Category: Blog

National Parents Organization is grateful for the commitment, hard work and dedication of its numerous volunteers, donors, Board members and staff to the goals of our organization. Without you, we would not have succeeded in making the considerable gains we have in recent months in reforming state legislation to ensure shared parenting for our children.

We were particularly proud to learn last week that one of our volunteer Affiliate Chairs, Christian Paasch, was also recognized by the U.S. Air Force for his volunteerism by being awarded the 2018 Air Force Spirit of Service Award. Please see the write-up below. A hearty ‘Congratulations and Thank-you’ to Christian for all you do for NPO!

“Mr. Christian Paasch champions the highest standard of community service. His unwavering commitment to children and parental rights, and ensuring the well-being of children, to include military families, in the Commonwealth of Virginia is unsurpassed. Over the last three years, Christian has not only volunteered thousands of hours to form and lead a statewide, non-profit organization aimed at furthering “shared parenting” but also sponsored legislation in the Commonwealth of Virginia for shared parenting reform.

Christian leads the Virginia Chapter of the National Parents Organization (NPO), which seeks to make shared parenting the norm in family courts across the nation. Child custody laws are very state-specific, so he focuses his chapter’s efforts on reform within Virginia. Since this space is typically fraught with men’s groups and women’s groups fighting each other, Christian has committed to instead champion the approach of uniting moms and dads in the fight for gender equity in family courts. In order to drive change through his extensive volunteer work, Christian leverages the skills that are evident within his day-to-day performance as a DoD career civilian — his expert research and analytical skills, ability to build coalitions, bridge communication gaps and strive for results.

Specifically, Christian has succeeded in leading a team of women and men, who collectively have published more than 25 op-eds in the past three years and most recently, successfully introduced legislation that will be a very significant first step toward shared parenting reform in Virginia. Past legislative efforts by other groups have never advanced past the first sub-committee, but Christian’s team has partnered with a variety of allies in Virginia to push their bill not only out of the sub-committee (8-0 unanimous vote), but also through the House Courts of Justice Committee (18-0 unanimous vote) and through the Virginia House of Representatives (98-0 unanimous vote). This is a landmark “first” in Virginia — it has never been done before in Virginia with shared parenting legislation!

Christian’s tenacity and compassion to better serve both youth and parents is well-respected by peers and pillars of the community. Former Virginia Governor McAuliffe appointed Christian as one of 15 members of Virginia’s Child Support Guidelines Review Panel, and he was recently invited to speak on “Successful Co-Parenting” at the seventh annual Dad 2.0 Summit in New Orleans. Christian’s selfless service is revolutionizing how the community perceives fatherhood.

In addition to his co-parenting volunteer work, Christian devotes time to Boy Scout camping trips, fund-raising 5K runs, and other selfless acts to aid the community. Within the office, Christian also mentors fellow employees and serves as a sounding board for leadership on how to tackle organizational challenges, improve communication, and build morale. His hard work and dedication sets a standard for others — he epitomizes servant leadership through his words and deeds.”

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

Not long ago, I did a piece on the special issue of the Journal of Divorce and Remarriage that deals with the latest science on a number of issues affecting child custody and parenting time. The issue should be required reading for all family court judges and state legislators who are considering bills to reform family courts.

Today’s blog will simply summarize the various articles in the issue and use Prof. Linda Nielsen’s preface to do so.

The first article is Nielsen’s summary of “the results of the 60 existing studies that compared the outcomes of children in JPC and SPC families.”

As these studies document, JPC children fare better than SPC children on a wide range of measures of well-being—above all, the quality of their relationships with both parents. More notably, independent of family income, the level of conflict between the parents, the quality of their relationships with each parent, and quality of the parenting skills, JPC children are still generally more advantaged.

Children’s better outcomes in shared care don’t stem from any of a number of possible other variables, but from the shared arrangement itself. There are, of course, certain situations in which shared parenting either can’t work or isn’t advised.

Next, Dr. Richard Warshak addresses the issue of overnights with Dad for infants, toddlers and older children, i.e. the subject of his consensus paper endorsed by 110 experts worldwide.

Drawing on research from the large literature on early childhood development over many decades, Warshak explains why “contemporary proposals of blanket restrictions are contradictory and rest on faulty interpretations of a narrow bandwidth of scholarship.”

Are you listening, Jennifer McIntosh? Somehow I doubt it.

Article three deals with whether shared parenting is warranted in high-conflict divorces.

Contrary to popular belief, children with higher levels of JPC do not have poorer adjustment when their parents have high levels of conflict during the divorce process or in the first few years following divorce. It is the more rare, long-lasting conflict that matters. Moreover, having a high-quality relationship with parents is linked to better child adjustment even in high-conflict families.

Given that, in Sweden shared parenting has become quite common, that country is ripe for comparing how children do in shared care versus sole care and intact families. Dr. Malin Bergström has been doing so for many years and her findings militate strongly in favor of shared care.

[W]e learn that toddlers fare just as well as older children in JPC families and that JPC children of all ages have better outcomes than SPC children. We also learn that the Swedish government is fully behind JPC policies, as is the general population.

Next, the issue deals with children’s relationships with their grandparents and others of their extended families.

In “Children’s Relationships With Grandparents in Married and in Shared and Sole Physical Custody Families,” Jappens documents that JPC children have stronger relationships with both sets of grandparents than SPC children. This matters because these relationships are linked to better outcomes for children after their parents separate.

Braver and Lamb then summarize the views of the 12 experts who gave talks at the Conference on Shared Parenting last May in Boston by the National Parents Organization.

These experts largely agreed that JPC should become a legal, rebuttable, presumption with a minimum of 35% of the parenting time allocated to each parent for children to reap the benefits of JPC. They also agreed that conflict between parents or one parent’s opposition to JPC should not preclude or rebut JPC.

Perhaps my favorite article is Prof. Edward Kruk’s. He summarizes arguments against shared parenting and the science used to support them. Unsurprisingly, there’s little to argue against shared parenting and those who do wax desperate in their claims.

Top among them are the beliefs that children will inevitably be harmed by being forced to live with an abusive or negligent parent and that judges will be unable to protect children from being placed in JPC when they believe this is not in children’s best interests. As Kruk explains, these arguments have failed to find support in the empirical data and are based more on speculation, fear, and opinion than on data.

Patrick Parkinson provides the view from Australia where, in 2006, significant reforms to child custody laws were made.

Largely quelled by Australian researchers whose work failed to find more negative outcomes for children after the legislative reforms, the battle has now largely come to a peaceful end. Parkinson cautions us, however, not to exaggerate the impact of revising custody laws, as custody arrangements are influenced by more than just legislation.

Indeed. The many judges who are biased against any but maternal custody will likely not be reformed, regardless of the reform of the statutes under which they’re supposed to adjudicate child custody cases.

Fabricius, et al then provide the results of their study of attitudes about shared parenting following Arizona’s reform of child custody statutes. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that, although the new statute did not establish a presumption of shared parenting, judges and lawyers have overwhelmingly acted as if it did.

Four years after the law’s implementation, court staff, judges, mental health providers, and attorneys evaluated the new law positively in terms of being in children’s best interests.

Austin deals with parental gatekeeping.

Austin explains how evaluators can incorporate research on gatekeeping, attachment theory, social capital, and JPC into their work. Because restrictive gatekeeping works against JPC arrangements, evaluators have to be able to recognize how gatekeeping works and to distinguish between warranted gatekeeping that protects children and unwarranted gatekeeping that undermines or sometimes destroys their relationships with one parent.

Appropriately, the zinger comes last.

After analyzing studies that have applied the most sophisticated designs, Braver and Votruba conclude that JPC probably is the “cause” of children’s better outcomes. Based on their analyses, they reassure social scientists that they can now provisionally recommend a rebuttable presumption of JPC to policymakers.

Causality of course is the gold standard. If that can ever be proven, the game is over. I’ve never thought it was necessary, but proven causality would be yet another powerful argument for shared parenting. My take has always been that the overwhelming weight of existing science supports shared parenting and that, since its benefits cut across all the usual demographic boundaries of race, class, sex, education, income, religion, etc., the argument in favor of shared parenting is simply far stronger than the argument against. And since judges must do one thing or the other in individual cases, it only makes since for them to lean toward shared parenting.

Whatever the case, I’ll be posting more on the special issue in the near future.

 

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National Parents Organization is a Shared Parenting Organization

National Parents Organization is a non-profit that educates the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents, and extended families. Along with Shared Parenting we advocate for fair Child Support and Alimony Legislation. Want to get involved?  Here’s how:

• Become an official member of the National Parents Organization team.
• Join our Facebook Page.

Together, we can drive home the family, child development, social and national benefits of shared parenting, and fair child support and alimony. Thank you for your activism.

#sharedparenting, #children’sbestinterests

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

Here’s a judge who needs to find another job (ABA Journal, 5/8/18). From here she looks to be part of a system that prefers foster care and adoption to parental care, pretty much regardless of how fit and loving the parents are.

N.M. was an infant when her parents took her to her pediatrician because she was “fussy.” The doctor thought she had an ear infection, gave the parents antibiotics and let them go. The fussiness got worse, so they returned to the doctor who ordered a chest X-ray that revealed minor fractures of two ribs.

Enter the Philadelphia Department of Human Services, a.k.a. the children’s protective agency. DHS took both N.M. and her toddler brother into foster care, each with a different family. But strangely, the little boy was soon returned to his parents. Only N.M. remained in foster care. (If the parents were child abusers, why keep only one child in their care?)

The issue of what to do – determine the cause of N.M.’s injury, decide on foster care, parenting classes, evaluations, etc. – fell to Family Court Judge Lyris Younge, who promptly made her biases clear.

The problem for the parents was that no one could figure out how N.M. had sustained her fractured ribs. She had no genetic disorder that would cause fragile bones and the parents steadfastly denied hurting the child. Mom mentioned that N.M.’s brother would sometimes slam into her when Mom was holding her, but no expert said that was the cause.

Meanwhile, the parents wanted N.M. to be placed in kinship care with her paternal grandmother. The grandmother was vetted by DHS and found to be a fit, loving caregiver with whom N.M. thrived. Given that it’s state policy to place children in kinship care when possible, you might think the matter of N.M.’s placement to be clear cut.

It wasn’t, at least not with Judge Younge in charge. Younge preferred stranger care for N.M., despite state policy and the opinion of the DHS. Why? With no evidentiary basis whatsoever, she simply decided that the parents would sneak over to grandma’s house to visit their daughter when DHS wasn’t looking and, well, we can’t have that.

Now, at no time did anyone find that the parents had abused the child. The only established facts were that the child had been injured and no one could figure out how. But Judge Younge decided that they must have done so and immediately changed the nature of the proceedings from reunification of the family to termination of the parent’s rights pursuant to adoption of N.M. by strangers.

Why? Judge Younge demanded that they admit to injuring their child. When they persistently refused, she figured the best way to get a confession from them was to terminate their rights and shanghai their daughter into the adoption market.

 “Either someone has to cop to it or there has to be a plausible explanation” for the injuries, Younge said.

“If I leave her [in foster care] maybe I get closer to an answer as to what happened instead of moving her to grandmom. … So, I’m not going to consider kinship care.”

Eagerly going along with that program, a caseworker for DHS opined that their refusal to admit guilt was evidence of guilt.

(We’ve seen that from the justice system many times before. The Innocence Project has demonstrated the actual innocence of numerous people over the years, many of whom were treated more harshly than otherwise because they refused to admit their guilt (even though they weren’t guilty). Doug Bressie, the Idaho man who fought the child protective system for four years, and about whom I wrote last week, was blackmailed the same way. The idea that the very state that can’t prove your guilt holds your denial of guilt as proof of guilt is truly Kafkaesque.)

Perhaps more amazing than that was the fact that, when the parents located two doctors who were willing to testify that the child’s injury could have been caused by something other than abuse, Younge simply refused to allow their testimony or to enter their reports into evidence. Proof of Younge’s frank bias in the case doesn’t get much clearer than that.

So Younge terminated the parents’ rights to N.M. on the sole basis that she’d been injured. Fortunately, the parents appealed. The appellate court was none too pleased with Younge’s behavior.

A state appeals court has accused a Pennsylvania judge of “judicially created parental alienation” and a failure to provide due process when she kept a baby in “protracted foster care” after receiving no explanation for broken ribs and then terminated parental rights…

“In short, despite the goals of the Child Protective Services Law, the trial judge seems to have done everything in her power to alienate these parents from their child, appears to have a fixed idea about this matter and, further, she prohibited evidence to be introduced that might have forced her to change her opinion,” the appeals court said.

Just in case anyone should be misled, the appellate court strongly suggested that, on remand to her court, Younge should recuse herself from further participation in the case. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an appellate court be that frank about what it thought of the behavior of a trial court judge.

The appeals court noted the comments in a footnote at the end of the opinion. “While this court must take and does take the issue of abuse of a child very seriously,” the footnote said, “the fact that a trial judge tells parents that unless one of them ‘cops to an admission of what happened to the child’ they are going to lose their child, flies in the face of not only the CPSL, but of the entire body of case law with regard to best interests of the child and family reunification.

“We find that the record herein provides example after example of overreaching, failing to be fair and impartial, evidence of a fixed presumptive idea of what took place, and a failure to provide due process to the two parents involved.”

That’s a pretty fair description of the child protective system as countless parents know it. At least the appellate court stood up to that system in this instance. But of course the parents’ fight is far from over. They still have another judge and DHS to deal with, their child is still in foster care and the end is nowhere in sight.

Meanwhile, it seems that Judge Young is a serial abuser of parents.

The Legal Intelligencer covered the decision in consolidated appeals by the mother and father. According to the publication, it is the ninth time one of Younge’s rulings has been overturned on appeal, and the fifth involving an alleged due process issue.

As I said, she’s a judge who needs to find another job.

 

Donate

 

National Parents Organization is a Shared Parenting Organization

National Parents Organization is a non-profit that educates the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents, and extended families. Along with Shared Parenting we advocate for fair Child Support and Alimony Legislation. Want to get involved?  Here’s how:

• Become an official member of the National Parents Organization team.
• Join our Facebook Page.

Together, we can drive home the family, child development, social and national benefits of shared parenting, and fair child support and alimony. Thank you for your activism.

#childprotectiveservices, #dueprocessoflaw, #childabuse

On the Brink of Success: Put Shared Parenting Legislation Over the Top

Due to your efforts over the past two months, we are highly optimistic that our reform of the custody law will pass in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

Now we must turn our attention to the Senate. Your phone calls and visits to Massachusetts State Senators are what can put it over the top.

So you MUST come to our meeting on this Sunday evening, May 13, at 6:30 PM in Weston, just off Route 128. This will be a succinct, short, strictly-business meeting to make shared parenting the law in Massachusetts. Yes, it is Mother’s Day, and yes, there could be a playoff game; if you decide these are more important than our kids, don’t come to us complaining the next time you are humiliated in court.

At this meeting, we will review with you the current status of this bill, why we can get it passed, what we have to do, and the timetable for action over the next month. In the end, we WILL get this bill passed!

We will then need you to contact your Senators to support the bill. We will explain how to do this, and give you any talking points or materials you may need.  You do not need to be an expert on lobbying, the law or on child development. You just have to be a person who understands that kids love both parents and who is willing to tell this to a Senator.

If we don’t do this, nobody will! If we don’t do this, we are abandoning the kids of Massachusetts! If we don’t do this, we let special interests triumph! If we don’t do this, we deserve what we get!

Directions and details are below.
With enthusiasm and optimism,

Ned Holstein
Chair of the Board
National Parents Organization
617 795-2238 (o)

 

Meeting Location and Directions

First Parish Church, Weston
Sunday evening, May 13, 2018 6:30 pm

349 Boston Post Road, Weston, MA 02493. It is the stone church in the center of town where Boston Post Road, School Street and Church Street meet. 

1. Get on Route 128 (also Interstate 95).
2. Leave at Route 20, exit 26, in Waltham (one exit north of Mass Pike).
3. Turn West, toward Weston.
4. At the second traffic light, 1.5 miles, turn right onto School Street.
5. In one block School Street ends at Boston Post Road.
6. First Parish Church is the stone building in front of you.
7. For events, turn right, then immediately left in the Church parking lot.

Parking is available in the church parking lot. The parlor is in the main building and accessible from the front door.

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

Sometimes it feels like it would be easy just to throw up my hands at how the news media deal with issues relating to parents and children. Here’s a prime example (Globe and Mail, 5/2/18).

It’s an advice column written by one David Eddie. His correspondent is a woman who’s become pregnant by a guy she describes as a “club-going partier.” He’s 25 years old. Being a “club-going partier,” he wants nothing to do with the child and asked her to have an abortion. She says nothing about whether she intends to terminate the pregnancy, but we assume she doesn’t. Oddly, she’s written to Eddie to ask what she should do.

I call that odd because, if she intends to carry her pregnancy to term, it would seem her path is clear – let the guy know her decision, tell him she’s going to demand child support and let him know he can be involved in his child’s life if he wants. These are not difficult concepts.

Except for Eddie, they’re too much to sort out. He refers to the woman’s situation as “quite complex,” “outside the comfort zone of my skill-set” (whatever that means), “murkier and more grey area-filled” (whatever that means). So he called a lawyer to have answered the simplest of questions.

But not before he takes one inexplicable detour.

The courts cannot enforce that the “father” (aka “the inseminator”: I’ve written in this space, and quite recently, how I hate when those two terms are used as synonymous, so I won’t go through all that again) cannot actually be compelled to have a moral, physical, or emotional relationship with the child.

Which strikes me as sad, weird and unfair.

Hmm. Why is the court’s inability to force anyone to have a “moral, physical or emotional relationship with the child” “sad, weird and unfair?” Does Eddie really believe that courts should, in some way, have that power? If they did, how would they enforce it? Would he like a court of law monitoring his life to ensure that his relationship with his child is sufficiently “moral, physical and emotional?” What would be the criteria for deciding whether it is or isn’t? The man is utterly incurious about his own words.

Why is the burden on her, just because she gestates the child in her womb?

Which “burden” he refers to is anyone’s guess and of course Eddie’s not letting on. But I’ll guess he’s referring to the “burden” of having a “moral, physical or emotional relationship with the child,” although why that’s a “burden” to a woman who wants a child is left a mystery. If so, the answer to his question is all too obvious. She has that “burden” because she’s the one who made the decision to go through with the pregnancy. It’s not a decision anyone forced on her any more than is the one to not place the child for adoption or simply take it to one of the places designated by Baby Moses laws available to mothers who wish to give up their newborns. She’s chosen to not take any of those alternatives and to keep the child. Her choice, her “burden.” Eddie hasn’t a clue. He asked the question, but makes no effort to answer it.

The good news (from my POV) is he can be compelled by the courts to have, if not a moral or emotional or (what I would call) paternal relationship to the child, then at least a financial one, i.e. to pay child support.

Eureka! Eddie managed to stumble onto the answer to the woman’s question he considers obscure but is in fact known to about 90% of people over the age of 16. Yes, Mr. Eddie, a man who fathers a child can be made to pay child support.

Ah, but for Eddie, the issue becomes a dense, dark thicket from which there’s no apparent way out. What if the father denies paternity? That one’s almost too much for him to handle, but somehow, against such great odds, he soldiers on. It seems there’s something called genetic testing. (Who knew?) Not only that, but some courts will force the man to be tested for paternity and others will simply assume he’s the dad if he fails to accede to testing. In short, the Canadian child support system makes it exceedingly easy for a woman to get child support from a man. Memo to Eddie: this is not news to anyone but you.

Still, the attorney Eddie consulted to provide him information everyone else already knows did come up with one gem.

“[I]n a relationship of some permanence if they are the natural parents of a child” it is possible (though not certain) you might qualify for spousal support as well as child support. This business of you spending time in his apartment as well as having clothes and cosmetics there as well may come into play.

Amazingly, Canadian law is so eager for fathers to support mothers, that seemingly any set of circumstances can give rise to an order of spousal support on top of child support. So if the letter writer spent some nights at the guy’s house and left some of her stuff there temporarily, that may be all it takes.

As usual, the message to men is clear: take what responsibility you can for contraception if you don’t want a child; never let a woman move in with you if you don’t want to pay spousal support.

Or, stated another way, the law once again makes sex between men and women a mine field for the man. As public policy, it’s utterly irrational because any sane society encourages stable, long-term relationships between men and women. Of course if the goal is simply a transfer of wealth from men to women and the hell with stable relationships that are the best for children, well, we’re already there.

Readers can decide for themselves, but unfortunately, I suspect David Eddie cannot. For someone who doesn’t understand the basics of child support, the multiple flaws in Canadian policy that encourage divorce, discourage marriage and tell men loudly and clearly that marriage and children are in no way in their interests are far beyond his ability to imagine, much less describe to readers.

 

Donate

 

National Parents Organization is a Shared Parenting Organization

National Parents Organization is a non-profit that educates the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents, and extended families. Along with Shared Parenting we advocate for fair Child Support and Alimony Legislation. Want to get involved?  Here’s how:

• Become an official member of the National Parents Organization team.
• Join our Facebook Page.

Together, we can drive home the family, child development, social and national benefits of shared parenting, and fair child support and alimony. Thank you for your activism.

#childsupport, #spousalsupport, #genetictesting, #GlobeandMail 

May 6, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

There’s an old saying among attorneys that “bad facts make bad law.” The same is true of journalism. All too often, the press seizes on the latest scandal to demand dramatic changes in public policy without stopping to consider whether one bad case means the whole system must be scrapped.

Such is the case here (Lexington Herald Leader, 5/4/18). The article is about changes made recently to Kentucky law regarding foster care. Amazingly, the piece begins, not with a headline, but with what looks like a meme from the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, i.e. the state’s child welfare agency. The meme says “There are 9034 Kentucky children in state care, up from 7,917 a year ago. They were removed from their homes for their own protection.”

Oh, really? I suppose Kentucky must be that rarest of all states in which the child protection authority never removes a child who isn’t in danger. That’s remarkable because everywhere else, we read day after day about overreach by CPS caseworkers. Indeed, my last two posts were about Idaho CPS that had taken perfectly sound children from their perfectly fit and loving father for no reason at all. The state kept them in foster care for four years and lied, obstructed justice, committed perjury and forced the father to submit to multiple evaluations despite there having never been any finding of abuse or neglect on his part. I’ve written countless pieces about other similar cases over the years.

So Kentucky’s claim that every kid in foster care is there for his/her “own protection” is predictably untrue. They’re in foster care for many different reasons, some legitimate, some not.

Having presented as fact that which is not fact before the article even begins, it comes as no surprise that the writer, John Cheves is utterly incurious about the true nature of the child protective/foster care system. He begins his piece with a foster mother in anguish about two kids going back to their parents. His sole reference to those parents comes here:

The girls had spent nearly all of their short lives in the Mullins’ Lee County home while their biological parents tried to convince caseworkers that they were learning responsible behavior. Mullins was the only mother they knew.

Notice that, according to Cheves, the parents hadn’t successfully completed what the agency demanded of them, which they plainly had, or completed parenting classes, or pulled up off of drugs. No, according to Cheves, all they were doing was pulling a fast one on caseworkers. Did he pick up the telephone and ask the parents for their side of the story? He did not. He’s content to let readers draw the conclusions he wants them to draw instead of figuring out whether his preferred narrative is accurate or not. Needless to say, balanced reporting doesn’t follow.

[R]eunification with family is twice as likely to be the identified goal of child-welfare cases in Kentucky as adoption.

Cheves considers this to be a nefarious situation, but wouldn’t dream of asking why family reunification is preferred to adoption. Had he asked some simple, basic questions, he’d know, but he didn’t. For one thing, it’s a matter of federal policy that reunification be the first option. Why is that? For one thing, parents have rights, a fact Cheves seems not to know. State child protection agencies can’t simply terminate parents’ rights without due process of law. Plus, on average, children do better in parental care than in any other caring arrangement and foster care is the worst arrangement of all.

Finally, adoption’s not the best alternative because there are far, far too few qualified adoptive parents for far, far too many children who need to be adopted. There are about 75,000 stranger adoptions completed in the U.S. every year, but over 400,000 kids who have no parents and need to be adopted. And the two children in Cheves’ article aren’t among them. In other words, if their parents can do a good enough job caring for them, we want to give them every opportunity to do so.

But that’s exactly the opposite of what the real subject of Cheves’ article will accomplish. He refers to House Bill 1 that passed the Kentucky Legislature this year and was signed into law. Among other things, it will establish,

Stricter deadlines for biological parents to turn around their troubled lives or — failing that — for the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services to ask a judge to sever parental rights so it can permanently place children with adoptive families.

Termination of parental rights could begin after a child has been in state care for any 15 of the last 48 months. The cabinet would review the case and make a recommendation to a judge about the child’s future within six months. The court would get updates every three months after that until the child is permanently placed.

Cheves is enthusiastic, but he shouldn’t be. He’s drunk the CPS Kool-Aid that has him believing that every delay in the case of a child in foster care is the fault of the parents failing to get their act together. But of course that’s simply false. See my previous two posts about Doug Bressie, the Idaho man who fought the foster care system and its malicious caseworkers for four years. None of the delays were his fault; all were the fault of the state.

And of course House Bill 1 in Kentucky sends a clear signal to the child protection system that, the longer they delay a case, the more likely it is that they can wrest custody from the parents, place the child for adoption and reap the federal largess that comes to every state that does so. Cheves is oblivious of those basic facts.

Later in the article, Cheves admits that the Kentucky system has been plagued with a 24% annual turnover rate of caseworkers, that they’re underpaid and overworked, i.e. the same scenario that plays out in state after state after state. But of course it never occurs to Cheves that, with the passage of HB 1, the very delays in cases occasioned by too few caseworkers might result in fit parents having their rights terminated. It’s plain as day to everyone but the guy writing the article.

As I said, bad facts make for bad journalism.

 

Donate

 

National Parents Organization is a Shared Parenting Organization

National Parents Organization is a non-profit that educates the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents, and extended families. Along with Shared Parenting we advocate for fair Child Support and Alimony Legislation. Want to get involved?  Here’s how:

• Become an official member of the National Parents Organization team.
• Join our Facebook Page.

Together, we can drive home the family, child development, social and national benefits of shared parenting, and fair child support and alimony. Thank you for your activism.

#childabuse, #childneglect, #Kentucky, #adoption

May 4, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Continued from yesterday. Here and here are source articles for this post (Coeur d’Alene Press, 4/30/18 and 5/1/18).

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare put a target on Doug Bressie’s back. When caseworker Stacy White allegedly abused his younger child, Oscar, who was then just eight, Bressie fought back, criticizing White’s behavior. Apparently, White didn’t like that. When his oldest child, Dusty, had to go to the hospital for a viral infection, amazingly, White showed up.

“I was horrified,” Bressie wrote in an affidavit. “White absolutely gloated when she walked into the room. I remember thinking … she must be enjoying herself.”

What Bressie described was the face of every petty tyrant in history. White had, I suspect, been bent on revenge against Bressie since the incident with Oscar. With Dusty in the hospital, she saw her chance and she wasn’t about to let it slip away. When it turned out that Dusty was diabetic and suffered from a seizure disorder, White pounced. Bressie’d been told by doctors that her seizures could be life-threatening and required immediate attention. So Bressie had the girl sleep in his bed so he could be aware the instant her body went rigid with a seizure.

That seemed to please White. She immediately claimed Bressie was sexually abusing his daughter. Of course, she had no evidence of abuse and Dusty was then 11 years old, i.e. old enough to describe her father’s behavior. But apparently, White and Idaho DHW cared little for facts.

Then and there, at the hospital, Bressie was forcibly removed from the premises. He wasn’t permitted to say good-bye to his children or try to explain what would happen. The children would spend the next four years in foster care. (By then of course, Dusty was 15, but never alleged any sort of impropriety on her father’s part.)

Indeed, the state never produced any evidence of any form of abuse or neglect by Bressie, but it kept his kids in foster care anyway.

As outrage piled on top of outrage, the state finally moved to terminate Bressie’s parental rights. It did so in a hearing from which he was barred. Perhaps the key piece of “evidence” used against him was his refusal to admit the wrongdoing of which the Department had accused him. Never mind that caseworkers had no evidence of abuse or neglect or any personality defect in Bressie at all. Never mind that he invariably complied with all agency demands. They’d accused him and his refusal to fall on his sword meant, to them, that he was guilty of whatever they’d charged him with.

Magistrate Judge Penny Friedlander, after listening to testimony from the state at a December 2009 hearing in Coeur d’Alene — that did not include Bressie or his children, even though they asked to attend — opted to move to terminate the father’s rights…

Buying into unconfirmed allegations by the state of Bressie’s abuse, Friedlander made the father’s denial a cornerstone of her decision to terminate his rights.

“There has been a lack of compliance,” Friedlander said. She cited allegations of a personality disorder that the state proffered. “(They) go hand-in-hand with (the father) denying any history of abuse.”

Franz Kafka would only smile and nod.

So how did the children’s lives improve in foster care? After all, since White and the Department had decided they needed the protection of foster care, how did their foster parents perform?

The agency failed to place the siblings together, a provision of its standards, and it violated another standard that required ensuring the children’s well-being…

“I hated my wanna-be home,” Dusty Bressie, who now attends college in North Dakota, said recently. “By the time I was 12, I wanted revenge. I wanted to be around my brothers, my father, my pets, my family. The thing I wanted most was my life (back). I went to bed every night not praying to God … But begging (to be reunited).”…

Six times in 2008, as Dusty suffered from a lack of care, and was twice hospitalized for her diabetes, the state failed to address unmet physical needs, Busch wrote.

Nine similar incidents were documented in 2009.

“On or about Nov. 3, 2009, (Dusty had a new foster placement as of 10/31/09) concern was expressed about Dusty’s care, potential coma. The state failed to address Dusty’s physical needs,” according to Busch’s report.

The agency also failed Oscar, who expressed a desire to harm himself, and following a suicide attempt in January 2009, continued to show a desire to harm himself.

“Incident reports increase to almost daily,” Busch wrote. “The state failed to address Oscar’s mental or physical health needs.”

The report pinpoints sexual abuse or neglect by a foster family. Barb Kingen was accused of locking the children in a garage, putting soap in their mouths, or not giving them food as punishment. The issues were not resolved, according to Busch, despite depositions by two case workers who questioned Kingen’s ability to care for foster children.

“There is no indication the state took any action … after these complaints,” Busch wrote in a detailed, 17-page report.

In other words, the state took three children from a perfectly fit, capable and loving father, separated them and sent them to live with foster parents who were by turns abusive and incompetent to care for the children’s medical needs. They also fed Dusty food that was inappropriate for her diabetic condition and fed Oscar very little at all. All the while the kids were, of course, placed on psychotropic medication that was never needed before their time in foster care or after.

Plus, the Department violated its own standards, state standards and federal standards for how to deal with abused or neglected kids. First, they separated the three children into three separate foster homes. That violated the Department’s own rules. Then it made no effort at reunification, also a violation. And finally, it kept the children apart and apart from their father for four years, far longer than state and federal rules stipulate.

Children tend to do worse in foster care than in parental care, even when their parents are marginally abusive. Under the Bressie kids’ circumstances of course they did far, far worse. Bressie is a good father; the children’s lives in foster care were terrible. That’s how the Department responded to a single instance in which a concerned and rightly indignant father had the nerve to criticize one caseworker’s high-handed treatment of his eight-year-old son.

“They were just never going to admit they were going down the wrong road,” said James Hannon, a Coeur d’Alene attorney who, with [Attorney April] Linscott, represented Bressie in the final stages of his case. “The truth had no place in this.”

Linscott’s assessment is more blunt.

“Their main argument was, we’re the state, so we win,” she said.

And what of Stacy White, the caseworker who first abused Oscar and then gloated over her power to destroy Bressie’s family? She’s been promoted to “the regional supervisor of child protective services for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s Panhandle district.”

White looks to have always known she could do anything she wanted toward Bressie and his kids and fear no repercussions. If so, she was right. And of course any other caseworker looking on and seeing her promotion can’t help but conclude the same thing.

 

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National Parents Organization is a Shared Parenting Organization

National Parents Organization is a non-profit that educates the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents, and extended families. Along with Shared Parenting we advocate for fair Child Support and Alimony Legislation. Want to get involved?  Here’s how:

• Become an official member of the National Parents Organization team.
• Join our Facebook Page.

Together, we can drive home the family, child development, social and national benefits of shared parenting, and fair child support and alimony. Thank you for your activism.

May 3, 2018 by Will Mitchell, Chair, Executive Committee, National Parents Organization of Kansas

The state of Kansas’ new Child Support Evaders program functions as a “most wanted″ of those who are behind on their child support payments: the names and faces of parents deemed the worst offenders have their faces and names posted online, complete with the amount they owe, their last known location and contact information.

This is a solution for families, says Gov. Jeff Colyer. But look closer, and the opposite is true — this program hurts, not helps, Kansas families.

This is detrimental to children and parents for many reasons. Most alarming is how misleading the program is. It’s presented as a way to collect money for children. The truth is that much of the money collected does not go to the children.

Colyer was quoted as saying, “For countless families in Kansas, when both parents financially support their children, it means the difference between being in poverty and being independent from government assistance.”

Unfortunately, in Kansas, if a child receives benefits from certain federal programs, including TANF and Medical Assistance (Health Wave or KanCare), the parent applying for benefits must assign their right to collect child support to the state of Kansas. In other words, every custodial parent struggling on welfare won’t get a dime of back child support collected because the DCF keeps it. It sounds like a Catch 22 — they want to collect back child support to help parents on welfare, but they need to keep the money collected to help pay for parents on welfare.

Next, the state’s approach assumes that these parents aren’t paying by choice.

In reality, child support collection programs hurt the poor and force them into a cycle that makes them even poorer. For instance, state courts are incentivized by federal payments to the states to set child support orders at levels the poor cannot pay. One recent study showed child support was the fourth-leading cause of homelessness among men in Kansas. Forcing a father into homelessness will only serve to damage the parent-child bond.

On the big-picture level, the effort misses the mark in terms of having a positive impact on the lives of children of divorced or separated parents and only further alienates wonderful parents who in an overwhelming number of instances have a great desire to be active in their children’s lives.

The governor’s office would be better served to focus on a greater need for children — protecting a child’s interest in shared parenting, where children spend as close to equal time as possible with both parents in the unfortunate instance of divorce. Kansas, like nearly half the nation’s states, recently considered a legislative bill aimed at making shared parenting more common.

Research shows that parents who spend equal time with their children are much more likely to comply with child support orders and, even more importantly, those same children end up living happier, healthier lives by having both parents involved with their upbringing.

What’s more, focusing on legislation that protects a child’s time with their parents would not cost taxpayers a single dollar and would reduce strain on the state in a number of other areas. For instance, consider that children raised by two parents are less likely to drop out of school, less likely to end up in prison, less likely to experience depression, less likely to be homeless and less likely to abuse drugs. The list goes on.

The governor could have a positive impact on all these measures by simply directing our family courts to treat both parents equally in instances of divorce. At the same time, child support compliance would improve dramatically.

Another negative aspect of the program — imagine going to school and being made fun of for being the kid of a “child support evader.” Do we really want our children to be singled out and bullied because the DCF wants to collect more funding? Our state should be encouraging shared parenting, not embarrassing children and alienating poor parents for the sake of giving the government more money.

The governor and the DCF have a great opportunity next year to publicly support shared parenting legislation. In 2017, 53 bills were signed across the nation to enforce child support while only 17 were made to improve custody and visitation. It’s time to focus on solving the root of the problem, instead of putting so much effort into picking up the pieces of a broken system.

View Op-Ed.

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

I often comment on child protective agencies being underfunded and understaffed, resulting in poor casework. This is not one of those times. No, this story isn’t about a tragic lack of resources resulting in abused children (Coeur d’Alene Press, 5/1/18). It’s about the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare apparently having all the resources it needed and still abusing three children and their entirely fit father.

Did Doug Bressie make a mistake? He did. His mistake was in trying to get caseworkers to treat his youngest child, Oscar, respectfully. Doing so looks to have put a target on Bressie’s back. He spent the next four years learning the awesome power wielded by child welfare agencies. Theirs is the power to take children from parents, one that every parent dreads.

But targeting, Bressie said, began earlier, after an incident at school when caseworker Stacy White accused Bressie of spanking Oscar, who was then a 7-year-old. She made the boy pull down his pants as she photographed his buttock without dad’s consent. The case fizzled because her photographs were lost, but not before Bressie confronted White and her agency.

“Oscar came home and was very embarrassed that this had happened to him at school,” Bressie wrote in an affidavit. “I was upset my children were spoken to without my knowledge. I was angrier when I found out photographs were taken of my son’s naked body by a stranger … This was highly inappropriate.”

For seemingly no reason at all, the Department took his three children into foster care, tried to railroad Bressie into admitting some form of wrongdoing, lied to him, lied to numerous courts and ignored the fact that his oldest child, Dusty, was in the care of foster parents who were unequipped to properly care for her diabetic condition. That lasted an astonishing four years, during which time the agency produced precisely no evidence of child abuse or neglect by Bressie.

[F]ormerly sealed court records show that for more than four years, between 2008 and 2013, the agency prohibited the Bressie family from reuniting while caseworkers hid exculpatory evidence from judges, repeatedly bullied Bressie, subjected him to irrelevant tests and evaluations, and cycled his children through foster homes in the Panhandle…

Child protective services illegally kept the family apart, attorneys for the family said, without due process, or any evidence the actions were warranted, for a period that far exceeded timeframes set by state law.

State caseworkers kept evidence from judges and pushed to break up the family without ever showing the court why dissolution was warranted, according to court records.

Meanwhile, 11 separate state judges simply lapped up caseworkers’ perjured testimony like cats with warm milk.

Caseworkers charged Bressie with being an unfit father. They testified before 11 Kootenai County judges over an eight-year period that Bressie was transient, sexually abusive and jobless, although he ran his own plumbing business, had two homes, and had never been charged with sexual misconduct.

Most of the judges didn’t question the state, instead rubber-stamping demands that the family remain apart and Bressie be subject to evaluations, counseling and strictures set up by child protective services, court records show.

And, just for good measure, they required him to jump through so many hoops his lawyer wondered how he remained employed.

He failed to comply, caseworkers testified, with the many plans the agency set as roadblocks to the reunification of a family that was knit tightly as boiled wool since Bressie’s wife abandoned them years earlier.

“I did everything they wanted me to do,” Bressie said. “It was maddening.”…

“I was so busy talking to counselors, peeing in a cup, and doing whatever they asked, and nothing was changing,” Bressie said. “I never got to see my kids.”

While other parents with kids in foster care got to see them frequently and without supervision, Bressie remained a marked man.

As other families under the child protective services authority had regular visits, including during holidays such as Christmas, Bressie was barred from spending time with his children without supervision, while the agency attempted to coerce him into admitting wrongdoing, he said.

“I wasn’t allowed to take my kids anywhere, the whole time,” he said.

Once in two years, the agency allowed him to visit his children in a park, he said.

Keep in mind that, for almost all of those four years, caseworkers knew Bressie was fit to care for his kids. He’d been doing so perfectly well for years since their mother abandoned the family. So all of the vitriol they directed at him, all the tests and evaluations, the refusal to allow him to see his children, the abuse and neglect the children experienced in foster care, the lies, the perjury – all of it – was understood by the Department to be completely unnecessary. Caseworkers seem to have done all of it purely out of spite, purely because a fit father dared to question their behavior.

And of course they did it because they knew they could. They knew the power they exercise, they know judges aren’t curious to know if they’re telling the truth and like so many state agencies, with power like that, it’s not unusual to see it misused.

Finally Bressie hired two lawyers who eventually were able to put a stop to the abuse of state power and the abuse of children, and the abuse of a system that’s supposedly in place to protect children and reunite families where possible.

That was almost six years ago. Having secured the return of his kids, Bressie wisely turned the tables on the Department that had wronged him and his children. That resulted in a civil verdict in his favor that was signed last December by Judge John Stegner in the entirely insufficient amount of $350,000.

In December, Judge John Stegner, a Second District judge ruling in First District Court, found in Bressie’s favor, indicating the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s Child Protective Services had turned its back on its compact with Idaho citizens by illegally removing Bressie’s children from his care and placing them in foster homes, preventing the dad from visiting the children — a traumatic situation that resulted in suicide attempts by two siblings — and splitting up a once-stable family.

Bressie will see little of that money. Most of it will go to his lawyers and to pay for the expert witnesses he had to hire to wrest his children back from a malicious and unfit state agency.

 

Donate

 

National Parents Organization is a Shared Parenting Organization

National Parents Organization is a non-profit that educates the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents, and extended families. Along with Shared Parenting we advocate for fair Child Support and Alimony Legislation. Want to get involved?  Here’s how:

• Become an official member of the National Parents Organization team.
• Join our Facebook Page.

Together, we can drive home the family, child development, social and national benefits of shared parenting, and fair child support and alimony. Thank you for your activism.

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