Category: Blog

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

International parental kidnapping is back in the news (Houston Chronicle, 5/24/18).  And the latest case may yet to take its most outrageous turn.

Wealthy Brazilians, Carlos and Jemima Guimaraes were convicted by a jury in federal court of aiding the kidnapping of their grandson, Nico, the son of Marcelle Guimaraes and Christopher Brann.  The couple lived with Nico in Houston until the boy was three.  That was when Marcelle told Brann she wanted to take the child to visit relatives in Brazil.  He agreed to a 20-day stay.  That was five years ago and the two are still in Brazil.

Now, you might ask how that could possibly be.  After all the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction is clear that signatory states are supposed to make a decision within 60 days.  Needless to say, that hasn’t happened in the Brann case, but it should have.  That’s because, at the outset, there was but one issue for the Brazilian court to decide – the child’s country of habitual residence.  Given that both parents and the child had lived in Houston all the boy’s life, that shouldn’t have been a hard decision to make.

Having made the obvious call on the residence issue, the next thing the court would have had to decide is whether U.S. courts are capable of ruling on the issues and issuing proper orders.  That too should have been an easy decision.

But it seems Brazil doesn’t play by the Hague Convention rules, despite having signed it.

Brazil is among 12 signatory countries cited in a 2018 annual State Department report for persistent failure to comply with the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

Suzanne Lawrence, a special adviser for children’s issues in the State Department, declined to discuss any specific cases or why the agency had not sanctioned Brazil. But she acknowledged that courts in Brazil do not move promptly. The average span of inaction is nearly six years, according to the annual report.

“The longer these cases go on the more harmful they are to the families,” she said.

In the Brann case, the governments of the U.S. and Brazil both concluded Nico was illegally abducted in violation of civil law, but the federal courts in Brazil have ruled he should remain there because his mother was well settled with family support. That ruling is on appeal.

An attorney familiar with the delays said Brazilian courts have allowed such disputes to drag out for years, allowing the parent in Brazil to request clarifications of orders, while so-called “left behind” parents in the U.S. have little recourse beyond political pressure, if they have the means.

So the courts in Brazil “have ruled that [Nico] should remain there because his mother was well settled with family support.”  Huh?  That’s precisely contrary to the plain requirements and the plain meaning of the Hague Convention.  It makes no sense to sign a convention that requires the return of a kidnapped child to its home country, only to thwart that convention if the kidnapper has settled in and has the support of her family.

But Brann doesn’t just have the Convention with which to fight this war, he’s also got the Sean and David Goldman Act that allows the U.S. State Department to pressure foreign states politically to encourage them to return kidnapped kids.  But, like the Brazilian courts, the State Department has apparently not lifted a finger on behalf of Christopher Brann or his son.

The father’s lobbying efforts resulted in a letter last week from the bipartisan Senate Judiciary Committee, including U.S. Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas urging the Trump administration to “use every possible tool” to bring the child back. 

Brann is doing everything he can to remain in contact with Nico, but it’s not easy.

Brann turned to the FBI in 2015 after two years of Skype calls and 20-hour trips to the remote resort city, where he was allowed to see the boy only if accompanied by hired guards.

In short, the courts of one country and the State Department of a second, both of which are charged by law with making sure kidnapped children don’t remain so for long, have failed in their duty.  Since this is a case of kidnapping that all agree happened,  both governments are complicit in child abuse.  It was long ago established that taking a child from its home and one parent and keeping it isolated from that parent is abusive.  Whatever problems Marcelle and Christopher had, Nico loves and needs both his parents and has been traumatized by his abduction.

And yet the Brazilian wheels of “justice” turn oh so gradually and the State Department sits on its hands.

And that may not be the worst of it.  I’ll have more to say on that tomorrow.

May 25, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

At a time when about half the states of the United States are coming to grips with the need for shared parenting, Canada lags woefully behind. Nothing quite demonstrates that like this article (CBC, 5/23/18).

In many ways, this CBC article has a lot in common with the one I wrote about yesterday. That is to say, it’s intellectually bankrupt, journalistically unbalanced and eager to promote concepts that are just plain wrong. Its writer, one Brandie Weikle, knows little of her topic.

The reason for the article is a proposed amendment to the Divorce Act that would make several changes to existing law. Needless to say, none of the changes even nod in the direction of shared parenting.

The proposed changes fall into six main areas:

1) ​Replace terms such as “custody” and “access” with words like “parenting orders” and “parenting time,” to make the language less adversarial. 

2) Set out criteria that help define the best interests of the child.

3) Compel lawyers and paralegals to encourage clients to use family-dispute resolution services such as mediation instead of courts.

4) Give courts measures to address family violence.

5) Establish guidelines for when one parent wants to relocate with a child.

6) Make it easier for people to collect support payments.

In other words, it does a lot that means little and nothing that would mean a lot. I’m sure changing terminology is a legal landmark matched only by Magna Carta, but truly, this is the best the Liberal Party can come up with? States here in the U.S. set out criteria that “help define the best interests of the child” some 20 years ago with essentially no improvement to kids’ ability to maintain meaningful relationships with their fathers. And do Canadian courts now truly have no “measures to address family violence?” Please.

Certainly the surest indicator that this is a bill of no importance is the family law bar’s enthusiastic embrace of it.

Lawrence Pinsky, partner in the Winnipeg firm Taylor McCaffrey and chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s family law section, said the proposed changes represent a significant step forward.

Pinsky penned a letter to Wilson-Raybould in late December 2017 that outlined the concerns of the CBA’s family lawyers.

“They’re either addressed or there was a solid attempt made to address them,” said Pinsky. “It may be that if I had the pen and was writing the legislation, I might have done it slightly different in certain respects. But they did address many of the changes we called for and we’re pleased with … those changes overall.”

Another family lawyer and mediator, Hilary Linton (yes, Hilary Linton) makes the matter even clearer.

 I love it because it’s written in plain English, and it’s really — as mediators — codifying what we’ve been doing all along.”

It’s always amusing to hear one lawyer saying that legislation constitutes a great leap forward and another saying it’s “what we’ve been doing all along.” Linton and Pinsky might want to chat before being interviewed again.

Still another family lawyer, Jeff Rechtshaffen, is actually wrong about his own practice of law.

“Because people don’t choose to go to court jointly. One party takes the other to court. When you’re served with court papers, you’re already in an adversarial situation and it’s not of your choosing.” 

Hmm. No, actually people jointly decide to divorce every day. My guess is that that’s far more common than one spouse being surprised by a divorce filing. The overwhelming majority of people who divorce don’t use lawyers and they do so for two overarching reasons – they can’t afford the fees and they don’t need the conflict that comes with involving them in one’s private affairs. Rechtshaffen is trying to obscure the fact that lawyers exacerbate conflict between their clients, but I doubt that many people are buying what he’s trying to sell.

Finally, Pinsky delivers the line that I suppose family lawyers have implanted in their brains when they passed the bar exam.

But ​Pinsky, of the Canadian Bar Association, said establishing that presumption is not appropriate in a system that centres on the needs of the child.

“We in the CBA say that you start in the position of the individual child, because there’s not a one-size-fits-all. Different children have different temperaments, and some can handle situations that other children can’t.

Of course Pinsky carefully avoids mentioning that shared parenting is, in the great majority of cases, all but synonymous with children’s best interests. Massive amounts of social science demonstrate the fact, but, as ever, family lawyers can’t be bothered with science.

And the claim that shared parenting is a “one-size-fits-all” arrangement, but the present system isn’t, is so much nonsense. Shared parenting bills in the U.S. invariably have numerous “outs” for unfitness, family violence, the desires of a teenaged child, significant geographical distances between parental homes, etc. And of course parents are invariably able to craft their own plans. Meanwhile, a close look at what actually takes place in family courts today reveals that they are indeed a one-size-fits-all arrangement. After all, how much variety is there in “Mom gets primary custody and Dad sees the kids every other weekend plus two hours in the evening one day per week?”

How balanced is Weikle’s piece? Not very. It’s about 80 lines long, of which six are devoted to pro-shared parenting advocates. And of course that’s not enough space in which to detail the countless reasons why the status quo so ill serves children and parents alike or why shared parenting would be such an improvement for everyone.

But hey, it’s the CBC. That’s the whole point.

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

I swear, there must be a recipe – a recipe for this type of article (CBC, 5/17/18). It’s about the fifth one I’ve seen and each follows in lock-step with the others.

The article is about parental alienation and takes the position that all parental alienation is a ruse by violent fathers to wrest custody from “protective” mothers. The recipe goes something like this: begin with one “example” of PA that’s not an example; stir in one statement that PA isn’t in the American Psychological Association’s DSM-V; add a quotation from one domestic violence “expert” that men are violent and leave aside any mention that women are too; under no circumstances add a mention that, in your example, DV hasn’t been established; add a healthy amount of claims that courts opt for shared parenting even when there’s DV and that DV isn’t taken seriously by courts.

Overheat all of the above and – presto! – you’ve got your article. Never mind that it’s utterly misleading and nothing but an attempt to derail children’s legitimate interest in maintaining meaningful relationships with their fathers post-divorce.

The linked-to piece follows the recipe to a “T” and, unsurprisingly, ends up an indigestible mess.

The writer’s “example” of a mother wronged by a claim of parental alienation by her ex in a custody case is “Mandy.” Does the writer, Leah Hendry, ever offer a single iota of evidence that (a) Mandy’s ex was violent, or (b) his claim that she’s attempting to alienate him from their child isn’t true? She does not. Of course those are highly pertinent issues to the case at bar, but Hendry ignores them completely.

She moves on to claim that parental alienation has “since [the 80s] been debunked by the American Psychological Association.” Uh no, actually it hasn’t. The reality is that parental alienation has all but been included in the DSM-V. Its symptoms appear under other names, but they’re there and described as worthy of therapeutic involvement. And of course the mountain of evidence for the existence of PA and how to treat it grows daily. About that, Hendry is flat wrong.

But of course she is. That’s because the “expert” on DV she quoted was Peter Jaffe, whose name has long been associated with flawed research and bogus reporting. Long ago, Jaffe took information from women in DV shelters and pretended it applied to women generally. A more scurrilous and outcome-oriented methodology would be hard to imagine. So relying on Jaffe for anything is dubious at best.

Hendry then moves on to quote from – of course – a woman who runs a DV shelter. That woman, Marielle Albert, is a virtual fount of disinformation.

“The [custody] evaluator assumes the [child’s] aversion to dad is because of the mom’s negativity towards dad,” said Albert. 

Citation? None. Of course there’s none because there are no data on that point. Albert (like Jaffe) has listened to the complaints of women in DV shelters, assumed them to be true and drawn conclusions about Canadian courts generally on the basis of those complaints. It was a lousy methodology when Jaffe used it and it’s lousy now.

Albert says there also appears to be an inherent bias in the court system toward shared custody, even if one of the parents has a history of being abusive.

Citation? None. It’s the usual trope of the anti-dad crowd: we don’t need shared parenting laws because courts already order it anyway. In this case, the claim is that courts are biased in favor of shared parenting and do so even when Dad (never Mom) is violent.

The problem being that the claim is outrageous nonsense. So, for example, this report from Statistics Canada states that about 15% of children of divorce live primarily with their fathers and 9% spend about equal time with Mom and Dad. That’s “inherent bias” in favor of shared custody? For Hendry’s information, it took me under three minutes on Google to locate that information. But needless to say, she’s not interested in information; that’s why she quoted Albert instead of taking a couple of minutes out of her busy day to find out the truth.

Then of course there’s the fact that Hendry managed to not contact anyone with an opinion contrary to hers. Did she even try to talk to an expert on parental alienation, i.e. someone who’d have told her the truth instead of the warmed-over claptrap produced by Jaffe and his ilk? Apparently not.

Did she make any effort to talk to Mandy’s ex? Nope. Had she done so, she might well have found out some facts that are uncomfortable both for Mandy and the thesis of her article. She might have learned that Mr. Mandy has some very good reasons for claiming what he’s claimed.

Did she look at the court’s file in Mandy’s case? Again, she didn’t. Given that it appears to be a long, drawn-out affair, there are probably affidavits by her ex, reports submitted by psychologists, custody evaluators, etc. Those too could have thrown light on the reality of Mandy’s case.

But Hendry was careful not to expose herself or her readers to anything that might run athwart of her narrative. Her article isn’t journalism, it’s advocacy. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as it’s clearly characterized as such, but it’s not. Worse, it’s advocacy for a position that’s scientifically vacant, legally wrong and opposed to children’s well-being.

But that’s just how these people roll. They’ve got nothing with which to support their bankrupt positions. Still, periodically the anti-dad movement spews out another article that tries to convince readers of something essentially everyone knows to be untrue – that parents don’t sometimes try to alienate their kids.

You might think that these people would be able to grasp the fact that their efforts, to the extent they have any effect at all, do themselves a disservice. What if they successfully sowed the seed of doubt about PA in some judge’s mind? And what if his next case involved a mother who was being alienated from her child by her ex-husband? That obviously tends to thwart their plain pro-mom bias. Do they really not see that?

Whether they do or not, the notion that allegations of PA are just a trick by fathers is believed by no one in family courts. That’s partly because there’s so much science demonstrating PA to exist and partly because judges and court personnel see it so often in custody cases.

People like Hendry are wasting their time and the articles they write are recipes for unscrupulous disinformation.

It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing of National Parents Organization’s Office Manager, Steven Sweely. Steven passed away on May 12th. He had been a valued member of our team since June 2011 and will be missed. Over the past 7 years, Steven has supported all of us at NPO, including our Board Members, Affiliates and Volunteers with everything from social media to spreadsheets.  Please keep Steven’s family in your thoughts as they go through this difficult time.

May 23, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

It’s the domino effect all over again. No, I’m not talking about the Cold War theory that, if one country became communist, then others around it inevitably would follow. I’m talking about the effect one shared parenting law in Kentucky seems to be having on the states around it.

As readers of this blog know, thanks to the National Parents Organization and the redoubtable Matt Hale, Kentucky became the first jurisdiction in the English-speaking world to enact a presumption of equal parenting into law. The new statute becomes effective on July 1. As if that weren’t enough of a landmark, it’s beginning to look like the states around Kentucky may be influenced by its success.

Certainly the news media in those states have taken note. In Ohio, Missouri, West Virginia, New York, Indiana and Minnesota at least, print and broadcast media have picked up on the Kentucky story. By now, the people of those states and their elected representatives know that another state has taken the plunge and decided to actually do what’s best for kids. Kentucky now walks the walk instead of just talking the talk.

So, shortly after Governor Matt Bevin signed our shared parenting bill into law, the ABC affiliate in Cincinnati picked up on the news. So did print media in West Virginia, Indiana and New York.

And all that press exposure has shown concrete results. Our point person in Missouri, Linda Reutzel informs us that legislators have been positively influenced by the passage of shared parenting in Kentucky. Indeed, NPO’s shared parenting bill passed the Missouri House and apparently would have passed the Senate but for a single senator’s threat of a filibuster.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, veteran shared parenting advocate Molly Olson reports that legislators there have taken note of the new Kentucky law. In Indiana, our Kentucky success has spurred activists to begin work on a new NPO affiliate there.

What all this means of course is that, in the future, our lobbyists will have yet another weapon with which to slay the beast that opposes shared parenting. In the past, opponents have routinely used scare tactics to try to convince legislators that a vote for shared parenting is a vote for chaos in family courts, children subjected to emotionally draining trips between homes, increased conflict between parents, children beaten by their fathers, etc.

So far, we’ve been able to point out that existing science demonstrates all those arguments to be meritless. But now we’ll be able to point to Kentucky and note that none of those nightmare scenarios has occurred. The earth hasn’t opened and swallowed the state or even a little part of it. Cautious legislators will be able to see for themselves not only that shared parenting is good for kids, but that it works in practice. That’s of incalculable value for the fights to come.

For now though, Kentucky’s new law is making headlines across several states. Now they know that a presumption of equal parenting can become reality, that legislators can vote in favor and not lose their jobs, that children can maintain healthy relationships with both parents, that no fit parent need lose contact with his/her child and that all those arguments against shared parenting were just that – arguments.

The truth is that shared parenting is a win/win/win/win/win arrangement. It’s good for kids, mothers, fathers, society generally and state and federal treasuries. At last we have an example to point to.

Kentucky’s the first domino to fall, but far from the last.

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

The legislative session in Missouri is over and this year, unlike last year, the National Parents Organization was unable to pass its shared parenting bill, HB 1667.  That wasn’t because HB 1667 wasn’t popular with legislators, it was.  Indeed, it passed both its House committee and the House of Representatives itself.  It was then approved by the Senate Committee on Seniors, Families and Children.  And we were reliably told that it had majority backing of the full Senate.

But it never reached the Senate floor.  Why?  Because in the final days of the session, a lone senator, Jill Schupp, threatened to filibuster until HB 1667 couldn’t be voted on.  That’s right, against a majority of House members and a majority of Senate members, Jill Schupp decided to play the role of governor and veto the bill.

Of course she did nothing illegal.  The rules of the Missouri Senate allow her to do what she did.  The rules of ethics, good sense and sound policy required her to do otherwise, but apparently Senator Schupp isn’t motivated that way.  After all, as our point person in the Show Me State pointed out, large majorities of Americans have repeatedly said they favor equal parenting following divorce.  And shared parenting has been demonstrated time and again to be the best arrangement for children when their parents split up.

Apparently most of the members of the Missouri House and Senate grasp those two concepts.  But it only takes one senator to substitute her version of good policy for that of all those other elected officials. 

And that’s just what she did.

NPO’s Linda Reutzel tells me that Schupp represents a wealthy district and is tight with the domestic violence lobby.  Reutzel contacted Schupp’s office and was told by an aid that the senator “doesn’t agree with the concept” of shared parenting.  She also refused repeated efforts by Reutzel to meet with her to hear NPO’s point of view on HB 1667.

I don’t know if Senator Schupp realizes it or not, but the National Parents Organization isn’t going away.  We’ll be back next year with another shared parenting bill that will again be favored by majorities in both houses of the Legislature.  Will Senator Schupp change her ways and do what’s best for the children and parents of her state?  Or will she again substitute her understanding of the facts of child well-being for those of hundreds of experts worldwide and the majority of people generally?

For that matter, will she still be a senator?

Wherever she is, I know where NPO will be.  We’ll be right back there walking the halls of the capitol rounding up votes for children’s welfare and parents’ rights.

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

The third and final wave of objections to shared parenting identified by Prof. Edward Kruk is that, while shared parenting has been demonstrated to be the best post-divorce arrangement for kids in all but a small percentage of cases, we shouldn’t enact it as a presumption in the law on custody.  Those advancing this objection pretend that the existing standard – the best interests of children – is (a) better for kids and (b) in opposition to shared parenting.  Both pretenses are just that.

Included in that objection is the notion that judges must maintain discretion in deciding custody and parenting time because all cases are different.

Kruk buries all those claims under an avalanche of facts and common sense.

First, the best interests of the child standard is vague and indeterminate, as children’s best interests are largely undefined, lack legal consensus, and are based on speculation about future conduct. The absence of a clear definition of best interests renders the standard unworkable. Second, the standard gives judges unfettered discretion in decision making, based on their idiosyncratic biases, in an area around which they have little or no training or expertise, and is thus subject to judicial error. This discretion can result in unpredictable and inconsistent outcomes. Third, decisions based on the best interests of the child reflect a sole custody presumption and judicial bias; judges might hold stereotyped or outdated ideas about fathers’ and mothers’ roles that bias their decisions. Fourth, the discretionary best interests of the child standard sustains, intensifies, and creates conflict, and fuels litigation because of the incentive of a winner-takes-all context where such an undefined standard provides a context of anything goes. Fifth, the best interests of the child standard makes the court dependent on custody evaluations lacking an empirical foundation, as the scientific basis for child custody evaluation is hotly contested and the qualifications for becoming an expert are nebulous at best. Sixth, the views of children and parents regarding the best interests of the child, which focus on children’s needs and parents’ responsibilities to those needs, are radically different to the views of the judiciary, which are deficit-based. Seventh, with two adequate parents, the court has no basis in law or psychology for distinguishing one parent as “primary” over the other. Finally, despite the rhetoric of children’s best interests, children’s interests are largely unrepresented in the court proceedings, as a custody contest instead pits the rights of mothers against the rights of fathers (Brown, 2014; Kruk, 2013).

I would add that the notion that judges tailor their decisions carefully to each individual case is so much bunk.  In many states, it can’t be anything but.  In Texas, for example, the statute governing those issues spells out in great detail the parenting time of each parent and all but requires the naming of one the primary and another the secondary parent.  Meanwhile, Ohio courts are astonishingly uniform in their preference for mothers over fathers and their willingness to reduce dads’ time with their kids to something far below the minimum required for children to reap the benefits of paternal involvement.

The point being that the system we have now is the very “cookie-cutter” approach the anti-dad crowd claims is a fault of shared parenting.

Plus, with all the science on the benefits to children of shared parenting, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, in the great majority of cases, a child’s best interests and a shared parenting arrangement are much the same thing.  Certainly, the latter tends strongly to beget the former.  If judges really want to do what’s best for kids, they’ll order shared parenting in all but rare cases.

Finally, the same science that shows that shared parenting is best for kids demands the conclusion that sole or primary parenting arrangements aren’t.  And yet sole/primary parenting is what judges order in the great majority of cases and have for decades.  In short, while they intone the mantra of the best interests of children, what they do is quite the opposite.

As with the previous two waves of opposition to shared parenting, the third has neither scientific nor logical nor factual support.  It is yet another excuse – not a reason – for opposition to kids maintaining meaningful and salutary relationships with their dads.

Dr. Kruk closes by quoting Dr. Sanford Braver who spoke at last year’s Conference on Shared Parenting sponsored by the National Parents Organization.

“To my mind, we’re over the hump. We’ve reached the watershed. On the basis of this evidence, social scientists can now cautiously recommend presumptive shared parenting to policymakers.” He further added, “I think shared parenting now has enough evidence [that] the burden of proof should now fall to those who oppose it rather than those who promote it” (Braver & Lamb, this issue).

I’ve argued the same many times.  It is far past time that shared parenting proponents must continually produce more and better evidence of its many benefits, while those opposed do little but cast brickbats.  What is the evidence that sole parenting is best for kids?  To those opposed to children maintaining healthy relationships with their fathers following divorce, I say, “Produce your evidence.  Demonstrate that losing a parent to the divorce system benefits kids, dads, moms or anyone else.”

They can’t do it and never could.  As Dr. Kruk makes clear, they are now left with nothing with which to oppose shared parenting.

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

The second wave of arguments against shared parenting claims that it’s inappropriate in high-conflict divorces.  It at one point argued that evidence supporting shared parenting merely cherry-picked parents who got along well anyway and could therefore make joint care work.  The latter was disproven when parents with various levels of conflict were compared both in and out of shared parenting arrangements.  The former has also been found to be unsupported by empirical evidence.  Prof. Kruk summarizes:

There is now strong empirical evidence, however, that children can benefit from shared parenting even when their parents do not have low-conflict, cooperative relationships (Fabricius, Sokol, Diaz, & Braver, 2016; Nielsen, 2017). Shared parenting might create an incentive for parental cooperation.


More recent research has also found that shared parenting can ameliorate the harmful effects of high conflict: A warm relationship with both parents is a protective factor for children (Nielsen, 2017; Warshak, 2014). The benefits of shared parenting exist independent of parental conflict. Shared parenting is beneficial for children in both low- and high-conflict situations. Except in situations where children are at risk of physical harm or negligent parenting, parenting time should not be limited in cases of high conflict, and high conflict should not be used to justify restrictions on children’s contact with either of their parents.

It has always struck me as odd that, when parents are in conflict, as they usually are during divorce, that, according to the anti-shared parenting crowd, the solution is to deny the child a relationship with one of its parents, usually Dad.  That neither addressed the conflict between the parents nor was a positive development for the child.  Why should the child suffer because the parents can’t get along?

Besides, there are many ways to ameliorate the conflict between the parents.  If Mom drops the kids off at school on Friday morning and Dad picks them up on Friday afternoon, keeps them for seven days and then drops them off the following Friday morning, the two adults never have to see or speak to each other.  Plus,

A number of specialized interventions to help parents reduce conflict have been developed, including parallel parenting, therapeutic family mediation, parent education programs, and parenting coordination (Kruk, 2013). A key strategy is keeping parents focused on their children’s needs, and enhancing parents’ attunement to their children’s needs. The main therapeutic task in high-conflict families is to help parents separate their previous marital hostilities from their ongoing parenting responsibilities.

Not only that, but whose bright idea was it that children must be shielded from all familial conflict?  They weren’t when their parents were married, and there’s likely to be conflict when they’re divorced.  That’s called “life.”  And for a child to witness conflict and its adult resolution is unambiguously a good thing.  How else is little Andy or Jenny supposed to learn how to resolve conflict with partners or peers?

Conflict is a normal part of everyday life, and to completely shield children from normal day-to-day conflict could in fact be doing them a disservice. Conflict presents an opportunity for resolution of disputes, healing, and reconciliation.

It goes without saying that some conflict is different from other conflict.  Domestic violence and child abuse or neglect are obviously not good for kids and therefore form exceptions to every shared parenting bill ever presented to a state legislature.

I’ll finish with Dr. Kruk’s article next time.

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

Prof. Kruk’s article in the Special Issue of the Journal of Divorce and Remarriage first details and then destroys the three waves of arguments against shared parenting.  At first, opponents simply denigrated fathers as uninterested in their children and only proponents of shared care because they wanted to reduce their child support obligations.  The problem with both was that subsequent research demonstrated that neither was true.  In fact, fathers most highly valued their relationships with their children, refuting the radical feminist narrative.

After those efforts failed, Kruk explains, opposition got serious, i.e. it attempted to recruit science to its anti-dad cause.  (Let me be clear that it was precisely anti-father.  Essentially everyone at the time understood that, overwhelmingly, mothers got sole or primary custody of children post-divorce.  Therefore, any attempt at sharing care was perceived as reducing mothers’ time with their children and increasing father’s.)

The first wave of objections to a legal shared parenting presumption was largely based on outdated versions of attachment theory that focused on children’s need for maintaining attachments with their mothers as primary caregivers (Bowlby, 1969). These arguments failed to take into account new research-based reformulations of attachment theory that emphasized children’s primary attachment to both parents, and the increasing popularity of shared caregiving in two-parent families.

By the late 70s or early 80s, Bowlby himself had abjured his original work, but, undeterred, anti-shared parenting forces soldiered on.  Enter Goldstein, Solnit and Freud whose book, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, was, at least as of the end of the millennium, the most influential work on post-divorce parenting arrangements, among judges.

The only problem was that its thesis – that there is but one “psychological” parent and so efforts to include both in children’s lives were pointless – was entirely without scientific support.  As Canadian economist Paul Millar wrote, that thesis “is not only unsupported  by evidence, but, worse, appears to promote harmful outcomes for children through the legal support given the destruction of one of the important parental relationships for the child.”

That’s what the anti-shared parenting forces found to their liking. To their dismay, reality intervened.

In rebuttal to the first wave of arguments against shared parenting, attachment theory has been amended to accommodate evidence that children form strong attachment bonds and relationships with both parents and show remarkable tenacity in continuing these under a variety of conditions (Lamb & Kelly, 2009)…

The major flaw of the primary parent or attachment figure argument is that it is based on outdated research and attachment theory formulations…

It is now well established that children form primary attachment bonds with both of their parents at the same stage in their development (Lamb & Kelly, 2009). Relationships spanning a range of activities and contexts, with minimal separations, are vital to preserving these attachments to both parents.

Much of that research dates back to the 70s, i.e. when anti-shared parenting advocates were citing research to support their claims that even then was out of date.  Over forty years later, we now know to a certainty that the concept of one primary attachment figure is, as Millar said, unsupported by evidence. 

The debunking of the primary parent argument has not deterred those who oppose shared parenting.

Their fallback position is that, because mothers do the majority of hands-on childcare, any arrangement following divorce should ape that during marriage.  Again, there’s nothing to support the claim, but claim it they do.

This argument, however, fails to acknowledge the gender convergence of child care roles in contemporary families (Bianchi, 2000; Marshall, 2006). Current analyses report that employed mothers and fathers spend a comparable amount of time caring for their children. On average, employed mothers devote 11.1 hours to direct child care each week and fathers devote 10.5 hours, a 515 to 49% split (Higgins & Duxbury, 2002).

That’s true of course, but even if there were a significant difference between fathers’ and mothers’ parenting time, that should never interfere with a child’s relationship with its father post-divorce.  Children form strong attachments with each parent. Sharply diminishing time spent with either parent is destructive to children regardless of whether Dad spends four hours a day with his child or one.  Children aren’t watching the clock to see how much time each parent spends with them and adjusting their attachments accordingly.

It’s a simple matter.  If little Andy or Jenny has a relationship with Daddy during his marriage to Mommy, it should continue robustly after they split up.  That’s assuming we’re serious about acting in the best interests of children.

More on this later.

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

Prof. Edward Kruk’s article in the Special Issue of the Journal of Divorce and Remarriage should be required reading for legislators, family court judges, custody evaluators, social workers, psychologists and everyone else involved in child custody decision-making. Kruk reviews the long history of resistance to the idea of shared parenting and the burgeoning science refuting that resistance. He leaves the reader with the feeling that (a) that resistance has never been particularly scrupulous and (b) it no longer has even a pretense of validity.

The article provides a historical perspective on the battle for shared parenting that’s much-needed today.

As research evidence on child and family outcomes supportive of shared parenting as a foundation of family law has proliferated, counterarguments to shared parenting have likewise evolved. Since the 1970s, after the introduction of the “best interests of the child standard” in family law internationally, a gender-neutral criterion replaced maternal preference statutes. This was intended to encourage greater sharing of parental responsibility of children after parental separation. Yet, three distinct “waves” of arguments against shared parenting have placed researchers and shared parenting advocates on the defensive…

These “waves” of arguments against shared parenting as a family law presumption were, first, an outright dismissal of shared parenting as an unworkable and preposterous notion; second, more concentrated and in-depth rebuttals; and third, a cautious but increasing recognition that the idea might have some merit. Today we find ourselves at a watershed moment in regard to recognizing and establishing shared parenting as in the best interests of most children of divorce, and as beneficial for parents as well.

That watershed moment reflects the great increase in scientific support for shared parenting at the same time that opponents find themselves empty-handed. For all intents and purposes, the science supporting shared parenting is unopposed by scrupulous counter science. As Braver, et al point out in the last article in the Special Issue, we can now venture to say that shared parenting causes better outcomes for children than does sole care.

In the first of these waves, an important early argument against joint legal custody was that it would disempower mothers, allowing fathers control over their children and ex-wives without any demonstration of responsibility for child care on their part (Polikoff, 1982; Weitzman, 1985). It was argued that “the search for symbolic equality has led to a sacrifice of equity” (Fineman, 1988, p. 4). A number of feminist scholars argued that when joint custody dispositions continue to resemble de facto sole maternal custody, the social role and functions of custodial mothers are maintained in practice but their legal rights and control over their children’s lives are diminished.

Hmm. That strikes me as a straw man argument at best. After all, where was the evidence that fathers with significant shared custody didn’t use it to maintain meaningful relationships with their kids? It certainly doesn’t happen now and I doubt it did then. Nothing in the literature I’ve read over the years indicates any such thing.

Another concern about the granting of joint custody to fathers was the assumption that the primary motivation of divorced fathers seeking joint custody and shared parenting arrangements was to avoid child support obligations (Polikoff, 1982).

Both the claim that fathers only want shared custody to take power from mothers and that they do so only to take child support from mothers were answered by research demonstrating fathers’ actual motivations.

This research concluded that although fathers envisioned the concept of shared parenting as encompassing a sharing of both parental rights and responsibilities, their primary motivation was to maintain meaningful day-to-day relationships with their children. Fathers experienced a profound grief reaction related to the absence of their children and saw themselves at high risk of becoming alienated from their children within traditional custody and access arrangements.

Having tried the tactic of denigrating fathers, opponents of children maintaining real relationships with their fathers post-divorce next resorted to science. According to Kruk, they did so in three waves.

The first wave was based on an outdated form of attachment theory that focused on children’s need for maintaining attachments with their primary caregiver, and the mother’s supposedly natural position as the primary parent. The second wave focused on children’s exposure to high conflict and family violence in shared parenting arrangements; these arguments persisted despite an initial lack of research on the link between the two. Finally, the third wave of arguments acknowledged that shared parenting might be beneficial for most children, but cautioned against the idea of presumptions in family law, focusing on subgroups of children and families such as children in high-conflict families, or infants and the very young. Again, these arguments persisted despite new research supportive of shared parenting that challenged outdated assumptions about these populations.

Each successive wave found itself submerged under a tide of scrupulous scientific inquiry demonstrating what common sense tells us – that humans, being bi-parental animals, their children need both parents and suffer when either is removed from their lives.

I’ll do more on this next time.

 

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