nanos poll indicated very firm support for Shared Parenting, regardless of age, gender, region and political affiliation.

That support generally runs between 70% and 80%, but Parliament casually ignores the will of the Canadian people.

And of course it ignores the science on shared parenting.

In a 2012 article published in The American Journal of Family Therapy, Kruk offers 16 evidence-supported Arguments for an Equal Parenting Responsibility Presumption in Contested Child Custody. Amongst them, Kruk shows how and why equal parenting:

preserves children’s relationships with both parents and vice-versa (about 30% of children have no contact with their non-custodial fathers);

reduces feelings of insecurity and rejection in children;

decreases parental conflict (40% of first-time incidence of family violence occurs after an adversarial separation);

respects children’s wishes (70% of children of divorce approve equal parenting, as do 93% of the 8% of children raised in ESP homes);

reduces incidence of ignorance- or bias-based judicial decisions;

reduces the risk of parental alienation that can and does flourish under sole custody conditions;

guarantees what should be children’s and parents’ Charter rights to each other’s love and companionship, as enunciated in the United Nations declaration regarding the rights of children.

Many other social scientists have studied this subject in depth, and the evidence is in: Shared Parenting by fit parents promotes the best outcomes in child well-being measured on multiple axes.

A meta-study including findings by 110 experts concludes that Shared Parenting is the best model, even for toddlers and infants, and even in instances where there is high conflict between parents (but no abuse of children by either).

But Parliament isn’t interested.  What interests the members isn’t children’s well-being, it’s, well, self-interest.

This [winner-take-all] model is supported by two groups, both of whom are stakeholders and not disinterested: most family law lawyers who benefit financially from litigation, and feminist groups who frankly advocate for the paradigm that tends to reward women, in the belief that fathers are less important to children than mothers.

I must quibble with that last statement.  Sole custody doesn’t “reward” women; far from it.  It limits their earning ability and increases their stress.  With so much of their time spent on childcare, they’re unable to save as much for retirement or advance as much in their careers.  It keeps them financially dependent on their ex.  The only “reward” they receive is the obligation of 80-100% of the childcare responsibility.  All else is negative.

Here in the U.S., the move toward sanity in family courts is very much under way.  Canada does many things that can be considered better than what we do in the U.S.  Sadly, family law and practice aren’t among them.