Category: Blog

September 17, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

With divorce rates on the rise in India, it’s time our lawmakers gave serious thought to amending the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act to alleviate the trauma that children of estranged parents undergo during the divorce proceedings and the custodial battle.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The linked-to article goes to bat for a presumption of shared parenting in India (Hindustan Times, 9/12/18).

At present, courts are empowered to grant a child’s custody to either parent depending on the child’s overall interests and well-being. 

So it appears that Indian courts don’t have the authority to order shared parenting, even if they want to. That said though, they’ve done so in the past.

In 2013, the Karnataka High Court ruled in a case that both parents were entitled to get custody and brought into operation an appropriate parenting plan.

That of course is to avoid the trauma to the child of losing one parent to the divorce process.

 [G]iven the impact that alienation from either parent can have on the child, choosing between the father and the mother without taking a considered view of the possibilities of joint parenting might work against the child’s interests. Granting parenting rights to just one parent can play havoc with the child’s emotional and psychological well-being. “Non-custodial parents are relegated to the role of mere visitors in their child’s life and are not allowed to fulfil their parenting role, resulting in the destruction of the parent-child relationship,” argues the petition.

Predictably, shared parenting in India has its opponents and, just as predictably, their arguments are as threadbare there as they are here. Indeed, they’re the same arguments.

But the concept of joint parenting also has its critics. Detractors argue that shared parenting is an impractical alternative to granting exclusive custody to one parent, with visitation rights to the other. The child cannot be expected to shuttle between visiting the residences of the two parents.

Of course the reality is that shared parenting has been shown by large volumes of social science to be the best alternative for kids when their parents divorce. Yes, the parents have to be fit and able to parent the child properly, but, since almost all parents are, shared parenting should be the overwhelming rule in India as elsewhere.

The writer’s optimistic that the drift of Indian legislation and court practice may be in that direction.

But the consensus of the judiciary appears to be moving towards shared parenting, albeit gradually.

Let’s hope so.

September 16, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

It’s not just the camel’s nose that’s inside the tent; now the whole smelly beast is living with us.  It’s eating our food and drinking our wine.  How long before it asks us to leave our own tent?  How long after that will it be before it simply shoves us out?

I refer of course to child protective authorities.  What began as a laudable effort to protect children from abusive parents has become a multi-billion dollar industry that grows larger every year.  To do that, it’s had to identify an ever-increasing number of parental behaviors that qualify as abuse.  Or neglect.  Or the risk of abuse.  Or the risk of neglect.  Or emotional harm.  Or the risk of emotional harm (The Guardian, 9/14/18).

It appears that the number of children being subjected to state oversight of their upbringing has been increasing in the U.K. and the major justification for that is “emotional harm” or the risk thereof.

The number of children put on to local authority care plans because their parents have been accused of emotional abuse has soared over the past decade, research has found, amid warnings that some families are being broken up without justification.

Analysis of national care statistics shows that the use of “emotional abuse” as a reason for starting a child protection plan has increased by 164% since 2007-8.

Unsurprisingly, the increase in findings of emotional abuse or the risk thereof isn’t evenly distributed.  The poor and less-educated, as usual, bear the brunt of the state’s interventions.

Andy Bilson, emeritus professor of social work at the University of Central Lancashire, who compiled the statistics, said the chance of a parent being found to have emotionally abused their child depended on where they lived. “There’s a postcode lottery which means children in some areas of the country are at much higher risk of being taken into care for emotional abuse than they are if they live somewhere else,” he said.

Just as predictably, authorities seem to believe that families should be broken up, not because of what has happened, but because of what they say they believe might happen in the future.

The use of “risk of emotional harm” as a reason for applying to a court for a care order before any harm has happened has become increasingly contentious as care numbers have risen.

How is “emotional harm” defined?  How is “risk of emotional harm” defined?  The article doesn’t say, but I’d be very surprised if the definitions are in the least rigorous.  Here in the U.S., children supposedly must have been actually subjected to abuse or neglect in order for CPS to step in.  But of course even those fairly easy to understand terms are routinely expanded in individual cases or ignored altogether.  The point being that, if that can happen when terms are reasonably clear, imagine what can happen when they’re muddy and amorphous.

But, as is usual with child protective authorities, the question is whether state intervention makes matters better or worse.  It is the tendency of caseworkers to, when in doubt, intervene.  As a practical matter, that means taking children out of their homes and away from their parents (and often from their siblings).  Doing so is emotionally traumatic for children even when the circumstances of their home lives require it.  Because of that trauma, caseworkers should be extremely cautious about taking children from their parents.  That should be done only when it’s clear the parents are abusive or incapable of caring properly for their kids. 

But inevitably, it becomes more than that.  Cases thereof are legion.  Children are taken from parents because the adults allowed them to walk to a nearby park by themselves, because, under Mom’s watchful eye, they were allowed to play in a cul-de-sac, because they had to walk across a driveway to access sanitary facilities.  And on, and on, and on.

That children may suffer emotional distress at home does not justify state authorities ensuring that they suffer emotional distress by taking them from that home and lodging them with strangers.  And yet, that is what is going on in the U.K.

…Bilson said many families were suffering without reason.

“There were nearly 120,000 investigations last year in England that didn’t lead to a child protection plan, so there’s a lot of collateral damage going on here,” he said. “It’s not just that we’ve had more findings of emotional abuse, it’s that we’ve had a huge increase in investigations that don’t lead to any child protection concerns.”

September 14, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Amazingly, Forbes has allowed itself to become the vehicle for some truly misleading claims by British writer Lauren Coulman (Forbes, 9/12/18). Her subject is the earnings gap between men and women. Unable to produce figures or facts indicating the gap’s being the result of anti-female discrimination, Coulman resorts to verbal legerdemain.

[A]ccording to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the earning gap between mothers and fathers widens over the first twenty years a mother returns to work, resulting in a 30% pay differential between similarly educated parents.

I suppose Coulman hoped readers wouldn’t click on her link, but I did. Did you think it was a link to a study conducted by the IFS? I did, but alas I was mistaken. It’s a link to a two-minute video describing some of the study’s findings. Unsurprisingly, given such a short time, the video doesn’t offer much information. But it does support Coulman’s claim, right? Wrong again.

The video establishes that, when women take time off work to have a child, the graph of their earnings growth fails to continue upward, or at least it’s a less steep upward progression. This of course is scarcely news. The IFS then asked why that’s the case.

It found that just under half of the reduced increase in wages is due to the woman’s having taken time off for the child and the loss of experience, seniority, etc. that entails. What’s more important is that they tend to work part-time.

Now, from what I could gather from the video, the IFS didn’t compare men’s and women’s aggregate earnings, but their hourly earnings. So the hourly earnings of part-time workers tend to rise less quickly than those of full-time workers. Mothers tend to work part time more than do fathers, so their earnings increase less rapidly. The IFS speculated as to why that is, but didn’t resolve the issue, at least not yet.

The answer to the question shouldn’t be terribly hard to find. Part-time workers are less important to employers because they have less connection to the company, less experience in their job, are more likely to quit, etc. Also, they’re more easily replaced due in part to the foregoing. So naturally, wage increases for part-time employees tend to lag those of full-time workers.

What’s most remarkable about the IFS video is that it nowhere attributes one whit of the earnings gap to anti-female discrimination. Indeed, the speaker on the video describes a number of possibilities that might explain the male-female earnings differential, but never mentions discrimination.

That of course is entirely at odds with Coulman’s thesis, leaving us to wonder why she linked to the video at all.

The root cause [of the gap]? Honestly, maternity discrimination, seen in the pay gap swinging into action for women around childbearing age.

Having cited a video that clearly explains the earnings gap and never speaks a word about discrimination, Coulman naturally concludes that discrimination must be the cause. Make sense? This is what people resort to when they have no evidence for the claims they wish to make. Oh, I know, they could alter their ideology to fit the facts instead of trying alter the facts to fit their ideology, but where’s the fun in that?

Coulman stumbles on.

Add to that the 77% of expecting or working mums who face prejudice in the workplace—opportunities for promotion removed, reductions in salary, being overlooked for pay rises and growth opportunities—and you have a situation where the simple fact of having a child erodes your earning potential and opportunity to enjoy a fulfilling career.

Well, scarcely. The link she provides this time is to the Equality and Human Rights Commission of Great Britain. And friend, if anyone could locate anti-female discrimination anywhere, any time, the Commission could. It doesn’t.

Coulman claims that 77% of working mothers “face prejudice in the workplace.” The Commission article to which she links says no such thing. In fact it reports “77% of working mothers reporting potentially discriminatory or negative experiences…”

Oh. So there is in fact not a word in the piece stating 77% of mothers being discriminated against. The reality is that 77% of them say they’ve experienced discrimination or “negative experiences.” That’s a long, long way from actual discrimination.

Perhaps more telling is that fewer than 1% of them bothered to take their claims to an impartial tribunal for adjudication.

… less than 1% pursued a claim to the employment tribunal.

Those tribunals are of course the places in which we can learn whether claims of discrimination have merit or not. The simple fact is that we can’t know whether there’s much discrimination toward mothers because virtually none of them are willing to put their allegations to the test. Needless to say, that says a lot about their confidence in the merits of those allegations.

Mothers are indeed paid less than they would be if they didn’t stay home with the kids. Mothers tend strongly to want to have, as their primary “job,” the care and nurturing of their children. This is no surprise given the facts of human evolution. If there is discrimination lurking abroad in the land, by all means, we should stamp it out. But evidence thereof is sorely lacking and has been since the minute the “wage gap” was raised as an issue. Writers like Coulman, with their dicey “logic” and cooked-up conclusions do no favors either to their own movements or to the level of public discourse.

September 13, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The campaign against recognizing parental alienation continues in this article (BBC, 9/12/18). The writer, “education editor” Branwen Jeffreys should consider educating herself before writing such a piece. The nut of the matter according to Jeffreys is that the very existence of PA is “controversial” and so any claim that it’s occurring should be looked at askance.

It’s a remarkable stance given the fact that the very reason she’s writing is that,

This autumn, social workers who look after a child’s interests in the family courts are being given new guidelines to help with these cases.

For the first time this will consider the possibility a child has been deliberately turned against one parent, by the other.

Now, if Jeffreys knew the first thing about PA, she’d regard the fact that social workers are just now being instructed to look for it with astonishment and outrage. After all, large volumes of evidence have for years demonstrated not only the existence of PA, but its pernicious effects not only on children, but on the adults they one day become. As psychologist Linda Gottlieb has written, mental health professionals have been noticing, recording and writing about what we now call parental alienation since at least the 1950s. Why British social workers are just now taking note should send people into the streets with pitchforks and torches. But for Jeffreys, the issue isn’t this very late recognition, but its recognition at all.

It’s a controversial concept which the courts have been trying to grapple with for years in cases where the parents are locked into entrenched legal action over contact.

There is no consensus and not a great deal of research, so how might it be considered by courts here?

Hmm. Actually, the concept isn’t controversial, there is a consensus and a lot of research. That’s three errors about the most basic aspects of parental alienation in two sentences. Most impressive, Ms. Jeffreys.

The concept of PA is so uncontroversial that it’s included in the DSM V, albeit under different headings. My understanding is that the International Statistical Classification of Diseases does too, but I can’t say for certain. Plus, any attorney with much experience in family court has seen cases of PA.

So how common might parental alienation be?

Amazingly, Jeffreys asks the question but makes no effort to answer it. Had Jeffreys asked researcher Sadie Leder Elder, who actually published a study of the prevalence of PA among divorcing couples, she’d have learned that about 13% of divorced parents have been alienated from their children. That means that, here in the U.S., some 22 million parents have suffered that fate. Elder calls PA “pervasive.”

But she didn’t ask Elder. Instead she asked Liz Trinder, whose shoddy work I’ve discussed before. Readers may recall that Trinder reviewed the behavior of family court judges when faced with applications to enforce parenting time orders, 86% of which were filed by fathers. Trinder found those courts to be behaving quite appropriately despite having not once (in her cohort) actually enforced an order with makeup time or changed custody. In short, Dads received no effective help from the courts and that was just how Trinder liked it. And sure enough, here’s Trinder:

“The problem with the alienation concept is that if your premise is the child has been brainwashed, it means you can’t trust what the child is saying to the court. So if you make an accusation of alienation it almost automatically casts suspicion on anything the child might say.”

That would be a problem if the premise of PA “is that the child has been brainwashed,” but of course it’s not. That’s very much the question to be answered and there’s a protocol for doing so. No competent mental health professional does what Trinder claims. If that’s what she believes PA to be, maybe she should read a book on the subject. I can recommend several.

The consequences of a diagnosis of alienation can have a huge impact on a child, she argues, with some supporters of the concept arguing it should lead to a transfer of care and residency.

“Supporters of alienation will generally insist that should be done literally overnight. So the child is removed from the alienating parent and placed with the so called innocent parent, and the child won’t have any contact with the first parent. For me that feels like child abuse”

Notice that, for Trinder, only the diagnosis of PA can have an impact on the child, not PA itself. I’d be more impressed with her concern about child abuse if she acknowledged that alienation is exactly that, but of course she doesn’t. Study after study, all published in volumes to which Trinder has access, reveal the reality and the brutality of alienation. So when Trinder and Jeffreys attempt to cast aspersions on the very concept of PA, they come perilously close to promoting child abuse themselves.

Here for example is an article by Dr. Amy Baker citing some of the well-known aspects of parental alienation (The Attached Family, 11/8/08). They include items the likes of Trinder and Jeffreys should consider, but won’t. Their agenda is to convince anyone who’ll listen that the very notion of PA is “controversial” and shouldn’t be credited. Responsible professionals in mental health and law fields know better.

September 12, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Recently I wrote a piece, once again pointing out the profound ignorance of British former family lawyer, John Bolch. His blog post was about child support and, as is always the case with Bolch, contained many smug assertions that don’t bear even casual scrutiny. But I find I was too kind.

Bolch tossed off the usual boilerplate about child support. In answer to the hypothetical question of why a non-resident parent should have to pay child support, Bolch responded with this, assuming the truth to be self-evident:

[A] child costs money to maintain, and the primary responsibility to maintain falls upon both parents.

That sound fair enough, right? It’s nothing but common sense, surely. Or is it? Consider this article from Louisiana (KPLCTV, 9/5/18). It’s a column to which people can write with their questions about various matters in family court. So here’s the question one person sent in:

I have been paying child support directly to my ex-wife for several months. I have receipts for payments. Support Enforcement now tells me that the receipts are not good, and since I haven’t paid through them, I have to pay back child support. Is this right?

And here’s the nut of the answer:

Technically, the payments are owed to Support Enforcement and not to the mother.

Yes, it’s one of the many miraculous achievements of the child support system that “child support” isn’t owed to the child or to the residential parent, but to the state. Prior to that system, courts were tasked with keeping track of child support owed and paid and all of it was paid by the non-resident parent to the resident parent. No longer.

So Bolch’s sunny belief that common sense prevails, that children require money to support and it’s the parents who must do so makes sense, but contradicts reality. Has the father who wrote to the advice column supported his child? Of course he has, but the fact is irrelevant to the case. He didn’t pay the state and so his effort is void ab initio. Remember that the next time someone brays that child support is for the child. It’s not.

Needless to say, it may be different in the U.K. but my money’s on it’s being the same.

Bolch plunged on to say that fathers’ complaints that they can’t tell whether their money goes to support their child or not is pointless. He did so because, after all, money is a fungible good, so any funds paid to a mother who in fact supports and cares for the child, necessarily redound to the child’s benefit. And who could argue?

Well, it turns out the law in the U.S. could.

However, it may be possible to defeat the Support Enforcement position if the payer can show that that mother requested it or that the money directly benefited the child.

Therefore, when Dad pays Mom directly, the entire notion of the fungible nature of money flies out the window. All of a sudden, the burden falls on Dad to in some way prove that the money he handed to Mom was spent by her for the child. How he’s supposed to do that, I can’t imagine. How does he trace his check to a package of Pampers?

When dads complain that they don’t know if their money is being spent on the child, they’re told to stick a sock in it; money is fungible, so necessarily, the child benefits. When Dad pays directly to Mom instead of to the state, all of a sudden that obvious fact vanishes like morning mist and Dad is told to pay again. There’s a weird sort of consistency to that. See if you can figure out what it is.

Interestingly, even the statement quoted above appears to be overly friendly to the paying ex. Note that it says that Dad can defeat the enforcement position either by showing that the money directly benefitted the child or that Mom requested that he pay her directly instead of sending it to the state. In the very next sentence, the column contradicts that.

Louisiana case law has held that Child Support payments, that are ordered to be paid through Support Enforcement, but instead are paid by the obligor parent directly to the obligee parent do not entitle the obligor to an offset or credit unless the payments were made for the direct benefit of the child(ren) and at the request of the obligee.

Note that what began as an ‘or’ immediately transformed itself into an ‘and.’ In fact, Mom has to have requested direct payment and Dad has to show that his money directly benefitted the child.

What’s Dad’s only way out of this Dickensian situation?

[I]f the ex-wife wants to waive the arrears due to the fact that the other parent made direct payments, she may have the arrears waived.

So if Mom elects to refuse extra money, she may. I’m sure that happens all the time.

Bolch aside, the whole notion that child support is strictly for the benefit of the child is demonstrably absurd. It should be that way, but it isn’t. After all, what possible policy is furthered by telling a father who very plainly has supported his child that he hasn’t? How does it make sense that the only way to support your child is to send money to the state? And don’t forget; the state is ever-ready to suspend the driver’s license and other occupational licenses and send to jail a father, just like the one who asked the question. Having supported his child in full, he’s “in arrears” and the state is waiting to pounce.

NPO’s Ohio Parenting Time Report is getting a lot of media attention in Ohio, with journalists in different counties asking how their county fared and how things can change. Research shows that children do better when they have plenty of time with both parents, and this report is leading those in Ohio to ask, “how can we do better?” 

September 10, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Even Ph.Ds. in psychology don’t get it (Fox News, 9/9/18). Honestly, you’d think Dr. Kevin Leman would, but alas, he doesn’t. If you’re going to advise clients going through divorce (which he does), it would seem to be Job One to, you know, read the literature on the subject.

Leman offers some perfectly sound advice to parents about how to deal with their kids during divorce.

With divorce’s bomb, [the child]’s understandably upset, especially if he’s already part of the hormone group. So give him some grace, but don’t excuse disrespect and foul language. Though the heat of the moment isn’t the best time to take on negative behaviors, the next day is fair game: “Let’s circle back to what happened yesterday. I know you’re hurting, but what you said really hurt me. I’m your mother – not your psychological punching bag. We will get through this tough time, but I want to do that in a healthy way. I’ll do my part the best I can, and I need you to do your part the best you can too. Can we agree on that?”

And,

Your ex isn’t likely your favorite person, but don’t use your kids as a sounding board for your squabbles. Putting down your ex is only asking your kids to make him into “Father of the Year.” So, for their sake, extend an olive branch – as much as he might not deserve it. Don’t extract information about what they did at your ex’s or who was there. You aren’t licensed to be a private eye. Instead, provide a warm environment (food helps!) and some non-stressed space to return to. If they want to talk, believe me, they will – of their own volition – and you’ll learn a lot more than any extraction technique known to humankind.

All that is sensible enough. It’s also nothing anyone should pay good money for. It’s about as basic a set of common sense as you’re likely to find. Any reasonably bright friend, neighbor or relative who truly has your best interests at heart could give you the same for free. Still, it’s fine as far as it goes.

As to shared parenting though, Leman’s woefully ignorant of the basics. He simply recycles what any anti-shared parenting lawyer would write in an op-ed for a publication that doesn’t know any better.

With most divorces, parents want to do the 50/50 kid split, but that approach takes a toll on already-stressed kids. That’s why – as improbable and crazy as it might sound – I tell divorcing couples, “If you’re so high on having to spend equal time with your kid, then you two move from place to place and let the kid stay in his own home.” After all, who’s the adult here?

And I could ask Leman, “who’s the psychologist here, me or you?”

Here’s the reality. Divorce is hard on kids, but the best outcome for them is 50/50 shared parenting time, assuming both parents are fit and their geographical separation doesn’t make it impossible. The old chestnut that 50/50 time takes a toll on kids because they’re bouncing between one parent and another is simply flat wrong. Whatever problems they have due to that are far more than outweighed by the benefits of maintaining real, meaningful relationships with both parents. As Dr. Malin Bergstrom’s research in Sweden shows, 50/50 time is a better arrangement for kids than any other save living in an intact family with their mother and father.

As a service to Dr. Leman, this link to the National Parents Organization website handily condenses most of the important research on shared parenting when it’s compared to other post-divorce arrangements and in a wide array of different families, e.g. those with infants or toddlers, those in which there’s high conflict, etc.

The results are in. They’ve been in for a long time. Equal parenting of kids following divorce is best for them. Psychologists like Leman need to take a few hours out of their lives, go to the NPO website and read the material that demonstrates the fact. Then, and only then, should they take to the pages of major publications to opine about the matters of parents, kids and divorce.

Thanks to Don for the heads-up.

September 9, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s yet another story that argues persuasively for requiring women to name the father of a child one gives birth to (NewsHub, 4/9/18).

An Australian man the article calls Kerry and a woman, Julie, had a one-night stand 20 years ago. She had a child and named Kerry the father. He assumed she was telling the truth. She wasn’t. For the next 18 years, he paid child support for the child. For some reason,

Kerry, who lives in the coastal town of Cervantes in Western Australia, was speaking with a child support consultant who told him their records didn’t have a result for a DNA test.

“I said, ‘because I didn’t have one’,” Kerry told Channel 9’s A Current Affair.

“And he pretty much on the phone called me a stupid idiot and to go and get one done as soon as I could.”

He did and it revealed he’s not the father. So Kerry’s out about $58,000 Australian, paid for a child who’s not his. Given that, what’s also true is that some man hasn’t supported his child, nor has he been permitted to have a relationship with the child. And of course the child hasn’t had a father.

All of that is true for one reason and one reason only – we don’t require women to identify the father of their children. We do bizarre and utterly unnecessary things like presuming a married man to be the father of any child born to his wife. That might have made since before we could do reliable DNA testing, but now we can, and we should. We should test every child at birth.

But until that happens, we should require women to identify the father. After all, we in the United States place that requirement on women who receive Temporary Aid to Needy Families, so why not do it across the board. As a practical matter, that would mean requiring them to name every man with whom they’d had sex at or near the time of conception. In Kerry’s case, that would have conferred many benefits on many people – Kerry, the actual father and the child.

Gender feminists argue that a woman’s right to privacy trumps the interests of all those three. But of course U.S. law has never recognized a right to withhold the name of the father of one’s child or, alternatively, all possible fathers. If it did, the requirement that mothers receiving TANF benefits could never exist. But it does.

Plus, the notion that the commission of fraud in order to obtain money from another person should be enabled by the right to privacy finds no place in any sensible national policy.

Predictably, Julie blames Kerry for the fraud she perpetrated on him.

In a statement sent to A Current Affair, Julie denied any intentional wrong-doing, saying instead that Kerry had been offered the opportunity to check the paternity but didn’t take it.

“Over the last 18 years Kerry has had the chance to get a DNA test, but as myself and Child Support could never get in contact with him, it never happened, and now he is coming out with accusations that are unfounded and untrue,” she said.

Kerry’s a commercial fisherman and, I assume difficult to reach when he’s at sea. But what Julie doesn’t mention is the fact that she had sex with another man at or near the time of conception. She didn’t tell Kerry that. She didn’t’ tell the other man. And she didn’t tell the Child Support Agency. If she had, the actual father could have formed a relationship with his child, helped support him/her and the child would have had a dad. The fault is Julie’s; the fraud is hers and hers alone. Kerry’s only fault was in believing her. I suspect he’s learned his lesson.

Julie will likely be required to pay back the support, but as she is not currently employed, she could pay just $49.80 a fortnight.

After feeling hassled “non-stop” by the Child Support Agency, Kerry now feels as though it should be responsible for repaying him.

“They accepted me as the father without any proof.”

Moms repaying fraudulently obtained child support would never happen in the U.S. and I’m amazed that New Zealand requires it. Of course at $100 per month, it’ll take Julie 580 months to pay off the debt. I’m assuming there will be no interest attached to her debt, the way there is to unpaid child support.

But she needn’t worry. Julie can simply name the other man with whom she had sex and he’ll be required to pay “child support” to her for a “child” who’s now roughly 20 years old and, one assumes, out of the nest and on her own. There’s no statute of limitations on child support, so, somewhere there’s a man who’s in for a rude surprise. He’ll get to pay 18 years of support for a child who’s no longer a child and whom he’s never met. And who knows? Maybe he’ll be much better off financially than is Kerry. That would mean he’d have to pay much more and possibly in a lump sum. So our Julie possibly stands to make out like a bandit, potentially receiving a very large sum of money up front, while dribbling out $100 a month to the man she defrauded.

Good work, if you can get it.

This poll taken by Public Policy Polling after the passage of the first in the nation shared parenting law in Kentucky shows that voters overwhelmingly support shared parenting after divorce or separation. The poll results are getting a lot of media attention, which is great news for the shared parenting movement! This article through the Public News Service includes an interview with NPO of Kentucky Chair Matt Hale. We will keep our readers updated on these great results for shared parenting around the nation. 

September 5, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Do I see the next exhibit on offer by those who seek to convince anyone who’ll listen that parental alienation is junk science and a plot by fathers to wrest custody from “protective mothers?” I just may. Richard Ducote and the various journalists who’ve put forward that nonsense may want to take note. Karin Wolf may be just the person for them.

Wolf’s latest shenanigans have involved abducting her 14-year-old child from its father, Edward Crane (North Jersey, 9/3/18). She was apprehended after a nine-day investigation by multiple law enforcement agencies. She’s been charged with interference with child custody and contempt of court in Glen Rock, New Jersey.    

As we so often see, Wolf was given primary custody of the couple’s two children after they divorced in 2007. Three years later, Crane filed for custody claiming Wolf was alienating the children. Apparently the judge agreed because custody was transferred to Crane. That didn’t sit well with Wolf.

At some point, she established the “Women’s Civil Liberties Union,” that looks very much like nothing but a website created by Karin Wolf to air her grievances about anything and everything. If you’re looking for legal advice, don’t take it from Wolf, who’s (a) not a lawyer and (b) has little-to-no concept of the law. For example, she informs visitors that the mere claim by one parent that the other parent is alienating the children constitutes a cause of action under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a claim that’s spectacularly at odds with the truth.

So it’s no surprise that her take on parental alienation itself is just as screwy. Consider:

The segregation of mothers and their children has been achieved via Richard Gardner’s highly-controversial, pseudoscientific theory Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), which has been rejected repeatedly by the American Psychological Association (APA); and fails Daubert and Frye standards.

Gardner was a misogynist who claimed that when the child(ren) do not want to spend time with the father, it is because the mother is alienating him from the child(ren). This is bogus, a bill of attainder against women. It is natural for a child to prefer the mother, it is simply nature. Look at everything from puppies and kittens to cubs and ducklings.

Let’s see how many objectively untrue claims Wolf managed to pack into about 90 words. 1. PA has nothing to do with “segregation of mothers and their children.” 2. PA is not Gardner’s idea having changed considerably from his PAS analysis almost three decades ago. 3. The APA actually included the concept of PA, if not the name, in its most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. 4. PA has met the Daubert and Frye standards many, many times. 5. Gardner’s understanding of PAS was emphatically not that whenever children don’t want to spend time with Dad, it’s necessarily the result of alienation. 6. She has no idea of what a bill of attainder is. It’s a legislative enactment condemning as criminal a specific individual or set of individuals. 7. It is in fact not “natural for a child to prefer the mother.” Humans are bi-parental and the science on children’s attachments is clear that there’s no hierarchy of preference. 8. Puppies and kittens aren’t human beings. Dogs and cats aren’t bi-parental species and humans are. Accordingly, their parental preferences differ from ours.

Not bad. That’s almost one misstatement of fact for every 10 words. I’d say that alone recommends her very well to the protective mother movement as an expert on parental alienation.

But it gets worse, far worse. Wolf turns out to be one of those parents who, when the court does something she doesn’t like, sues everyone in sight. Her suit was a comedy of errors at least for those of us who didn’t have to deal with it. I feel sorry for the federal judge and her clerks who had to wade through Wolf’s 120 pages of legal and factual nonsense.

Now, you may think I overstate the matter when I say she sued everyone in sight. I do, but not by much. She sued something like 58 defendants. Among those were at least one church and its pastor, 12 judges, one superior court, the entire appellate division of the State of New Jersey, lawyers who never represented her, social workers she hadn’t hired and countless court personnel. Many of those people and entities had little or nothing to do with her case. Here’s how Federal Judge Madeline Cox Arleo described Wolf’s petition:

Although Plaintiff’s 120-page Complaint is somewhat difficult to decipher, this action apparently arises out of Plaintiff’s 2007 divorce from her husband, Edward Crane, and ensuing child custody proceedings that ended with the Bergen County Family Court awarding legal and physical custody of the Children to Mr. Crane on August 30, 2013. See id. ¶¶ 86-87. In this lawsuit, Plaintiff names as defendants essentially any person or entity with any conceivable connection to the state court custody proceedings.

And what did she want from her lawsuit? Oh, not much…

Plaintiff seeks declaratory, injunctive, and monetary relief in various forms. See id. ¶ 396. To provide a few examples, Plaintiff asks this Court to do the following: (1) declare the Bergen County Family Court proceedings described above void ab initio for lack of subject matter jurisdiction; (2) enjoin essentially all entities and persons connected to the proceedings from further involvement; (3) order the state entities to provide Plaintiff with free transcripts of the proceedings; (4) temporarily seize all of Defendants’ assets; (5) award $100 million in damages and treble damages under RICO; and (6) award Plaintiff interest calculated from the date Mr. Crane filed his petition for custody in Bergen County Family Court. Id. ¶¶ 396(e), (l)-(n), (s)-(u). In addition, a large number of Plaintiff’s requests for relief are declaratory judgments that call upon this Court to reorganize the New Jersey justice system, create a new federal court for interstate custody disputes, and rewrite New Jersey family law. See id. ¶¶ 396(aa)-(mm).

I particularly like the demand for $400 million in damages and the ones to reorganize the entire state’s judicial system, create a new federal court and rewrite New Jersey family law. Hey, why not think big?

Needless to say, the court dismissed all of Wolf’s claims.

The odd thing is that even someone like Wolf isn’t actually too far out of the mainstream of those who seek to cast doubt on the fact of parental alienation. That’s why I recommend her so highly to them to provide services as an expert. I can see it now – the next article of that sort we see quoting Karin Wolf. After all, didn’t she found an organization with the august-sounding name of the Women’s Civil Liberties Union? She must be an expert, right?