December 3, 2015 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization
This article’s author, Jim Ellis, was smart enough to make Dianna Thompson — friend of the National Parents Organization and powerful voice for shared parenting — its centerpiece (The Legacy, 12/1/15). That means it’s an excellent article, one that should be read by every judge and lawmaker in the country.
It hits most of the high points of the shared parenting debate.
If you ask Dianna Thompson, she will tell you straight. It’s a mess out there.
As a nationally recognized expert on family, step-families and divorce-related issues, and a member of Leading Women For Shared Parenting, Thompson sees that sons and daughters growing up without access to both parents is causing harm to children, families and communities.
Loss of a parent to the divorce process is highly correlated with a range of social and personal ills for children. Poorer performance in schools, higher rates of depression and other emotional problems, higher involvement in crime and greater tendency to abuse drugs or alcohol, lower rates of employment, and greater difficulty with intimate relationships are just a few of the detriments faced by the children of divorce.
That’s obviously bad for the kids, but it’s also bad for the parents. Fathers who lose custody — and often contact — with their children are far more likely to commit suicide and experience other emotional/psychological problems than are other dads. Mothers burdened with 76% – 100% of the parenting time suffer from heightened stress, lower earnings and lower employment rates than do those with more equitable parenting arrangements.
But our destructive child custody laws and practices don’t stop there. How much do we as a nation spend on attempting to ameliorate all the problems (and more) listed above? What are the costs in the countless governmental programs? How much do we spend to combat alcoholism, drug abuse, unemployment, mental problems, educational problems, crime, etc.?
I can’t begin to guess at a number, but why not strike at the root of all those problems? Why not do everything we can to keep both parents involved in their children’s lives post–divorce? Would all those social and personal deficits disappear? Of course not, but we’d be treating one of the most pernicious and wide-spread causes of them, instead of throwing money at symptoms.
Meanwhile, Ellis cites some truly knee-buckling statistics.
The non-profit National Father Initiative reported on a U.S. Census Bureau finding that 24 million children in America — one out of every three — live in biological father-absent homes. Nine in ten American parents agree this is a “crisis.”
According to research conducted by Joan Berlin Kelly, author of “Surviving the Break-up,” 50 percent of mothers “see no value in the father’s continued contact with his children after a divorce.”
The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry report “Frequency of Visitation by Divorced Fathers,” claimed that “40 percent of mothers reported that they had interfered with the noncustodial father’s visitation on at least one occasion, to punish their ex-spouse.”
Researchers found that father-child contact was associated with better socio-emotional and academic functioning.
Youths in father-absent households have significantly higher odds of incarceration than those in mother-father families.
There is significantly more drug use among children who do not live with their mother and father.
Ninety percent of American parents may agree that our astonishing rate of fatherlessness is a “crisis,” but political elites seem to not much care. From President Obama on down, they like to pretend that fatherlessness is the fault of fathers, whom they prefer to believe don’t care about their children. For anyone in a position to do something to fix the problem, that’s a handy dodge. After all, if the problem is merely uncaring fathers, what can policymakers do?
Of course if the problem is the family court system, they can do plenty. So they routinely opt for doing nothing even if that flies in the face of too much social science for most of us to ignore.
Are judges aware that 50% of mothers consider the fathers of their children to be of “no value” to their kids once Mom and Dad split up? What about the 40% of custodial mothers who admit to intentionally interfering with Dad’s visitation just because they were angry at him? Would it matter if judges were aware of those data?
The way the current system is set up in every state, custodial parents who have problems receiving child support have an army of state-employed and state-paid lawyers ready and willing to represent them in court to collect what’s owed. Noncustodial parents, 82% of whom are fathers, have no such support. When Mom decides to deny visitation, Dad has to dig into his own pockets, hire a lawyer and go to court.
Even if he has the wherewithal to do that, it’s likely that the judge won’t punish Mom for her wrongdoing. So he’ll have to come back to court again and again, at an often ruinous cost in attorney fees, just to see his kid as the original order supposedly guaranteed.
Of course, all those state-employed lawyers that go to bat for Mom are ultimately paid by the federal government that spends a whopping $5 billion a year for child support enforcement. Dad’s visitation? Not so much. Only $10 million a year is spent to support that (a 1:500 ratio), but here’s the kicker: none of that $10 million can be used to hire lawyers to assist dads in their quest to see their kids. Why the restriction? That’s anyone’s guess.
Even if couples go to court and receive visitation orders, fathers don’t always get their time, due to limited visiting terms and thwarted visits. And in this latter case, the fathers’ only recourse is to return to the court system, costing money that ultimately runs out. Instead of parents working out custody in a civil, considerate manner, some families are funneled into a billion dollar divorce industry where children are paying the price for it…
As the noncustodial parent, fathers may find themselves, for example, seeing their child every other weekend if they can see them at all. Having visitation orders doesn’t assure fathers will see their kids. “A lot of dads tell me they have shared custody, but they haven’t seen their child in six months or more,” Thompson says.
Thompson points out that parents who don’t pay, or fall behind, in their court-ordered child support will be contacted by a state agency, possibly costing them drivers licenses, business licenses, passports and even jail time. However regarding visitation rights, there are no state agencies or free services available for noncustodial parents, primarily fathers. The option of returning to court is ineffective and costly for fathers, most of whom decide to simply pay child support and forgo the court fights.
Some who oppose children’s rights to equal time with each parent claim that fathers only want time with their kids in order to reduce child support payments. There’s not a whit of evidence for the proposition and Thompson, in her 20 years of helping men in custody battles, has never seen it.
According to Thompson, though fathers often request equal, shared parenting, the courts don’t observe that. “In the 20 years that I have been working with fathers the one question I get asked most is ‘Why can’t I just be a dad?’ Fathers never come to me trying to get out of child support. It’s always ‘How can I get more time with my child?’”
Our largely dysfunctional system of child custody allocation is perhaps our single greatest social ill. That’s because it’s such a major contributor to so many of our problems, including poverty. It’s also because it contradicts the social science on child well-being, while claiming to act “in the best interests of children.” It’s also because it’s flagrantly unjust to children and their fathers.
Thanks to Dianna Thompson and Jim Ellis for doing their part to reform family courts and family laws.
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:
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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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