Category: Blog

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

I always cringe when I hear the phrase “male role model.” I do so because it’s so often been used to suggest that actual fathers aren’t important to their children. It’s the thoroughly debunked notion that fathers are replaceable by some other man, any other man. One’s as good as another, don’t you know. To the extent that notion gains traction, it undermines every father’s efforts to establish and maintain a meaningful relationship with his children. The simple truth is that fathers are irreplaceable. Everything else – adoptive parents, foster parents, stepparents – is, on average, a distant second best. Public policy needs to focus on keeping biological dads in their kids’ lives.

So it was with some distress that I read Terry Brennan’s latest piece (Daily Caller, 4/2/18). Now, as I’ve said before, Brennan didn’t just fall off the turnip truck when it comes to public policy issues affecting men, fathers and children. He’s one of the most knowledgeable people around and his article is basically sound. We have plenty of kids without fathers and that’s not going to change any time soon. About one-third of the kids of divorce have little or no contact with their father.

That presents the question of what to do. It’s been said before that a child can come into the world and reach college age without a single significant man in his/her life. No father, no teacher, no coach.

Male primary school teachers have become an endangered species. While pre-school and kindergarten gender disparities are worst, where women comprise 97.7 percent of teachers, elementary and middle schools aren’t significantly different. Between 1987 and 2012, the percentage of male teachers declined in every measured period, falling to 23.7% of all teachers.

Short of re-engaging fathers with those kids, they need – the dreaded term – male role models. Hey, something’s better than nothing. There are movements afoot to provide them.

Programs like “Watch D.O.G.S.” (Dads of Great Students) and Strong Fathers Strong Families create positive educational engagement with fathers. Chrystal Wilkie, of Minnesota Valley Action Council’s Head Start, learned:

“The Strong Fathers Curriculum has made our staff more aware of involving and engaging the dads or other male figures in our everyday programing, i.e. conferences, newsletters, health requirements, family days, policy council, parent meetings and volunteering in the classroom.”

More “involving and engaging” dads is a move in the right direction.

Almost 6,500 schools have started Watch D.O.G.S. programs and Strong Fathers Strong Families has conducted 5,000 engagements. While impressive, considering there are 90,000 elementary schools in the US, there’s a long way to go.

Meanwhile, fathers themselves seem hungry to provide to other children what they provide to their own.

When fathers are welcomed, amazing things happen. A Dallas middle school hoped 50 dads volunteer for a breakfast with fatherless kids. So many responded the schools website crashed and 600 finally attended. Shelby Traditional Academy instituted a “Flash Dads” program for students without male role models. A day after a shooting at a nearby school, Dads lined the hallways giving students high-fives as they entered. They likely felt very safe.

Of course there are many reasons why men and fathers aren’t involved in schools, either as teachers or as auxiliaries. Over four decades, we’ve so demonized men that even the presence of a man at a primary school can bring anything from suspicious glances to allegations of child abuse. Several years ago it was reported that 19% of male primary school teachers in Canada had been falsely accused of some form of child abuse. For many men, that’s simply too great a risk to take.

Plus, teaching in public schools doesn’t pay very well. For all our talk about gender equality, vastly more women than men opt for lower-paying jobs, work less and tend to drop out of the workforce altogether when children come along. That places the main burden of earning a family’s living squarely where it’s always been – on Dad. And Dad’s sense of what it means to be a man, a father, a husband and a provider still militates in favor of his getting the highest-paying job he can find. Typically, that’s not teaching elementary school kids.

It’s not like that’s likely to change any time soon. Traditional sex roles have proven hard to break down, despite decades of trying. Men still tend to see themselves as providers first and women see themselves as mothers. There are of course countless exceptions, but voluminous data from, for example, the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development demonstrate the strong hold those roles have on both men and women. And the American Enterprise Institute produced a survey of college degrees that bring the highest salaries. Of those, men far outnumbered women in nine of the top 10, 19 of the top 20 and 26 of the top 30 college majors. That’s true despite the fact that women far outnumber men on campus.

So the notion that men will soon start flocking to jobs in primary education looks dubious at best.

Still, Brennan’s right to exhort schools to do more to involve fathers and father figures to take part in students’ lives. It’s far from the ideal solution to the problem of fatherlessness, but we shouldn’t allow the ideal to become the enemy of the possible. Again, something’s better than nothing.

#fathers, #malerolemodels, #schools

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

Here’s yet another article to which policy makers should pay attention (Wall Street Journal, 3/27/18). It’s by Wendy Wang who’s the Director of Research at the Institute for Family Studies. Her theme is the “success sequence,” by which she means “education, a job, marriage and then kids,” explicitly in that order. She points out that in most of the Asian world, conducting one’s life any other way is an anathema.

Like many Asian parents, my mother stressed the importance of working hard and getting a good education before beginning a family.

Having a child outside marriage never crossed my mind. In the small city where I grew up, it isn’t done. Even today, less than 4% of births in China are out of wedlock, and the same is true in India, Japan and South Korea. For the vast majority of young adults in Asia, the path to success clearly runs through education, work and marriage—in that order. Families, schools, media and society at large all reinforce that message.

That last sentence is important. The success sequence can’t be legislated, it must be learned. To be learned, it must be taught – and taught and taught again. It must be part of the cultural Muzak. Everyone is better off if we follow Wang’s mother’s advice. Single-parent child-bearing is a bad idea, mostly for children but also for adults and society generally. The data on poverty alone should convince anyone.

Tracking a cohort of young adults from their teenage years to early adulthood in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and I recently tested how well the three success sequence “steps” work among the millennial generation. We found that at ages 28 to 34, 53% of millennials who had failed to complete all three steps were poor. The poverty rate dropped to 31% among millennials who completed high school, 16% among those who had a diploma and a full-time job, and 3% for millennials who also put marriage before the baby carriage.

The millennial generation often seems fond of believing that they’re special, that the rules don’t apply to them. They’re wrong, as the above findings demonstrate. Just like everyone else, single parenthood tends strongly to result in poverty. Recall for example that one-third of single mothers live in poverty in the U.S. That’s over twice the overall rate. Having a child out of wedlock has long been considered by some to be “just another lifestyle choice,” but if that’s what it is, it’s a bad one. Single parenthood is hard, exhausting work, with little time to earn the family’s daily bread. Children who grow up in poverty tend to exhibit an array of social and personal dysfunctional behaviors and failings. Children who grow up without a father (or a mother) do as well.

And yet, what’s rightly scorned in the Asian world is defended in the U.S.

But the message isn’t much discussed on this side of the Pacific—and when it is, it’s controversial. Liberals often dismiss it as a right-wing notion. They shouldn’t. Following the success sequence is associated with a much lower chance of being poor and much better odds of realizing the American Dream.

Exactly. As I said not long ago in a post about the liberal Texas Tribune’s article sneering at impoverished fathers in child support court, there was a time when liberals in this country cared about the poor and thought it was a good idea to help them if possible. Apparently that pillar of liberalism has been knocked down and carted away. Nowadays, liberals seem incapable of admitting that, in Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s timeless iteration, “Dan Quayle Was Right.” In no way can single motherhood be defended as a lifestyle choice as valid as any other. And yet, the very idea of challenging that twisted orthodoxy is met with the type of scorn only the ignorant can muster.

In regression models that predict the odds of being in poverty after controlling for a range of background factors—including intelligence, childhood family income, race and ethnicity—the probability of ending up poor was reduced by 60% for millennials who married before having children and by about 90% for millennials who followed all steps of the sequence compared with those who missed all three.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Single parenthood emerges as a bad idea across all boundaries of intelligence, class, income, race and ethnicity. And yet policy makers, opinion makers, pop culture, schools and countless others who should know better, who should be leading us in the right direction, have utterly failed to point out what Wendy Wang’s mother and Asian culture generally know to be true – the success sequence is good for individuals and for society. Like it or not, that’s the truth.

At this point of course, it’s time for me to remind Wang that, for fathers particularly, the “marriage” part of the success sequence can look like a bad bet. Marriage is great as long as yours lasts, but if it doesn’t, men stand to lose so much that the prospect of marrying often doesn’t look worth the potential cost. We’ve so incentivized mothers to divorce that, unsurprisingly, many do. We offer them the custody of their children, sometimes hefty cash payments that can last for decades, at least half the family’s assets including the family home. Combine all that with no-fault divorce and it’s no surprise that 70% of divorces are filed by women and that over 40% of marriages end in court.

So yes, Wang is correct. Young adults should follow the success sequence and society should inculcate it from children’s earliest ages. But all that exhortation may be futile if we maintain a system of divorce and child custody that strongly urge the financial and psychological destruction of men and fathers. We have to make marriage less of a minefield for men in order for them to buy into the proposition that Wang so rightly makes.

 

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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.

#marriage, #poverty, #singlemotherhood

April 1, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Stephen Bakerville overstates the case, but, after all, maybe the case needs overstatement (Daily Caller, 3/26/18). The case is the one for fathers and there is no issue more important.

Ever since the horror perpetrated by Nicholas Cruz against high school students in Parkland, Florida, among all the angst about firearms and the Second Amendment, the far more important issue of fatherlessness has emerged. Barely heard – but heard nonetheless – amid the din, the fact that 26 of the last 27 school shooters were fatherless males has garnered a bit of the public discourse.

That’s a good thing. Indeed, it’s a vital thing. Like it or not, there’s a Second Amendment that’s been interpreted by the Supreme Court to confer an individual right to possess certain types of firearms. And there is little-to-no public support for wholesale changes to either the Constitution or our laws regulating firearms.

But as yet, there’s no constitutional prohibition on fathers. And we know far too much about their value to children, women, themselves and society generally to pretend that our decades-long crisis of fatherless homes is something we can ignore.

As Baskerville so aptly points out, this isn’t the first time we’ve come to this realization.

Fatherhood was the rage during the 1990s. Spearheaded by Al Gore, the Clinton Administration started all kinds of programs to “promote fatherhood”. Scholars like David Blankenhorn and David Popenoe published influential books claiming a fatherhood crisis. The National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) and similar groups were founded here, as well as in Canada, Britain, and elsewhere…

For there was a dark side to it all. Rather than face the problem honestly, we took the easy way out by simply blaming the crisis on fathers themselves. Blankenhorn and Popenoe cheapened their books by claiming (without a shred of evidence) that fathers were abandoning their children in droves. While Gore was promoting fatherhood, his boss, Bill Clinton, was attacking fathers and having them plundered and arrested:  “We will find you!” he intoned. “We will make you pay!”

As late as 2009, I went to the website of the President of the United States and was at first pleased to find Obama’s respect for the importance of fathers. But reading further I realized that it was more of the same, more denigration of fathers while extolling their virtues. Fathers are terribly important to children, so they should stop being the callous scoundrels they are and stick by long-suffering and sainted Mom. Such was the narrative.

At the time I remarked that that take was nothing more than an easy way to avoid doing anything. After all, if the fault lay with fathers who care nothing for their kids or their responsibilities, what could government do? And so Government washed its hands of the matter.

But of course it was government that was at fault all along. From child custody orders to visitation orders to child support orders to adoption to paternity fraud to alimony, government everywhere encouraged women to leave marriages and take the kids. Unsurprisingly, they did just that. Meanwhile, study after study showed fathers to be deeply caring about their children and their role as Dad, only to be told by courts, elected officials, the press and Hollywood that their input was neither wanted nor needed.

Government largesse that had been paid to liberal client groups now went to conservative client groups, but no one ever really answered the basic question of how a government agency could “promote” either fatherhood or marriage.

Perhaps someone should have mentioned the problem of the hole. As the saying goes, “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.” Government should have done then what it should do now – stop what it’s doing wrong. Shared parenting is the obvious first step, but there are countless others. Fatherlessness is the problem, so courts must stop removing fathers from children’s lives. You’d think that would be obvious enough, but so far it hasn’t sunk in. Baskerville adds a few necessary actions of his own, with most of which, I agree.

No expensive government programs or psychotherapeutic gimmicks are necessary. It requires simply that we enforce the Constitution, which has been all-but-discarded by all this.  Shared parenting laws would help in the short run, but more is needed. We must enforce the fundamental right of all parents to the “care, custody, and companionship” of their children, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized, unless they have been found guilty of some legal transgression by due process of law. We must recognize that “no-fault” justice – in divorce or elsewhere – is an oxymoron (and clear violation of the Contract Clause) that debases legal justice and threatens a free society. We must again require that knowingly false criminal accusations are themselves a crime that must be punished. And yes, we must directly confront the political power of the massive army of judicial functionaries whose collusion has brought all this to the crisis point and who fought reform tooth-and-nail the first time:  judges, lawyers, social workers, forensic psychotherapists, the radical feminists who pressure them, and others with a vested interest in taking control of other people’s children and using them as weapons to augment their earnings and power.

To his credit, Baskerville grasps the importance of fathers, not just to their families, but to everyone.

I have laid a lot at the door of fatherlessness: degeneration of our social order, financial solvency, and judicial integrity. But it is precisely because so much is at stake that our would-be reformers have lost their nerve when they realize the herculean task they face. We will need leaders of courage and strength – not only politicians but journalists, scholars, clergy, and above all the ordinary householders who are not only the basic strength of a democracy but who are also themselves, in this case, the main targets under attack.

It can’t be said often enough.

 

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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.

#fatherlessness

March 30, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

A safe, effective and reversible male contraceptive pill has successfully undergone initial human testing in the U.K (Telegraph, 3/18/18). This is a once-daily pill that’s hormone-based. It improves over previous such efforts in that it slows the rate at which the ingested hormones are metabolically cleared, rendering them ineffective.

A male contraceptive pill has been developed which is effective, safe and does not harm sex drive, scientists have announced.

In what has been described as a “major step forward”, the drug was successfully tested on 83 men for a month for the first time.

So far efforts to create a once-daily pill to mimic the mainstream female contraceptive have stalled because men metabolise and clear out the hormones it delivers too quickly…

However, the new drug, called dimethandrolone undecanoate, or DMAU, includes a long-chain fatty acid which slows down the clearance, allowing just one dose to be taken each day.

Like the pill for women, the experimental pill combines activity of an androgen – a male hormone such as testosterone – and a progestin…

At the highest dose of DMAU tested, 400 mg, subjects showed "marked suppression" of levels of their testosterone and two hormones required for sperm production.

The results showed that the pill worked only if taken with food. "Despite having low levels of circulating testosterone, very few subjects reported symptoms consistent with testosterone deficiency or excess," said Professor Stephanie Page, senior investigator on the study.

"These promising results are unprecedented in the development of a prototype male pill," All groups taking DMAU experienced some weight gain, as well decreases in HDL ("good") cholesterol.

Now, given a choice, I’d prefer a contraceptive like Vasalgel that’s about to begin human trials. The above-described pill alters a man’s hormonal makeup leading to weight-gain and a drop in HDL cholesterol. Those side effects aren’t good. Plus, he has to remember to take one every day.

By contrast, Vasalgel has no side effects other than slight discomfort around the small incision that’s necessary for injecting the polymer into the vas deferens. That lasts a couple of days. After that there are no side effects at all, the injection is completely effective and lasts around 10 years. It’s also reversible with another injection after which, fertility returns in about a month.

Still,

"Many men say they would prefer a daily pill as a reversible contraceptive, rather than long-acting injections or topical gels, which are also in development."

Given that, I say more power to the research team developing this pill. With it and Vasalgel, men will be able to choose between a pill or an injection to ensure that they – at last, for the first time in human history – can safely, effectively and confidentially control their fertility.

A safe, effective male contraceptive is vital in the fight for equal rights regarding children. With it on the market, in whatever form, men will be able to decide for themselves whether or not to have children. They won’t have to rely on their female partners to do so. And of course with the male taking responsibility for family planning, women will be relieved of that obligation, if they so desire.

What’s not to like?

 

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.

#malecontraceptive, #Vasalgel

 

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

In the second of his superb six-part series on fatherlessness, Terry Brennan takes on the financial interests that fight to keep the existing system in place (Daily Caller, 3/26/18). I refer of course to family lawyers and state bar associations.

Family law is a $50 billion industry which too often removes one parent; overwhelmingly fathers.

Senator Wayne Wallingford acknowledged this: “Most fatherlessness is not caused by abandonment; it’s created by an outdated court system.”

Representative Edwin Vargas added: “We’re talking about keeping parents fighting and arguing because it’s billable hours, billable hours, billable hours.”

Rather than work to maintain parent and child relationships, courts take families at their most vulnerable, and pit parents against each other in a contest for their children.

Of course many family lawyers don’t simply maximize income at the expense of clients and kids. But for maney, divorce and child custody are all about making a buck, indeed, making as many as possible. Given that their clients are already angry with the other parent, exacerbating those feelings via the adversarial process doesn’t take genius. Unsurprisingly, those same lawyers look at a legal presumption of shared parenting as a significant threat to their livelihoods. With far less to fight about (the loss of a child), parents can be predicted to fight less, resulting in fewer billable hours for their lawyers. So the lawyers fight for the status quo that shoves dads out of their children’s lives.

How are dads marginalized?

An alienating schedule remains the standard in many states. For example, Michigan courts state: “The sample schedule presented in this guideline is based upon the most commonly used schedules across the state.”

What’s the schedule?

 “Parenting time shall occur on alternating weekends from 6:00 p.m. Friday evening until 6:00 p.m. Sunday evening. Parenting time shall occur one evening per week from 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on a day of the week to be determined by the parties.”

Fathers go from being everyday parents to being occasional ones. That often strikes at the heart of their very sense of self-worth, their reason for being.

No one has explained the heartbreaking decision they face better than Emma Johnson: “I eventually reached a crossroads with four paths. Some men commit suicide because they can’t handle the anguish. Others resort to violence and anger against the ex-wife. The thirds set take the difficult road, and sacrifice years of their happiness, battling on a hopeless battle with the ex, just to maintain some sort of contact with the kids. The fourth way, is to simply give up, and decide that the cost to the child through seeing the conflict, and to oneself, is too high.”

Indeed, sociologist Susan Stewart years ago coined the term “Disneyland Dad” to describe fathers who see their kids only on weekends. Her point was that those fathers quickly come to see themselves as mere entertainers of their children. What kind of father can a man be when he sees his children only two days out of 14? He picks them up, they go get pizza and rent a movie. On Sunday they go to the zoo. That’s about it. He makes no important decisions, receives little important information, impacts his child’s life in no important way.

Is it any wonder fathers drop out? About one-third of American children have little or no contact with their fathers. That’s the family law system at work. It serves lawyers very nicely, but parents and kids suffer. So does society generally, as a couple of generations of fatherless children demonstrate.

Fortunately, we have a pretty good template for shared parenting laws, i.e. that of Arizona. Professor William Fabricius is in the process of evaluating that law and how it’s being implemented. But, with the exception of the state’s family lawyers, everyone seems to think it’s working well. Fabricius also took the lead in educating Arizona’s judges about the many benefits of shared parenting, education the rest of the country’s judge’s apparently lack.

Back in 2006, Australia reformed its family laws to encourage more equal parenting time.

In reviewing the implementation of shared parenting in Australia, University of British Columbia Professor Edward Kruk found: “A marked reduction in child custody litigation has also been noted since the new legislation, with applications to court over child custody falling by a staggering 72 percent.” And, “corresponding to decreased litigation has been a marked increase in the use of family relationship centers and family mediation services. And most Australian parents (72 percent) now resolve parenting arrangements without the use of any legal services.”

That, of course, is exactly what the lawyers fear.

Brennan concludes with a thought I’ve expressed myself and should be shouted from the rooftops until our elected representatives hear it:

As almost half of marriages end in divorce and with record numbers of Americans now never getting married, shared parenting is likely the largest immediate action governments can take to begin negating fatherlessness.

The only change I’d make to that sentence is to replace the word “likely” with the word “unquestionably.” Still, Daily Caller readers will get the message. We promote fatherlessness through family courts; we do so to ensure that lawyers continue the lavish lifestyles to which they’ve become accustomed. It doesn’t get more shameful than that.

 

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.

#sharedparenting, #familycourts, #familylawyers, #statebarassociations

It is now the critical moment for the excellent shared parenting bill in the Massachusetts Legislature, and you are the only one who can put it over the top.

So you MUST come to our meeting on Sunday evening, April 8, at 7:00 PM in Weston, just off Route 128. This will be a succinct, short, strictly-business meeting to make shared parenting the law in Massachusetts. Please let me know you are coming!

Refreshments!

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 or two. In the end, we WILL get this bill passed!

We will then need you to contact your legislators 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 legislator.

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)

P.S. There is a possibility that CNN cameras will be present. Also, there is a possible mystery guest.

 
Meeting Location and Directions

First Parish Church, Weston
Sunday evening, April 8, 2018 7:00 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.

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

Domestic violence is an issue that’s important to anyone attempting to reform family courts and family laws. For four decades now, allegations of domestic violence have been used by parents to gain an advantage in child custody disputes. The absence of much in the way of due process of law on behalf of the accused means that he can be removed, sometimes for months at a time, from his child’s life, thereby establishing a fait accompli of maternal custody when the final hearing rolls around. Family lawyers have been acknowledging those facts for many years now.

That means that domestic violence law and policy play a large part in the nationwide effort to ensure that children maintain meaningful relationships with both parents post-divorce.

The Violence Against Women Act, while providing necessary services for women who are the victims of domestic violence, has long been criticized for its failure to address or serve either male victims or female perpetrators. The current count of DV shelters stands at roughly 1,500 for women to 3 for men. Likewise, the embrace of the discredited Duluth Model of power and control by domestic violence organizations funded through VAWA ensures that those organizations charged with ameliorating the problem of DV aren’t doing the job.

It’s with that background that Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) brings to the public’s attention facts about our domestic violence policy that the words “shocking” and “outrageous” don’t begin to do justice.

It seems that recently, Senators Charles Grassley and Diane Feinstein held a celebration of the 24th anniversary of VAWA. That’s the sort of things office-holders often do when they want to draw attention to past achievements. They remind the public. So it was unusual to say the least that Grassley and Feinstein invited no member of the public and no member of the press to their “celebration.” That “down in the trenches” nature of the event turns out to be all of a piece with the organization that’s behind VAWA and has been for years.

I refer of course to the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence, or NTF. What is the NTF? SAVE’s announcement contains this:

In the words of one knowledgeable Senate staffer, the NTF is the “main coalition involved with the VAWA reauthorization.” Groups that have requested to have a “seat at the table” of the VAWA reauthorization process have been informed that their request first must be approved by the NTF.

In other words, NTF is the one and only gatekeeper for everything related to United States policy on domestic violence. It’s the proverbial 500-pound gorilla in that room.

But again, what is the NTF? Apparently, no one knows. Not only that, but there seems to be no way to find out. We live in an age in which such secrecy is generally considered all but impossible. After all, can’t we simply go to the organization’s website and find out much of what we need to know? Not in the case of the NTF. Its website consists of a plethora of intentionally vague assertions of fact. For example, it informs us that the NTF includes “civil rights organizations.” Oh, which ones? It doesn’t say. “Labor unions.” No word on which ones. “Advocates for children and youth.” None are named. “Anti-poverty groups.” Nothing on those either. The list of supposedly affiliated organizations goes on without a single actual organization being named.

So what is the NTF? The organization’s own website, under the menu item “Who We Are” gives no information.

But surely a visitor to the site can simply locate the “contact us” button, click on it and find an email address or telephone number, right? Wrong, there is no such button. The site offers no way in which an interested party can ask a question or make a comment.

OK, but here’s one way we can be sure of contacting the NTF. Every organization needs money, so we can simply find out how to make a donation, right? Wrong again. The NTF’s website makes no pitch for funds.

At this point, a casual visitor to the NTF’s website might well conclude that the organization isn’t an organization at all, but simply a website. Indeed, its information is so sparse and so entirely unverifiable, such a visitor could imagine that the whole thing was put together by a bored 12-year-old. The fact is that anyone can make the type of statements the NTF’s website makes and, because of the entire absence of specifics, no one can figure out whether they’re true or false. If say, the site specified such-and-such a local labor union as being part of the task force, we could call that local and ask some questions, answers to which would lead us to other sources of information. But we can’t, because there are no specifics.

What is the legal status of the NTF? Is it a 501(c)3 organization? A (c)4? A section 527 organization? A PAC? A for-profit corporation? Some other legal entity? Who knows?

Where does its funding come from? Who knows? It’s obviously an important question because most organizations receiving money through VAWA are prohibited by law from lobbying state or federal legislatures. The NTF certainly does lobbying work, so is it in compliance with federal law? Who knows?

If it receives public money, what does it receive it for? That is, in seeking grants or loans, it will have been required to say what the money was to be used for, so what representations did the NTF make? Again, who knows? And again, that’s important.

It’s important because the NTF’s “Action Alerts” have, over the past 18 months addressed a wide range of issues that seem to have nothing to do with domestic violence. Those include federal tax policy, the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions to be U.S. Attorney General, healthcare reform and the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last August.

Is NTF misusing public money? Who knows?

In short, U.S. public policy on domestic violence is being controlled by an organization that is utterly secret. We neither know nor apparently can know what the NTF is, what it does, who funds it, who is affiliated with it or whether it violates federal law.

As I said, this is shocking and outrageous. Nothing in the law, morals or sound public policy allows such power to an organization that operates entirely in secret. Grassley and Feinstein must make the facts clear and well-known. They must do so before VAWA comes up for re-authorization later this year.

 

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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.

#Domesticviolence, #CharlesGrassley, #DianeFeinstein, #SAVE

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

I’ve said it before and, alas, I’ll say it again, “Child protective agencies run roughshod over the poor.” Often, we see the strong arm of CPS when caseworkers make the mistake of thinking they can do to the educated and affluent what they routinely do to the uneducated and poor. One such example was that of Alexander and Danielle Meitiv in Chevy Chase, Maryland. They are exemplary caregivers to their kids who were never harmed in any way. But Montgomery County CPS threatened the family with removing the children simply because the parents allowed them to play unsupervised at a nearby park.

The Meitiv rightly sued CPS.

But they’re highly educated people and know their rights vis-à-vis the state. Many, many poor families don’t.

Enter Brian Hogan of Cherokee County, North Carolina. Hogan is skilled enough, but only marginally literate. So when the Department of Social Services showed up at his door demanding that he sign a “custody and visitation agreement” or have his children taken from him, he did. He had no idea that CVAs are blatantly illegal under state law unless they’re approved ahead of time by a judge. Nor did he know that the county DSS had used them without a judge’s order for at least a decade, taking an untold number of kids from their parents in violation of the law.

That Hogan had harmed his daughter not a bit made no difference to DSS. Neither did the fact that he’d probably shielded her from harm. Hogan’s wife and the mother of his daughter had suffered a massive heart attack and was in ICU in Asheville, 60 miles away. So he asked a neighbor to care for his daughter who was then 10 and whose best friend was the daughter of the neighbor.

To many of us, that looks like (a) a sound decision that allowed Hogan to deal with his wife’s medical needs while (b) sparing his daughter the trauma of spending days at a hospital and seeing her mother on the edge of death.

But DSS didn’t like it.

Hogan said he asked his neighbor to watch his daughter mainly because her best friend lived there. But a few days later, a teacher at her middle school called DSS to say the girl smelled “like a cat,” Hogan said.

A child welfare worker investigated and decided the girl was not living in an acceptable environment. Hogan said he told the social worker that he had to be at the hospital because his wife was on life support. That’s when Hogan said he was coerced into signing a CVA giving his father custody.

In the world of DSS caseworkers, the fact that the neighbor apparently hadn’t sufficiently seen to the child’s bathing was more serious than if Hogan had taken her out of school and taken her to a strange new place to be up close and personal with her mother unconscious and hooked up to various medical apparatus.

But irrespective of what the right decision for Hogan would have been under those stressful circumstances, DSS had no right under state law to do what it did. Proper procedure would have involved going to court and presenting the case to a judge and allowing Hogan to explain why he’d done what he did. But, as we’ve seen all too often, respecting parental rights, state law or the U.S. Constitution is often not part of the repertoire of CPS agencies. Just a few years ago I reported that Judge Michael Schneider in Houston had actually gone so far as to order two Harris County caseworkers to write essays demonstrating that they understood the Constitution and the rights of parents. That sounds like a good idea for Cherokee County caseworkers, supervisors and others. They’ve been ignoring parental rights since at least 2007.

What happened next would eventually expose a practice by a child welfare agency that illegally removed potentially hundreds of children from their homes in this poverty-stricken mountain community.

Those same children are now facing the possibility of being uprooted again — including some who have spent years adjusting to their new lives, an Associated Press investigation has found…

In order to remove a child from a biological parent, social workers must get a court order from a judge, said Sara DePasquale, assistant professor of public law and government at the University of North Carolina.

Not only did Cherokee County child-welfare workers bypass that critical legal step with Hogan, they did the same thing with dozens, possibly hundreds, of other parents, according to interviews, court documents and copies of the agreements obtained by the AP.

Because a judge and state welfare officials have determined the practice was illegal, the children are at risk of having their lives disrupted again, AP found.

Some children who are better off in their new homes might not be allowed to stay there because the agreements did not follow proper protocol. In other cases, children never should have been removed from their parents.

And of course all that took place, not in the lives of educated, well-to-do parents, but the poor who tend to be less aware of their rights and have less ability to assert them if they do know.

The practice of using private custody agreements was implemented by longtime county and DSS attorney Scott Lindsay, who was recently fired from the agency.

Lindsay declined to say why he bypassed the court system to remove children, or how many of the arrangements his agency made over the years. He provided legal services for DSS for nearly two decades.

The lawyer may have “declined to say why he bypassed the court system,” but I can explain it. He did that because he could. He did that because he routinely dealt with parents who were ignorant of the law and their rights. He did that because it was simpler to shanghai children away from their parents if he could “bypass” due process of law. He did that because, on occasion, judges can be pesky, requiring evidence before they issue the desired order.

That was much to the liking of DSS. What’s not to like about a process that’s quick, easy and a slam-dunk winner for the agency? And if hundreds of parents feel the state’s boot in the middle of their face in the process, hey, they’re poor and ignorant. Why care about them? And if hundreds of children are traumatized, well c’est la vie.

Hogan, his daughter and those hundreds of other parents and children need to sue Cherokee County and attorney Lindsay. They need to acquaint themselves with the inside of a courtroom and, at this point, a hefty civil suit is the best way to accomplish that. Meanwhile, it looks from here as if Lindsay should be disbarred for blatantly violating state law.

 

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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.

#childprotectiveservices, #parents’rights

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

Fathers in Scotland face a hurdle that’s common to dads across the English-speaking world (Herald Scotland, 3/15/18). The Fatherhood Institute there calls it a “data desert.” That is, public policy and the legislative process are hamstrung by a lack of hard data on what actually happens to fathers when they divorce or separate from the mother of their children. Governments fail to collect appropriate data and public policy fails as a result.

The findings of a three year study by the Fatherhood Institute have been presented to MSPs, amid concerns policies are out of touch with the changing role of fathers in the lives of Scottish children.

Rebecca Goldman, Research Associate with the Fatherhood Institute, presented her report Where’s the Daddy? to the new cross party group on shared parenting at the Scottish Parliament.

In Scotland as in the U.S. and elsewhere, fathers are indeed changing their parenting behavior and there as here, law and public policy remain blissfully unaware of the fact. That’s true despite a couple of decades of research demonstrating dads’ expanded role.

But I don’t want readers to conclude that the increased parenting done by fathers is the only – or even the main – reason why policy must change. The simple fact is that children need their fathers. That’s true almost regardless of how much diaper changing, bathing, feeding, etc. a father does. Fathers don’t have to behave like mothers to be of value to their children.  Kids form attachments to their fathers equally with their mothers. Public policy that kicks dads to the curb damages those attachments and results in the many personal and social deficits attendant on fatherless children.

So yes fathers are doing more hands-on parenting, but that’s not why public policy needs to change. It needs to change because children’s welfare requires it to do so.

[Goldman] said national datasets such as the Census, Labour Force Survey and Growing Up in Scotland (GUS) often fail to take into account the role of fathers, particularly where children live between households.

Funded by the Nuffield Foundation, Where’s the Daddy? calls for more to be done to reflect the diversity of modern fathering. It says official statistics often fail to distinguish between birth, adoptive or ‘step’ fathers. It also recommends separated fathers should be reclassified in terms of whether they live with their children, and how much of the time, under headings such as full-time co-resident, part-time co-resident or non-resident.

That’s important to many Scottish fathers because government benefits often reflect the assumption that a single father spends no time with his child.

Ian Maxwell, Scottish head of the charity Families Need Fathers, says a father, can be categorised, often unwittingly – as the “non-resident parent” – even if his children live with him up to half of the time.

He claims housing is a classic example of the problems this causes, with many fathers unable to gain overnight care of children if they don’t have space for them – but told by housing providers they don’t qualify for larger homes because they don’t have the care of their children.

As Yossarian so memorably remarked, “That’s some catch, that Catch-22.”

Here in the U.S., we have our own vast expanses of data-absence. Few states keep anything like scrupulous records of parenting time outcomes in family courts. Indeed, judges in Nebraska are resisting a proposed requirement that divorcing parents fill out a simple, one-page form indicating what custody and parenting time orders judges issue. That could be done at virtually no cost to the taxpayer and would provide an easy-to-access dataset showing exactly what family court judges are doing.

Our own data desert then allows opponents of shared parenting to claim that laws promoting shared parenting are unnecessary because judges are granting equal or near-equal parenting time anyway. Those claims are contradicted by the data we do have, but routinely kept statistics on the matter would allow us to track which judges tend to order what type of custody and parenting time and how that changes over time (if it does).

Mr Maxwell added: “A data desert tends to lead to a policy desert. This isn’t just an issue for fathers, it is important for mothers too and above all for the children. There is a mountain of research from around the world that the greater the involvement of both parents the better the life chances of the children.”

Well and accurately said. The same is true across the entire English-speaking world. Knowledge is power and it seems those who resist giving fathers power in divorce courts like us to remain as ignorant as possible.

 

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.

#parentingtime, #sharedparenting, #Scotland, #children’swelfare

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

Co-founder of Leading Women for Shared Parenting and longtime friend of the National Parents Organization, Terry Brennan began his series on fatherlessness in the United States this past Monday in The Daily Caller (Daily Caller, 3/19/18). Brennan is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about fatherlessness and one of our most dogged and effective activists. His series of articles is a must-read for anyone looking to educate themselves about the panoply of issues that cluster around fatherlessness and family courts.

In his first, he sketches the outlines of the problem, quoting Missouri Senator Mike Cunningham thus:

“I want to share a couple of the statistics the senator presented during his presentation to the committee. As many as 71 percent of all high school students who are drop outs, come from a home where the father was not present in their life. The statistics of the effects of not having a father in the home are startling, and include:

85 percent of all youth in prison come from fatherless homes;

63 percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes;

71 percent of pregnant teenagers lack a father in the home; and

90 percent of runaways or homeless teens are from fatherless homes.”

That of course is far from all the social and personal deficits occasioned by growing up without a father. We’ve known those for decades now. But father absence doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Pointedly, former US Representative George Radanovich wrote:

“0 percent of the 537 elected federal officials in Washington D.C. fully understand the relationship between the fatherless child and government costs; that dedicated parenting is essential to the pursuit of happiness and the lack thereof is the common denominator of the runaway cost of government”.

I’ve been beating that drum for years now. Law and public policy actively, even enthusiastically, promote fatherlessness at every turn. Fatherlessness is implicated in a host of ills that the same people who passed the laws and create public policy then spend countless billions of dollars to address. Make sense? If those elected officials in Washington don’t understand the connection between fatherlessness, societal dysfunction and a bloated federal budget, they have only themselves to blame. The information is out there. Hey they can give me a call any time; I’ll be glad to explain it to them.

But even if elected officials were educated, what, if anything, could be done to address the fatherlessness?

Answer: A lot.

To a huge degree, the problem of fatherlessness is one created by public policy that, for over four decades has peddled a patently false narrative that kids are better off without fathers, that men are dangerous to women and children, that children only need one parent, etc. That narrative was wrong in its inception and it’s wrong now. The only difference between the mid-70s and 2018 is that we now have abundant proof that broken families are bad for everyone, the public purse not excepted.

What can be done? It’s vital to understand that we can only do what we can do. If a man is determined to not be a father to his children, there’s realistically nothing we can do to force him. Fortunately, the great majority of fathers aren’t of that kind. As countless studies and surveys demonstrate, most dads want to be loving, devoted, present and hands-on parents. Indeed, even the poorest, youngest and least-educated fathers cite parenthood as the thing that most motivates them, the thing in which they find their identity.

But if public policy has created fatherlessness, public policy can – and must – reverse the trend. To do so will mean a clear understanding of what produces fatherlessness. Most importantly, fatherlessness is produced by laws and courts that separate fathers from children. Divorce courts do so, but so do child support courts, adoption courts and domestic violence courts. As long as judges assume mothers to be important to children and fathers to be at best sources of income, we’ll have fatherless kids. As long as adoption laws bend heaven and earth to remove potentially fit, loving fathers from their children’s lives, we’ll have fatherless kids. The same holds true for courts that jail fathers for the sin of losing a job or yelling at a wife in a fit of distress.

But the law and courts aren’t the only factors promoting fatherlessness. The various communications media and popular culture bear a huge weight of responsibility too. For decades now we’ve shouted to the heavens that fathers are no good, liars, cheaters, violent, dangerous to women and children alike, lazy and without value to themselves, others or society. The movies, television, advertising and even children’s books have parroted the same line. Why we’ve allowed such a narrative to persist is anyone’s guess, but, after a couple of generations, even fathers may have come to believe it, at least in part.

So another thing we can do is start singing a different tune. Politicians need to learn the facts and start repeating them. Family values need to become a real part of our political discourse, not just talking points to be forgotten the minute the votes are counted. Television and movies need to start telling the truth about fathers and intact families – that all children need two parents, that women and children are better off financially and emotionally when Dad is around, that women and children are safer in a family with a father and husband than anywhere else.

When we start to do the above, we’ll see an acceptance of that message that’s wider-spread than anything that attended the anti-father narrative with which we’re all so familiar. People generally know the truth and are hungry to hear it. The truth has a ring to it that falsehood can never match.

For now though, read Terry Brennan’s series in The Daily Caller. Terry knows and tells the truth. We don’t get a lot of that these days.

 

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.

#fatherlessness, #LeadingWomenforSharedParenting