Category: Blog

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

The to-do about the Trump Administration’s decision to enforce criminal law by arresting undocumented aliens, even when they’re in the company of minors gets more hypocritical, ironic and frankly dishonest with each passing day.  It started with a photographic image of kids in holding cells that went viral over social media.  That photo was quickly taken down when it was revealed that it had been taken in 2014, i.e. during the Obama Administration, and therefore couldn’t be used to denigrate the current president.

Then Time Magazine ran on its June 12th cover a photo of a little girl, distraught and weeping, staring up at an apparently unmoved Donald Trump.  The caption read “Welcome to America.”  Of course no such little girl was ever in Trump’s presence.  It was a photo montage, and that much at least was evident.

What wasn’t evident was that, far from being a poster child for the heartlessness of Trump’s policies, the little girl is in fact the precise opposite.  Read about it here (Daily Mail, 6/21/18). 

If that were all there were to the matter, we could put it down simply to the type of hypocrisy we so often see in the press.  As I and so many others have pointed out, the people currently tearing their hair about the plight of some 2,000 children separated from their parents by Trump’s policies, have never lifted a finger or a voice on behalf of children taken from their fathers via divorce or from their parents via CPS.  Many of them, like the New York Times, routinely demean fathers, thereby promoting their marginalization by courts.

But amazingly, the usual hypocrisy is neither the end nor the worst of it.

You see, the little girl on the Time cover hasn’t been separated from her mother at all.

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, [the girl’s father, Denis Javier Varela] Hernandez, who lives in Puerto Cortes, Honduras, says that he was told on Wednesday by a Honduran official in the US that his wife and child are being detained at a family residential center in Texas but are together and are doing ‘fine.’

So the poster child for the trauma of children separated from their parents, well, has never been separated from her mother.  They are together and doing fine.  That’s the dishonest part.

Now for the irony.

Readers probably noticed that I said the child, Yanela Denise, hasn’t been separated from her mother.  That’s true; they’re together.  But what about her father?  She has indeed been separated from him, but not by the Trump Administration or any other U.S. official.  No, she’s been separated from her loving father by, you guessed it, her mother.

Denis said that his wife had previously mentioned her wish to go to the United States for a ‘better future’ but did not tell him nor any of their family members that she was planning to make the trek.

‘I didn’t support it. I asked her, why? Why would she want to put our little girl through that? But it was her decision at the end of the day.’…

He said that Sandra set out on the 1,800-mile journey with the baby girl on June 3, at 6am, and he has not heard from her since.

‘I never got the chance to say goodbye to my daughter and now all I can do is wait’, he said, adding that he hopes they are either granted political asylum or are sent back home.

In short, little Yanela Denise is the victim of parental kidnapping.  She was taken from her home and father in Honduras, subjected to a long and dangerous trip and now she’s detained in a foreign land about which she knows nothing.  Her mother did that despite it’s being against the wishes of Yanela’s father.  That’s kidnapping according to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.  It, like all parental kidnapping, is also child abuse.

So there we have it.  The little girl who was supposed to exemplify the brutality of the Trump Administration (a) does no such thing because she was never separated from her mother, (b) has in fact been separated from her father, not by any U.S. official, but by her mother and (c) has been abused and placed in danger by her mother in the process.

As recently as this past Thursday, Times’s Editor-in-Chief said about the cover:

Under the policy enforced by the administration, prior to its reversal this week, those who crossed the border illegally were criminally prosecuted, which in turn resulted in the separation of children and parents. Our cover and our reporting capture the stakes of this moment.

Indeed it does, just not in the way the EIC meant.

By any standard, this is as big a failure of the narrative insisted on by the press as one could imagine.  It’s factually false and, in their zeal to attack Trump, the media have ended up promoting the very thing they supposedly oppose – the separation of children from their parents.  It’s an achievement of sorts, I suppose.  After all, it’s not easy to be wrong both factually and morally about all aspects of such a story, but Time managed.

I wonder how many stories we’ll read in the next few days about the mother’s abuse of little Yanela, about the serious problem of international child abduction, about the kind, loving father waiting helplessly back home.  But truly, I think I know.  Having failed as a weapon with which to assail President Trump, the media will forget Yanela Denise and move on to other things, all the while continuing to assure us of their deep devotion to “the children.”

June 22, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I return now to Dr. Brad Wilcox’s pre-Fathers’ Day message in which he debunks five popular myths about dads. My first post on that is here.

His second and third myths don’t require a lot of explication. “Women Want Everything 50-50” is well-known to be false. What women and men both want is a firm sense that a relationship is fair, i.e. that neither is pulling too much of the load. That usually means that Mom does most of the child care and Dad most of the earning, or, some version of traditional sex roles. Few couples, if any, attempt to enforce a strict 50-50 sharing of all tasks and, it seems clear to me, anyone who does is incapable of maintaining a serious, stable, intimate relationship.

Wilcox’s third myth, “Cohabiting Dads are Just the Same as Married Dads,” is similarly easy to dispose of. They aren’t and neither are cohabiting mothers. Like it or not, marriage is a great deal more than “just a piece of paper.” Marriage typically means greater emotional commitment of the adults to each other and to their children. That commitment means a longer-lasting relationship and more careful, loving and nurturing parenting of the kids. Much science bears this out.

Meanwhile, Wilcox’s myths Four and Five go together, but he betrays no awareness of the fact. Myth Four claims that “The Kids are Alright.” Again, they’re not. Kids without fathers are indeed far from “alright” and Wilcox makes the point cogently. After skewering the myth-monger and thoroughly loathsome Sandra Tsing Loh, Wilcox offers this:

According to research by Sara McLanahan of Princeton University and Paul Amato of Penn State, girls whose parents’ divorce are about twice as likely to drop out of high school, to become pregnant as teenagers, and to suffer from psychological problems such as depression and thoughts of suicide. New research indicates they are also less likely, as they move into adulthood, to attend and graduate from graduate school. Girls whose parents’ divorce are also much more likely to divorce later in life.

We are also increasing hearing the voices of adult children of divorce, who tell us that the loss of their parents’ marriages brings lifelong, though often hidden, suffering.

Fortunately for everyone, at least among college-educated Americans, the divorce rate is falling sharply. Those are the ones who were kids in the 70s and 80s when adults decided divorce was a “no-harm, no-foul” event that freed adults from less than perfect relationships and weren’t a problem for kids. Those kids, now grown up, know the truth about divorce and do their best to avoid it.

But is it divorce itself that harms kids? Or is it the way divorce is done by state laws and the judges who adjudicate child custody cases? Wilcox’s fifth myth that “Dads are Dispensable” is of course far from the truth, but I find it odd that he didn’t notice the quite obvious connection between the importance of fathers to children and the harm inflicted on kids by divorce. Put simply, divorce and the loss of Dad are often one and the same. Does Wilcox really not see that?

This myth fails to take into account the now-vast social scientific literature showing that children typically do better in an (sic) intact, married families with their fathers than they do in families headed by single mothers.

Very true, but Wilcox left out another arrangement altogether – equally-shared parental care post-divorce. Yes, intact families are better than families headed by single mothers (or fathers). But there’s an alternative to both. Another “vast social science literature” demonstrates that children in shared parenting arrangements tend strongly to do better than those “in families headed by single mothers.” Is Wilcox aware of that science? If he is, you’d think he’d mention it in an article about the value of fathers to children. If he’s not, he has no business opining on the subject.

[The myth] also overlooks the growing body of research indicating that fathers bring distinctive talents to the parenting enterprise. The work of psychologist Ross Parke, for instance, indicates that fathers are more likely than mothers to engage their children in vigorous physical play (e.g., roughhousing), to challenge their children—including their daughters—to embrace life’s challenges, and to be firm disciplinarians.

Not surprisingly, children benefit physically, mentally, and emotionally from being exposed to the distinctive paternal style. Sociologist David Eggebeen has shown, for instance, that teenagers are significantly less likely to suffer from depression and delinquency when they have involved and affectionate fathers, even after controlling for the quality of their relationship with their mother. In his words, “What these analyses clearly show is that mothers and fathers both make vital contributions to adolescent well-being.”

That of course is something every judge ruling in child custody cases should be made to read and reread every day. Human beings are a bi-parental species. Unsurprisingly, the sexes tend to parent differently and children need both forms of care. Mothers’ style tends to inculcate self-esteem, something that everyone needs.

But self-esteem needs to be tempered by an understanding that, while your parents may love you unconditionally, no one else does. To the cop on the beat, your first-grade teacher, the teller at the bank, etc., you’re just another person, one of many, no more entitled to respect or special treatment than the next person. Fathers’ parenting tends to inculcate that understanding in kids. It’s necessary to get along in the world. And it’s necessary to counterbalance mothers’ style of parenting.

June 21, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Articles like this one continue the verbal assault on the Trump Administration’s separation of children from adults when they cross our borders illegally (Detroit Free Press, 6/16/18). In this one, a University of Michigan law professor, Vivek Sankaran, reprises the usual talking points that rightly emphasize the trauma to children when the adults go to prison and the kids go either to detention or foster care. Unquestionably, the children suffer the same trauma that all kids do when they’re separated from their parents. These kids additionally suffer the pain of experiencing that in an unfamiliar place.

Sankaran goes a step further than previous articles to compare the Administration’s policy to that of CPS agencies. To put it mildly, he betrays little knowledge of how the child welfare system actually works. He knows the law well enough, but says nothing about the realities faced by children and parents when attempting to deal with CPS.

[F]ederal and state child welfare laws allow the government to remove children only as a last resort, when physical separation is necessary to assure their own safety.

Indeed, the laws state exactly that. The problem of course arises when caseworkers ignore the law as they routinely do. I can introduce Sankaran to countless parents who’ve had kids shanghaied by child welfare workers when they were in no danger whatsoever. Given that her case played out in Detroit and was reported on by both local papers, you’d think that Sankaran would have heard of Marianne Godboldo whose daughter was taken from her for no good reason, without a court hearing and without a valid order. The image of the SWAT team, replete with armored personnel carriers, that forcibly broke into Godboldo’s home, terrifying her daughter squares poorly with Sankaran’s sunny description of CPS.

Federal law requires child welfare agencies to make “reasonable efforts” to prevent kids from being removed from their parents. That may involve providing families with supports, or arranging for children to live informally with relatives while parents address their issues.

And yet again, the law is routinely ignored by caseworkers. Has Sankaran not read the Urban Institute’s white paper that found that, when children are taken from a mother, no effort was made to contact the father as a potential placement for the child in 55% of cases? I suppose not. Does he know that Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed an executive order all but prohibiting the placement of children with their non-parental relatives? If he does, he carefully didn’t let on.

When child welfare agencies believe that a child faces extreme danger and must be removed, a court must review the agency’s decision, usually between 24 and 72 hours after the removal. And at that removal hearing, both children and parents are typically provided with an attorney, who can demand that the government produce evidence to justify the continued detention of the child.

Again, this is pure fantasy on Sankaran’s part. Those hearings often come much later than the 1 – 3 days he imagines and parents often have no attorney. When they do, the attorney is often provided by the state because the parents are indigent. That attorney has dozens of other cases and neither the time nor the resources to challenge the state’s case. The state’s request is typically rubberstamped by the judge in a hearing that may last as little as a few minutes. Sankaran paints a pretty picture of a process that has one and only one aim – to do what CPS wants. It’s more of a conveyor belt from home to foster care than due process of law.

In short, in order to make his case that the situation with foster kids compares favorably to that of immigrant kids, Sankaran is required to entirely misrepresent the reality of the child welfare system.

Meanwhile, he’s also required to avoid asking some very pertinent questions about our immigration laws and how they are/should be enforced. For example:

It is a violation of federal law for a person to attempt to enter this country without the requisite immigration documents. Should the Trump Administration simply ignore that law in order to keep adults and children together?

If Sankaran agrees that it’s required to enforce the law, what should be done with the child when an adult and child illegally enter the country? The adult is charged and jailed to await trial, so should the child go to jail with him/her?

The answer to that last question is “no,” because doing so would violate another federal law. So what should be done with the children? Should they be put on the street? Returned to their original country without their parents? The Administration is placing them with foster parents when possible, but often it’s not. There aren’t nearly enough foster parents for all the kids who need them, so what is the alternative? Needless to say, Sankaran has nothing to say on the subject, but of course if one is shaping immigration policy, ignoring the problem of what to do with the kids isn’t an option.

Then of course there’s another comparison that Sankaran carefully omitted. I refer of course to what happens every day in the United States and citizens who live here legally. When a parent commits a crime, is charged, convicted and sentenced to incarceration, what happens to the kids? They don’t go to prison with the parent for what should be obvious reasons. If there’s no one else to care for them, they go into foster care, often into a group home.

[P]lacing children in such conditions after separating them from their parents is perhaps the most toxic and cruel sanction a government can inflict on a child. 

And yet we do it every day. Why? Because often there’s no alternative. The same is true in the case of the adults who cross our borders with kids, but without proper documentation.

There’s no shortage of people like Sankaran willing to inveigh against current policy, but again and again, they do so without asking, much less answering those questions. In the real world of actual public policy, that’s not an option.

And some like Sankaran do so by resort to misrepresenting our own child welfare system as some sort of Eden in which parents’ rights are never abused, only children who need it are placed in foster care and, when they are, it’s a safe haven and not the hell on earth so many kids describe.

The Trump Administration’s policy may or may not be the best available. And unquestionably the children suffer when they’re separated from their parents. But that isn’t the end of the inquiry. It’s easy to criticize, but far harder to craft sensible, effective policy that comports with existing law.

June 20, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I’ve done this once, but indirectly.  It’s time to do it directly.

 “It” in the first instance was aimed at the New York Times.  The Times, like so many other news and opinion outlets has been bewailing the Trump Administration’s decision to jail adults who cross our borders in the company of a child.  That decision necessitates removing the child and placing it in either foster care, other temporary care or sometimes in detention.  This has thrown many serial opiners into quite a tizzy.  Imagine how the children suffer!

And of course they do.  The Times piece was actually quite moving as it described the anguish one little Honduran boy experienced over being separated from his father who’d tried to cross the border illegally and landed in jail.

My point then as now was that the Times routinely expresses the most virulent anti-father sentiments.  It does so in a variety of ways, including articles, op-eds, opinions by featured columnists, forums and the like.  Put simply, prior to the article about the little Honduran boy, I can’t recall a single Times piece that had anything positive to say about fathers.  So I found it odd that, after all these years, the editors had finally located a father about whom they could say a good word.

More importantly, where is the Times when the issue of shared parenting comes up, as it does more and more these days?  Answer: AWOL.  It mostly has nothing to say on the subject, and, given its routine denigration of fathers and men, that adds up to apparent opposition to shared parenting.

Well, guess what happens when family courts rule in child custody and parenting time cases.  Yes, they routinely remove fathers from children’s lives.  They’ve been doing so for decades with nary a peep from the Times.  In other words, it’s hard not to take the paper’s current excitement about Latino fathers and children at all seriously.  Their “concern” is nothing but a stalking horse for the usual anti-Trump bent.

That of course raises the question of why the Trump Administration is conducting this policy as it is.  Well, it seems to be trying to correct the previous policy of the Obama Administration.  Apparently that included simply citing undocumented adults with children and hoping they turned up in court for their immigration hearing.  Unsurprisingly, some 80% of them didn’t.

I strongly suspect too that, with that policy in place, the word went out that crossing the border with a child – whether yours or not – was an undocumented person’s “Get Out of Jail Free” card.  Several sites have reported that often the children with adults crossing the border weren’t the children of those adults.

So apparently the Trump Administration is trying to clamp down on that practice.  Of necessity, if an undocumented adult is arrested, U.S. authorities are faced with few alternatives regarding any child travelling with that adult.  They can’t jail the child too because doing so would violate federal law. They can place the child in some sort of detention or they can place the child in some form of state care.  That seems to be what’s going on.  If someone has a better idea, I’d like to hear it.

But of course the practicalities of (a) enforcing U.S.  law and (b) dealing with the children of undocumented adults crossing the border illegally, are as nothing to those whose sole function in life seems to be attacking the Trump Administration.  They’ve got their story and they’re stickin’ to it.

The problem for them as for the Times is that we all know they don’t mean a word of it.  That’s because the various news media that are riding this particular horse – MSNBC, CNN, WaPo, the Times, etc. –  never give a tinker’s “damn!” about the children of divorce.  Many of them too lose their fathers for no better reason than that the judge hasn’t been educated about the parenting arrangement that truly functions in the child’s best interests. 

Where are their anguished cries in support of those kids?  Silent.  Where’s their support for shared parenting?  Nowhere to be found.

To them I say, do the hard work of making real change in state family courts that seeks to reconnect children to their fathers.  Do that day after day, month after month for many years.  Then we’ll believe that you care about immigrant children.  Until then, we won’t.

June 18, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Prior to Fathers’ Day and, to prepare readers for the expected spate of ill-informed articles about dads, W. Brad Wilcox published this piece. I’ve criticized Wilcox before for his complete failure to grasp – or apparently even consider – the many downsides of marriage for men. But his most recent piece is spot-on.

He takes on five myths about fathers. I’ll deal with them each, one at a time.

The first myth is that of the “Mr. Mom Surge.”

Open a newspaper or turn on a TV in the week leading up to Father’s Day and you are bound to confront a story on stay-at-home dads.

Yes, it’s astonishing that, all too often, in order to honor fathers, articles seem to have to make them look as much like mothers as possible. So a stay-at-home father manages to be acceptable to the journalistic powers that be where a dad who merely supports his family, provides food, shelter, clothing, school supplies, medical care and the like, in addition to hands-on parenting, for some reason is assumed to be lacking.

Wilcox points out what’s obvious from even a casual glance at, for example, Census Bureau data: there are vastly more stay-at-home mothers as there are stay-at-home fathers. The last time I looked the numbers stood at about six million SAHMs and under 200,000 SAHDs. And of course those figures undercount both. To meet the Census Bureau’s definition of a stay-at-home parent, one must have earned no income at all from employment over the previous 12 months and one’s chief use of time must be caring for one’s own children. Stated another way, if Mom earned $50 for cleaning someone’s house within the past year, and all the rest of the time she was at home with her kids, she’s not a SAHM.

Dads now represent slightly more than 5% of all stay-at-home parents, which means the vast majority of stay-at-home parents are still moms, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. For instance, in 2017, 267,000 of America’s 21 million married fathers with children under 15 were at home caring for their children. By contrast, about 23 percent (4.96 million) of those families had a stay-at-home mom (as of 2017.)

So there are a tad more SAHDs today than when I first checked the data several years ago. Wilcox’s point (and mine) is that, overwhelmingly, mothers prefer to care for kids and fathers prefer to support their families. Hence, Mom drops out of the workforce, either all or part of the way, and Dad ups his time working and earning. Countless couples choose that way to care for their children and support them. Whatever Brave New World assumptions we run into about men and women joyfully casting off the shackles of traditional sex roles, the reality is that, when little Andy or Jenny first comes along, those roles have a way of reasserting themselves.

The focus on Mr. Mom obscures another important reality. In most American families headed by two parents today, fathers still take the lead when it comes to breadwinning, even though mothers play a larger role in breadwinning than they used to. Specifically, married fathers earn about two-thirds of the income in married families with children at home.

Recall that, about four years ago, the Census Bureau revealed that 41% of households in the U.S. now have a woman as their main breadwinner. That was greeted by hosannas from much of the press. See, they said, it’s the Brave New World after all. Look at the progress we’re making toward gender equality.

It was nonsense of course. Yes, 41% of households had a woman as their main earner, but that was true because, in the great majority of those households, the woman was the only breadwinner. Her only competition was her children. The figure was a proxy for single motherhood, not how much more women are working and earning than before.

To get an idea of the latter reality, Prof. Margaret Ryznar looked at how many married couples had the woman as chief wage earner. In just 13% of those couples was that the case. That’s slightly more than the 8% of couples in the 1960s who did, but again, the reality remains that mothers prefer kids to paid work and rely on fathers to pay the freight. For their part, dads are happy to do just that.

They’d better be. That’s because the single event that best predicts a woman filing for divorce is her husband’s loss of his job. Men and women both value Mom staying at home with the kids. Men and women both value Dad bringing home the bacon. The Brave New World this isn’t.

Providership is important to protect children from poverty, raise their odds of educational success, and increase the likelihood that they will succeed later in life. Thus, the very real material contribution that the average American dad makes to his family can be obscured by stories that focus on that still relatively exotic breed, the stay-at-home dad.

If we want to honor fathers, and we should, let’s honor what they do, not what we fantasize about what we’ve decided they ought to do. Typically, fathers provide the money to support their families. They also provide a synergy of parenting styles between Mom’s and Dad’s that’s vital to children’s well-being.

Fathers aren’t worthwhile because they’re like mothers. They’re necessary to children just the way they are. Let’s not try to remake them in the image of their partners.

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

Today we celebrate fathers.  We should do so more often, but this is fathers’ special day.  Fathers are vital to children and children’s well-being.  They’re vital to the well-being of the adults children become.  That means they’re vital to the health and well-being of society. And yet, in many ways, we marginalize fathers in children’s lives.  That is our society’s gravest error.  We see its consequences every day in our educational system, suicide figures, crime, addiction, emotional deficits and the like.  Like mothers, fathers are special.  They bring special benefits to children.  They are irreplaceable.  Today, we must rededicate ourselves to rectifying the many ways in which this society denigrates and sidelines fathers.  The science on our need for active, involved fathers is by now beyond question, so we must bring public policy and law into line with that science. 

Today is just a single day.  But every day of every year, we should be doing our utmost to bring fathers and children where they belong – together.

June 15, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

With Fathers’ Day fast approaching, we can expect the usual wave of articles and commentary, much of it nonsense, some of it kind, some of it malicious. But the ever-excellent Barbara Kay’s piece won’t be found among the latter (National Post, 6/13/18). Her topic is the urgent need for our societies and cultures to once again place value on men and fathers. Of course, she nails it.

It is difficult to overstate both the positive effects of growing up with a father and the negative effects of father absence, especially for boys. These myriad benefits and perils are on record, undisputed and easily accessible. But in this gynocentric era, what is good or bad for boys does not seem to attract the interest of our cultural elites.

Not only cultural elites, but public policy elites too blithely ignore the scandal and the crisis that is the decline of masculinity throughout the Western World. As Kay points out, this is all well known. Information is not what we lack. What we lack is decency and good sense among those who could change this if they only would. Children need to grow up with a father and a mother. They used to do that and, no surprise, men’s value to society went largely unquestioned. Now we’re doing the one thing we should never, never do – taking fathers out of the lives of their kids. And when the kids manifest every symptom of growing up fatherless, we do nothing to fix the problem. Into the bargain, we have the gall to criticize the very kids (now grown to adulthood) we damaged in the first place.

At every turn we tell men that fathers have no value. We do that in the news media and popular culture. And, just in case men missed the point, we follow those messages up with even more-hard-hitting ones. Family courts routinely marginalize fathers in the lives of their kids, child support laws place the bar higher than dads can clear, the better to incarcerate them and denigrate them in their children’s eyes. Adoption laws are, in over half the states, designed specifically to get fathers out of the loop and line lawyers’ pockets with the cash that comes from completed adoptions.

All that sends the same message that pop culture sends – dads aren’t important. We know they are, but wouldn’t dream of mentioning it.

We could do a lot to fix this if we wanted, but we don’t. We could change laws and make sure judges understood the reality of what Dr. Kyle Pruett calls Fatherneed. But we don’t. We could preach to the skies that kids need both parents in their lives and make services available for parents to help them make co-parenting work. But we don’t. We could teach girls that maternal gatekeeping and paternity fraud aren’t appropriate behaviors. But we don’t. We could teach boys that, if you have sex and don’t want a child, use a condom or get a vasectomy. But we don’t. We could teach boys that, if you father a child, you need to stay in its life. But we don’t.

The result:

Boys are in crisis everywhere. They are falling behind academically in 60 of the most developed nations. Boys are 50 per cent less likely than girls to meet basic proficiency standards in reading, math and science. Rates of ADHD among them are escalating. Since the Great Depression, the gap between male and female suicides has tripled in the U.S.

The common denominator behind many of these trends is fatherlessness. When all other variants of race, socio-economic status, health and other obvious metrics are accounted for, fatherlessness is the single biggest predictor for many negative outcomes among boys. Male prison inmates are 85 per cent fatherless. Juvenile detention centres are likewise full of dad-deprived boys. Male violence and fatherlessness are strongly linked, even in violence-promoting political movements. Fiyaz Mughal, a radicalization specialist with the Faith Matters Network, says, “All of these (young ISIL recruits), they have an absent father … the kids fought police, fought at school, rebelled against every power structure at every opportunity.”

I somewhat disagree with Kay on one point.

As women’s roles expand, society’s need for men in their traditional roles as protector, provider and parent is shrinking.

That’s certainly true, but how important is it? After all, if men’s traditional role is shrinking, women’s has already shrunk. Indeed, it started doing so long ago. The role of nurturer to children is of far, far less importance than ever before, particularly in the very parts of the globe that see men and fathers suffering so. Face it, there are over seven billion people on the planet. We don’t need more. And in the post-industrial West, women tend to have fewer children than ever before, in fact, at below-replacement rates. Plus, caring for a child has never been easier. Household technologies make it easier and less time-consuming and daycare takes much of the obligation away altogether.

So with their traditional role so diminished, why aren’t women in the same boat with men? The answer is that, in one way, they are. Women’s happiness levels, as measured since the 70s has declined while men’s has stayed the same. But women are excelling in school and at work, they’re healthier and far less likely to take their own lives than are men. With the diminution of the role of mother, why don’t they show the same deficits as do men?

It seems obvious that, whereas we denigrate men at every turn, we laud women. We’ve altered the system of primary education to suit the way girls learn at the expense of boys and how they learn. We can’t log onto the Internet or open a magazine or newspaper or turn on the television without being bombarded with messages worshipful of women and girls. And of course the family court system gives them every break imaginable and some that aren’t (see my previous posts on the Ryan West child support matter).

The problem isn’t that women compete for men’s jobs. It’s one of men’s greatest virtues that they welcome fair competition. The problem is everything else – the outright malice, the ignorant but pervasive criticism, the collective guilt mongering, the second-class citizenship in the legal system. Fix those things – and we can – and much of the problems facing men and boys will disappear like morning mist.

Till then, we need more Barbara Kays, contemporary Cassandras, to warn us about the path ahead, the path we’ve chosen against all that’s sane and sensible, against all that’s morally right.

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

This post continues yesterday’s regarding the Ryan West child support case.

District Judge Cynthia Wheless ignored the pleadings of the parties, the evidence before her and Texas law in order to rule that Ryan West, the custodial parent, owes child support to his ex-wife. From where I sit, it’s hard to not conclude that Judge Wheless decided the outcome she wanted and simply ruled accordingly.

Consider a few words from West’s brief to the Court of Appeals that will eventually decide the matter.

Child-support payments are for the benefit of the child, not the parents, and should be structured to fairly provide for the best interest of the child, not so that one party or another can make a profit…

An amount of child support established by the guidelines is presumed to be reasonable, and an order conforming to the guidelines is presumed to be in the best interest of the child. § 154.122(a)…

In this case, the trial court modified the child-support order without reference to any guiding rules or principles, resulting in an inequitable order that is not in the best interest of the child and that creates a windfall for Appellee, the non-custodial parent…

Appellee did not dispute that child support should be ordered in accordance with the guidelines…

[T]he court modified the child-support order in a manner not requested by either party and not in conformance with the guidelines or with the recognized exceptions contained in the Family Code…

Had the trial court applied the percentage guidelines contained in Section 154.125, Appellee would owe Appellant $910 per month in child support plus $100 cash reimbursement for medical insurance, and Appellant would not owe child support at all.

Having ignored the evidence before her and the law as found in the Texas Family Code, Judge Wheless then simply invented her own law. She decided that West should pay child support to his non-custodial ex-wife in order to provide “adequate resources” at both residences.

[R]equiring the custodial parent to pay child support to the non-custodial parent to provide for “adequate resources at both residences” has no basis in Texas law.

And even if it was supported by the law, the evidence before the court clearly demonstrated that there are more than adequate resources at each residence to care for the child. So, having invented her own law, Judge Wheless then ignored the evidence that contradicted her preferred outcome, i.e. that Ryan West should continue to support his ex-wife child support and call it child support.

Now, keep in mind that the resources at his ex’s residence are almost entirely the result of her new husband’s employment. She brings in very little money because she works only part-time and barely that. She’s well-educated and the evidence shows her to be capable of earning as much as $80,000 per year, but she has always refused to do so, at least during the pendency of this case. This raises some pithy issues that go beyond the outrageous rulings by two separate judges in this individual case.

Judge Wheless’ ruling is being appealed by West. The appellate decision may become precedent for all future family law cases in the state. Consider what that means.

To begin with, it means that non-custodial parents who choose not to work and earn may receive child support from their custodial counterparts as long as the latter out-earn the former. I wonder how many custodial mothers would look forward to that scenario.

Second, if the case isn’t reversed, Texas law on child support will include the notion – unknown to the Texas Legislature – that higher-earning exes must provide for lower-earning exes in order to ensure adequate resources in the household. That of course means that child support as being for the child will no longer be the law of the land. On the contrary, “child support” will be for the parents in order that all may have “adequate resources.” That of course contradicts decades of statute and case law in the state.

Third, Texas statute law provides 17 items to be considered by judges in deciding whether to deviate from the child support guidelines. Wheless’ desire that both households have “adequate resources” isn’t one of them. So, if the appellate court affirms Wheless’ decision, it will create brand new law on the issue of when the guidelines may be deviated from.

As West’s attorney stated in her brief to the Court of Appeals, “such a rule opens the door to untenable, unreasonable, and inequitable consequences.” The current case is a good example of its doing exactly that.

Attorney Anna Eby went on:

Further, the trial court’s adequate resources rule simply does not work, as it raises questions with no logical answers. The court found that Appellee has $4,550.00 in monthly net resources and implicitly found that this did not provide adequate resources for the child. Yet the court made no findings and offered no explanation of how “adequate resources” should be defined. Is $4,550.00 in monthly net resources automatically inadequate? Given that the median Texas household has monthly net resources of $3,600, this would mean the vast majority of Texas child-support orders must somehow address inadequate resources of one or both parents. Is the inadequacy in this case dependent on Appellant’s income, which exceeds Appellee’s because Appellee does not work full-time? If Appellant had the same net resources as Appellee, would the child then have adequate resources at both residences? In this context, does “adequate” mean “equal,” and is it the Family Code’s intention that child support be used to equalize the financial resources of the parents? Is Appellant responsible for providing adequate resources for the child at Appellee’s residence, even when the child lives full-time with Appellant? Nothing in the Family Code suggests that the Legislature made a policy choice to have custodial parents subsidize the lifestyles of non-custodial parents who choose to work part-time.

And finally,

The trial court is to make child-support decisions without regard to the sex of the parents or of the child. Yet, were Appellant the child’s mother, the inequity of this order becomes readily apparent. It is difficult to imagine that a mother would be ordered to pay child support to a noncustodial father, in order to equalize the parents’ income, when the mother was the custodial parent, worked full-time, and incurred all of the child’s expenses, while the father was the noncustodial parent, chose to work part-time, refused to share in the child’s expenses (in violation of a court order), and had greater household net resources than the mother. Under such facts, it would seem deeply unjust and inequitable to require the mother to pay child support to the father. Yet, under the exact same facts but with the genders of the parents changed, that is just what the trial court has ordered in this case.

Indeed.

This case is an outrage that fairly screams for reversal. We’ll see what the Court of Appeals decides.

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

The Texas judicial system is hard about the task of ruining a thoroughly decent man and excellent father, a man whose current girlfriend calls him “a saint.” That man is Ryan West, about whom I first wrote here. West’s case appears from here to be one of outright, unconcealed anti-dad bias on the part of not one but two family court judges.

West is such a good dad that Judge Margaret Barnes awarded him primary custody of his daughter Alanna. He has her about 70% of the time, his ex has her the rest. The bias appears when she awarded child support. Barnes ordered West, the custodial father, to pay child support to his ex, the non-custodial parent. Now that’s not supported in the child support guidelines that are supposed to direct judges’ rulings, but Barnes did it anyway.

Gilding the lily, Barnes also utterly ignored the fact that West’s ex had testified under oath that she was capable of earning $80,000 per year marketing ads for the Yellow Pages. Normally, that would have significantly reduced the amount West had to pay, but Judge Barnes refused to recognize the facts of the matter, including that she’d failed to get a full-time job.

She also refused to impute income to West’s ex-wife. She’d worked for the Yellow Pages, but testified that she’d voluntarily quit the job to spend more time with their daughter. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oklahoma and graduated from the Cordon Bleu culinary institute and is therefore capable of earning a good living. By her own testimony, she refused to do so and was (and is) voluntarily underemployed. Ergo, under the clear terms of Texas statute and case law, Judge Barnes should have imputed income to West’s ex. But she didn’t.

Into the bargain, the Office of the Attorney General decided that, despite the fact that he has primary custody of his daughter and that such is the definition of “custodial parent” according to its own words, West is the non-custodial parent.

Finally, because West is an honorable man, he began paying child support to his ex directly, before there was an order issued by Judge Barnes directing him to pay it to the AG’s Office. He of course had all the cancelled checks showing the amount paid, to whom they’d been paid and that they were for child support. But the OAG decided that he hadn’t paid a dime and threatened to put him in jail.

That more or less brings us up to this time last year. Did things get better? On one hand they got a bit better, on the other they got a lot worse. What they didn’t get was more sensible or more in line with Texas law.

West’s ex married her boyfriend. He earns about $13,000 per month. She remains vastly underemployed, working at a community college teaching one culinary course for half a semester twice a year. That’s a total of 160 hours/per year. Again, this is a woman with a college education and a certificate from a prominent culinary institute.

With all that extra income that’s attributable to her by Texas law, West went back to court claiming a change in circumstances that he expected would lead to him receiving support from his ex-wife. Indeed, given the fact that his ex-wife has significant resources, is underemployed and that he’s the custodial parent, she should be paying him.

The case went to court, this time in a different county and before a different judge, Cynthia Wheless of the 417^th District Court. Her ruling was every bit as weird as Judge Barnes’s earlier one.

First, Wheless agreed that a change of circumstances had occurred due to the remarriage and increased monetary resources of West’s ex. She then announced in open court that she didn’t want to undo what Judge Barnes had done.

Note to Judge Wheless: when a change of circumstances occurs, that’s what you do; you change the existing order. It’s the whole point of finding a change in circumstances.

She then went on to, yes, change that previous order. She of course maintained Ryan West as the primary parent and maintained his parenting time. After all, he’s the great dad he’s always been. But then Wheless went off the rails. Put simply, she started making stuff up, i.e. Texas law.

Texas law requires that child support be sufficient for the custodial parent to provide the child with adequate circumstances for living. It doesn’t contemplate that the custodial parent do so for the non-custodial parent. Judge Wheless ordered that West pay child support to his ex and his ex pay child support to him in offsetting amounts. What that means is anyone’s guess.

She also found that applying the guidelines to this case would have been “unjust and inappropriate.” She didn’t say why. She made no findings of fact in support of that claim. She just pulled it out of, er, thin air. A court in Texas may not deviate from the child support guidelines unless it makes findings explaining why it did so. Indeed, neither party to the case requested that the guidelines shouldn’t govern the child support calculation. But, with neither pleadings nor facts in support of her action, Wheless did so anyway.

By mysterious arithmetic, that meant that West’s child support obligation decreased from over $1,700 per month to $700 per month. That’s how things got better.

Weirder still, Wheless based her action on the notion that the child didn’t have “adequate resources” at each home. Now, the issue of adequate resources has only to do with the situation at the custodial parent’s residence, so considering whether West’s ex has adequate resources for the child has no basis in the law of the state.

It also has no basis in fact. Unsurprisingly, neither party offered any evidence of inadequate resources at either residence. That’s probably because (a) West’s resources are adequate, (b) whether the resources at his ex’s home are adequate is irrelevant to the case and (c) in any event, the resources of a man who earns $13,000 per month plus his wife’s income are clearly adequate to care for a single child.

Wheless ignored all of that, made up some law to suit herself and issued a ruling for which there was no evidence. Amazing, but true.

So Ryan West no longer has to pay as much to his ex-wife/non-custodial parent as before. Unfortunately, this by-now-five-year process has all but bankrupted him. He’s an intelligent, hard-working, educated man. He works for JP Morgan Chase and earns a good living, more than enough for him and his daughter. But fighting the madness that is his child support case has cost him about $200,000 and counting. That’s how things have gotten worse for him. He’s hemorrhaging money and he doesn’t have an unlimited supply.

From here it looks like both judges simply decided to transfer wealth from a father to a mother and did what was necessary to accomplish that task regardless of facts, regardless of law. In any event, this case is a disgrace because of their unprincipled abuses of their power. The ultimate irony of course is that, because of their incompetence and apparent anti-father bias, Ryan West is strapped for cash, cash that he could be using for his daughter’s benefit.

He’s appealing Wheless’ awful decision. That’ll cost more money. If he wins, the appellate court will likely just return the case to the trial court. Given what we’ve seen to date, anything can happen there.

I’ll say a bit more about this case tomorrow.

June 11, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Is this progress (New York Times, 6/7/18)?  On one hand, it may actually be that the New York Times has discovered fathers of whom it approves.  On the other, those dads are all Hispanic and from countries other than the U.S.

So it’s hard to know what to think.  The self-appointed “paper of record” has, to my knowledge, never before located a father it could stand.  Indeed, its descriptions of fathers in the past has run to words like “ornamental” (Maureen Dowd) and “inessential,” (Pamela Paul).  Others depicted dads as flummoxed by the simplest parenting tasks (Filip Bondy).


Now, all of a sudden, the linked-to piece finds fathers to be very important indeed.  The article at times waxes quite moving as it observes a little boy, newly arrived from his native Honduras and separated from his father who has been detained by immigration authorities.  

When he landed in Michigan in late May, all the weary little boy carried was a trash bag stuffed with dirty clothes from his dayslong trek across Mexico, and two small pieces of paper — one a stick-figure drawing of his family from Honduras, the other a sketch of his father, who had been arrested and led away after they arrived at the United States border in El Paso…

Staring intensely at the sketch of his father, with a slight mustache and a cap, he repeated his name out loud again and again.

It was “just me and him” on the trip from Honduras, he told Janice [his foster mother] one night as he lay in bed shuffling the pictures, taking turns looking at one and then the other.

“He holds onto the two pictures for dear life,” Janice said, through tears. “It’s heart-wrenching.”

What spurred the Times to run the article of course isn’t a new-found understanding of the importance of fathers, but a long-standing antipathy for President Trump and his administration’s policies.  It seems the policy now is to arrest and prosecute adults who enter the United States illegally. When they arrive with children, the kids are sent to foster homes to await disposition of their parents’ cases.

Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, emphasized that separating families was not the aim but merely the effect of a decision to step up prosecutions of those who cross the border illegally. “We do not have a policy to separate children from their parents. Our policy is, if you break the law we will prosecute you,” she told the  Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee  on May 15.

That’s fair enough, as far as it goes.  It’s an attempt to discourage people from trying to cross the border illegally.  Whether the policy will have much of an effect on that behavior, I have no idea. I suspect it won’t, because, after all, people don’t come here expecting to get caught.  They know that, if they do, they’ll be detained and sent back to wherever they came from. A new policy of housing them in prisons at a tremendous cost to taxpayers may or may not change much.  

But apparently, little effort is made to allow the children to keep contact with their detained parents.  Phone calls and Skype contact could be very important to kids, particularly those as young as the boy in the article.  But he’s been in foster care for months and only had one call with his mother who’s still in Honduras.

Calculated by the Times to tug the heartstrings and build opposition to the Trump presidency, the article perhaps inadvertently provides what’s seemed in the past to be strictly off limits, i.e. a positive depiction of fathers or their importance to their children.  The boy in the article desperately wants his dad, a fact to which Times readers are rarely, if ever, exposed.

That of course gives rise to an obvious question – “Why are Latino fathers important to their kids, but American fathers aren’t?”  It’s one the Times will never ask, much less answer. Are the editors even aware of their gob-smacking hypocrisy? I doubt it.

The truth is that all kids, not just those from south of the Rio Grande, attach to both their parents.  That means both parents are vitally important to children’s well-being and separating kids from either can have catastrophic emotional results.  Just look at the little boy in the article.

[Janice] tried to offer him his toys, but he erupted in anger, screaming and crying at the kitchen table for almost an hour.

“It was really hard to watch. The look on his face was anguish,” said Janice, her voice breaking.

When his fury subsided, the boy collapsed on the kitchen floor, still sobbing. “Mamá, Papá,” he said, over and over.

Nearby lay the family pictures, which he had flung on the floor.

Yes, that’s a pretty heart-wrenching view of a little boy who’s lost his father.  Maybe the Times could remember that the next time one of its columnists writes snidely about fathers or defends our system of divorce that routinely removes them from their children’s lives.

Maybe.