Fathers & Families

The Fix is In: Nebraska Parenting Act Panel Acts in Secret, Violates State Law

Robert Franklin, Esq. — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:44:57 +0000

Not long ago I ran a couple of pieces about the demise of LB 22, the bill before the Nebraska legislature that would have established a presumption of shared parenting. The president of the Nebraska State Bar Association, Marsha Fangmeyer wrote an op-ed in one of the state’s newspapers that sought to mislead readers not only about the terms of LB 22, but about the NSBA’s opposition to it. As Dr. Les Veskrna pointed out in his answer to her that appeared exclusively here on the National Parents Organization website, although asked repeatedly to submit its own proposal on how to improve children’s outcomes post-divorce, the NSBA never has. Into the bargain, Fangmeyer claimed to want to read studies on the value of joint parenting, but left it to Veskrna to tell readers that she’s had those studies for over a year.

As a final indignity, Fangmeyer actually claimed that the NSBA doesn’t oppose shared parenting. Right. It just opposes any and all efforts to alter, however slightly, the status quo that deprives children of shared parenting 70% of the time (according to state data).

So the Nebraska bar’s opposition to fathers’ having equal custody of their children is plain for all to see. But the funny thing is, they needn’t have bothered. What is now coming to light is the fact that the fix has been in since long before anyone ever filed LB 22. The information you are about to read has never been published in Nebraska. The guardians of the status quo in custody matters have, for about two years, been working largely in secret to make sure that the current law, the Nebraska Parenting Act doesn’t change.

I’ve received a copy of a letter sent by three concerned attorneys to the Chief Justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court, Hon. Michael Heavican. It’s dated May 21, 2013, and it summarizes the frank corruption that surrounds the Parenting Act and ongoing efforts to keep it in place. This is a National Parents Organization exclusive.

The Parenting Act was originally passed and signed into law in 2007. It was immediately so sharply criticized that the very next session of the Unicameral had to radically overhaul it. Such an immediate alteration of new legislation essentially never happens, and the fact that it did in the case of the Parenting Act stands as mute testimony to the original law’s defects.

As it stands now, the Act requires mediation in all divorce cases in which children are involved. To say the least, that was a huge boon to mediators across the state. It’s a constant and large source of revenue for them. And of course, as we know, the law has made not a dent in the ability of children to maintain real relationships with both parents once they’ve split up. In Nebraska, mothers still receive custody in about 60% of cases, fathers in about 10% and joint custody is ordered in the remaining 30%.

Now there is something called the Parenting Act Evaluation Panel. Just why that entity came into being seems to be a mystery, but suffice it to say that the former speaker of the Unicameral, Mike Flood, appointed it two years ago. Nominally, its job is to look into the effects of the Act since its revision, but everything about it looks like an expenditure of public funds for the purpose of whitewashing a bad law. Essentially everything about the panel is at best suspect and at worst a violation of Nebraska law. Consider:

The panel’s membership includes essentially all the drafters of the original Parenting Act that was so quickly and unceremoniously amended. In other words, this is a panel that’s supposed to evaluate a law that was drafted almost entirely by members of the panel. What are the chances they’ll be very tough on their own work? And then there’s the fact that they did such a patently bad job of it the first time. Why are Nebraskans supposed to believe they’ll do better now?
Although the panel plainly exists, its very existence, purpose and membership have never been officially disclosed. Yes, it’s been funded, but from the outset, the entire project has been shrouded in secrecy.
That’s made all the more obvious by the fact that the panel meets in secret. Its meetings have never been publicized, in plain violation of the state’s Open Meetings Act, and public input has never been solicited.
The largest bloc of the panel’s membership consists of family court mediators, the very group the Parenting Act most favors by its requirement that every custody case go to mediation. Those members stand to gain financially if the law is left as is. If there’s a more obvious example of a conflict of interest, I can’t think of it.
The second largest bloc of the panel’s membership consists of anti-domestic violence advocates. Mediators in the state are required to undergo training in domestic violence issues and the state’s anti-DV advocates are the ones to provide it. Again, if the state were to back off of the mediation requirement, those anti-DV advocates would lose income just as the mediators would. And of course they have the same clear conflict of interest.
The panel is blatantly anti-shared parenting. As originally configured, there were no pro-shared parenting advocates. None. That raised objections, so a grand total of two shared parenting proponents were added to the panel out of a total membership of 34. At least eight members have publicly declared their outright opposition to shared parenting.
The panel is supposed to evaluate the effects of the Parenting Act, but the chairman of the panel and co-author of the previous law, Deborah Brownyard, has already gone on record praising it. She did so despite the fact that the panel had no data with which to evaluate the law.
Indeed, the panel hadn’t even created a protocol for doing so, and it turns out that that too may be a sham proceeding. The letter to Justice Heavican refers to the writers’ concerns about “reports that members of the panel have attempted to design data collection efforts to reach pre-determined outcomes, i.e. surveying only certain constituencies while purposely excluding others; members of the panel have also circulated studies to the Legislature that used non-representative data samples (i.e. cherry-picked samples) to reach pre-determined outcomes.”
Finally, there’s the matter of money. The panel’s budget is a hefty $250,000, over six times that given to a similar panel in Maryland. So far they’ve used it to let no-bid contracts in the evaluation process.

In short, from secrecy, to legal violations, to a rigged membership, to a rigged evaluation process, the fix is in. The entire exercise is one in which mediators and DV activists aim to keep the gravy train flowing in their direction. The whole purpose is to maintain a status quo that shifts huge amounts of money from taxpayers and divorcing parents to those functionaries. In the meantime, children are forgotten. If the kids of Nebraska are like those everywhere else, they need to maintain real, deep and lasting relationships with their fathers post-divorce. But Nebraska is deaf to their pleas.

Those of mediators and DV activists who aim to make out like bandits? Ah, that’s a different story. They’ve got their own mostly secret panel with lots of money to spend to do bogus research whose pre-ordained conclusions will be that what those children need above all is the very pricey services of mediators and DV activists. In Nebraska, the process of deciding custody is about who can grab the most money, in this case, from the state. If children suffer, well, that’s just a cost of doing business.

This is corruption at its most blatant. The voters of Nebraska must be told what their elected representatives have been up to. And many, many of those elected representatives should be booted out of office because of their knowing acceptance of that corruption that privileges narrow, greedy interest groups above children.

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

The National Parents Organization is a non-profit organization that is educating the public, families, educators, and legislators about the importance of shared parenting and how it can reduce conflict in children, parents and extended families. If you would like to get involved in our organization, you can do so several ways. First, we would love to have you as an official member of the the National Parents Organization team. Second, the National Parents Organization is an organization that believes in the importance of using social media as a means to spread the word about shared parenting and other topics, and you can visit us on our Facebook Page to learn more about our efforts. Last, we hope you will share this article with other families using the many social networking sites so that we can bring about greater awareness of shared parenting. Thank you for your support.

Outrage at The Guardian! Men Have a Say about Childbearing!

Robert Franklin, Esq. — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:50:28 +0000

It’s one of those moments when the anti-male press descends to the depths of self-caricature. If you’re feeling brave, read the article here (The Guardian, 5/18/13). Barbara Ellen’s piece is so downright nutty in so many ways, it’s hard to keep count. The strange feminist ritual in which every woman who participates comes out cleansed of agency, an eternal victim of men has never been exhibited more clearly for all to see. That men might have an existence outside of their utility to women seems to never occur to Ellen.

You see, the much remarked on trend of women putting off childbearing until later in life turns out to be not their doing at all, but that of - you guessed it - their male partners. And of course, this occurs, not for any legitimate reason on men’s part (are there any?), but due to the inherent immaturity and dishonesty of the unfair sex. Do I have to add that Ellen bases her allegations on nothing whatever? No studies, no data, not even any anecdotes from friends – nothing. Ellen wants it to be the way she says it is, therefore it must be that way. Period.

But I’m already ahead of myself. That’s because the very first problem Ellen has, and completely ignores, is the notion that there’s a problem. It’s true that, on average, women are putting off first childbearing until later in life than, say, 40 years ago. In the United States, the average age of first birth was about 21 in 1970; today it’s about 27. So there’s been a significant change. The question is “Is that a problem?” Well, it can be in one way. A smaller younger generation will have difficulty keeping up the social safety net for a larger older one. Now of course some would argue that’s an issue for the political system to sort out, adjusting the obligations of the younger generation and the benefits of the older one.

But strangely, Ellen never mentions that real but manageable issue. Indeed, she never makes the slightest effort to explain to her readers why we should care that women are putting off childbearing. It’s as if she holds that truth to be self-evident. It’s not. In case Ellen hasn’t noticed, there are over seven billion people living in the world this very minute, and that number increases every single second of every single day. Apparently the human population is going to top out at around 16 billion by a little past mid-century.

And of course the planet’s resources are being strained to the limit as it is. Natural food sources like the oceans are already over fished and the per capita consumption rates of the two most populous countries are nowhere near those of the U.S. and Western Europe. If they ever get close to that, look out.

So it’s easy to conclude that what the world needs now is not more people, but fewer and of course later childbearing means fewer children. But Barbara Ellen has decided that later childbearing is something women don’t want. They’re doing it against their will, and, since they want more children earlier, they should have them, the planet be damned. Ellen betrays not the slightest awareness of, or concern about, the declining ability of the beautiful blue planet to fulfill the demands of its human population.

And the same can be said about something in England called “Get Britain Fertile.” (What would Don Draper say about that moniker?) GBF, as the name implies, is out to increase the country’s birthrate. It does so in part by trying to educate women about the realities of their own biology. GBF seems to think that significant numbers of women don’t know that, after age 40, conceiving a child becomes a fairly dicey proposition. I can’t guess at the state of British women’s knowledge on that subject, but it’s no surprise that GBF has a survey in which it asks women about why they’re putting off childbearing. And it’s no surprise that Barbara Ellen isn’t interested in their answers.

Indeed, GBF is accompanied by a survey, stating that many women aged 18-46 are concerned about practicalities: ranging from loss of earnings and workplace inflexibility, to childcare costs and housing.

That’s right. There as elsewhere women are making their own decisions about whether and when to have children. And of course many practical considerations enter into that, career and earnings being among the most important. Sounds reasonable to me, but Ellen wants to focus elsewhere.

[F]or the purpose of this article, let’s look at the third of women who say they want children but haven’t yet found the right partner.

Yes, let’s. That could be an interesting exercise, so readers are left to wonder why Ellen doesn’t look at those women. Instead, she takes it as her cue to start making stuff up.

In my opinion that one-third is an underestimate.

Ah, so it’s time to substitute opinions for empirically-established data. Ellen wants the “problem” to be worse than it is, so she simply ignores the facts.

Even not finding the right man often turns out to be a euphemism for: “I met him, I spent years with him, but ultimately, he wouldn’t have children.” Put bluntly, many of these women at their fertile peak didn’t refuse anything, their men did.

Oh, and how does Ms. Ellen know this? She doesn’t let on. For her, to state something as fact is for it to be fact. Simple as that, no need for science, no need for data. For that matter, no need to ask inconvenient questions like when did you (the woman) decide you wanted kids?,” “When did you tell him you wanted kids?,” “What was his response?,” “Were you married at the time?,” “Did you previously have an agreement about whether or not to have children?’” “If so, what was it?” The list could go on and on and the answers would tell us a lot about just who in these relationships did what and when.

But of course Ellen would have no interest in that. Answers to those questions and many others could possibly reveal that men aren’t solely responsible for women’s choices about childbearing, and that’s something Ellen doesn’t want to hear. On the contrary, her interest is in male-bashing, and she’s not to be denied.

Like it or not, this is how men influence female fertility and, ultimately, female infertility. The mere thought is enough to inspire feminist panic: women, not men, should control their fertility. Who could disagree?

Of course women control their fertility. They have vastly more ways in which to do that than men have, a fact known to everyone who’s thought about the subject, maybe even Ellen. What’s remarkable is the unspoken assumption that men must be the tools of women’s desires. If she wants to stay childless, let no man suggest having a baby together. But when she decides it’s time to have a family, his job is to say “yes, ma’am.” The statement that “women, not men should control their own fertility” says nothing less than that. If you’re not going the sperm donor route, it takes two people to produce a child. If only women are to have a say in whether to do that or not, then men’s only part in the decision is to agree to the woman’s desires. That’s a fair definition of narcissism.

Now, Ellen does give a passing nod to the notion that a man’s unwillingness to become a father might have a legitimate basis, although she demonstrates no grasp of the many things that might make up that basis. But she doesn’t spend long on that topic, hastening on to her real thesis – irresponsible men.

Such men may feel that the relationship isn’t right, or don’t want their freedom curtailed, or other reasons, all as valid as a woman making similar decisions. It only becomes unfair, verging on selfish, when men keep such insights to themselves for too long. These are the time-wasters, what I’d term the fertility-drifters, who think nothing of keeping women dangling for years on end.

The obvious question becomes “how many of these men are there who secretly don’t want to have children, but don’t tell their partners until it’s too late for the women to chart a different course?” Ellen has no idea. There’s not a whit of data on that, but, as usual, she needs none. Those men exist in their multitudes, she’s sure, and don’t they make the world a rotten place for women!

But far more important is Ellen’s concept that, when the woman says “jump,” the man needs to hop to. For her, it’s perfectly acceptable for women to dither, for years and years if necessary, about whether or not to have children, but when she decides the answer is “yes,” the man needs to be ready to go. In her understanding of him, he’s known all along that he doesn’t want children, but just kept the fact secret. According to her, men have no right to the very ambivalence, uncertainty, worry, fear that haunt many women about the subject of children. When she says “children,” his only legitimate response can be “how many.”

Barbara Ellen has a problem; she just can’t grasp the concept of men as human beings with all the strengths and weaknesses that flesh is heir to. Solipsism is pretty much all there is to her argument. As far as she can see, the important decision about whether or not to have children is really all about women. A man’s job is to be the mechanism that achieves the woman’s desired end, whatever it may be. What irritates her so is that men have a way of seeing their own wants and needs as important, valuable and in need of respect. That’s the last thing they’ll get from Barbara Ellen.

But there’s a lot more that’s wrong with her article, so I’ll deal with that in a future post.

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

Dr. Les Veskrna Responds to Nebraska Bar President’s Opposition to Shared Parenting Bill

Robert Franklin, Esq. — Sun, 19 May 2013 16:00:53 +0000

The president of the Nebraska State Bar Association, Marsha Fangmeyer, responded to Dr. Les Veskrna’s op-ed in support of LB 22, a bill that would promote shared parenting in the state. Fangmeyer’s piece was at best an inaccurate representation of the bill, the NSBA’s opposition to it and the science on family structure post divorce. It demanded the response that I gave it. Now Dr. Veskrna, who’s head of the Children’s Rights Council, has honored the National Parents Organization by responding to Fangmeyer on this blog.

The recent column by Nebraska State Bar Association president Marsha Fangmeyer (“Local View:Bar Association does not oppose joint custody,” May 12, 2013) presents more questions than answers. Ms. Fangmeyer says “let me be clear, the Nebraska State Bar Association does NOT oppose joint custody of children in divorce.” However, NSBA’s views regarding joint custody are still far from clear.

Until 2012, the NSBA officially opposed every joint custody bill that was introduced in the Unicameral. This year, the NSBA’s Legislative Committee and House of Delegates, its ultimate governing authority, decided to take “no position” on two joint custody bills. Despite this official “no position” stance, the NSBA leadership and its outside lobbyist actively opposed LB 22, which was one of the two bills that seemed destined to be approved by the Judiciary Committee. When asked to explain the inconsistency between the position adopted by its governing authority and the action taken against this bill, the lobbyist said “the only comments that we have made regarding LB 22 is to restate the longstanding position of the NSBA in opposition to a presumption of joint custody.” In addition, the NSBA leadership has taken active opposition toward an amendment to LB 22, which did not significantly change the bill. In doing so they again ignored the original directive of “no position” provided by the governing authority of its organization. These actions, and other numerous conflicting and inaccurate statements by the NSBA leadership, lead to a question of motive: are they really more interested in helping lawyers or kids caught in custody disputes?

Ms. Fangmeyer mischaracterizes the language of LB 22 when she says it “seems to require judges to adopt a Parenting Plan that establishes joint custody of children in all cases, instead of deciding such issues based on what is in the best interests of the children, the requirement of current law.” A lawyer with 30 years of experience in family law, as Ms. Fangmeyer describes herself, would surely recognize that LB 22 does no such thing and, in fact, directs judges toaward joint custody unless doing so is not in the best interest of children. This does not change the existing “best interest” standard, nor does it remove a judge’s discretion in ultimately determining custody if parents cannot agree. It simply specifies where the court should start when making a custody decision. If judges are capable of determining the circumstances under which a child should have one parent after divorce or separation, they should be equally capable of determining when a child should have two parents. Does Ms. Fangmeyer suggest that judges should not be trusted with this discretion?

Too many children in Nebraska are routinely denied the resources of a good parent and their extended family when their parents divorce or separate. What about this does the NSBA leadership not understand? Of course, the NSBA supports shared parenting when both parents are civil and entirely cooperative with one another – how can they not? Relatively few parents, however, are able to be or stay this way because of the extremely adversarial nature of the legal system that seeks to polarize them. Uncertainty or disagreement between parents often exists regarding parenting time and parenting responsibilities. When this occurs, both parents know that the court will intervene with a great likelihood that one parent will be given sole custody and nearly all parenting time, and the other parent will be made a mere visitor. We all know “the other parent” is usually the father. This practice, routine in most Nebraska courtrooms, incentivizes conflict. In addition, it becomes nearly impossible for “the other parent” to fairly negotiate a parenting plan – because they are unable to overcome the leverage provided to the parent who would predictably receive sole custody in the absence of an agreement. While mandatory mediation is promoted as a solution for parental disagreement, the hidden truth is neither parent can be required to meaningfully participate.

Ms. Fangmeyer says that “we should look at these studies,” which show that shared parenting provides the best outcomes for children in almost all cases. These studies also challenge or disprove many notions that have been used to discredit shared parenting, especially parental conflict. Ms. Fangmeyer neglected to disclose that the NSBA and Voices for Children were given these studies 12 months ago, and asked to engage in a dialogue to see if we could reach common ground. The NSBA was asked to make a proposal – any proposal – to help children caught in custody disputes. Again, they haven’t made any. Why are they and Voices for Children now asking for a study, after refusing to engage for the last 12 months?

While shared parenting may not be possible, or may be inappropriate, for some parents, there is no question that many more children in Nebraska would benefit from this parenting arrangement. In order for this to occur, however, the NSBA must be willing to discuss solutions rather than just offer objections and obstructions.

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

British Mom: Social Services ‘A Nightmare’

Robert Franklin, Esq. — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:14:13 +0000

Here’s yet another story about a children’s welfare agency gone wild in its efforts to take three children from their loving parents (Daily Mail, 5/10/13). But there’s more to it than just that. Indeed, in this story, the social services agency for the Devon, England Council has a reasonably good excuse for its tactics, but the case also reveals just why those tactics recur in case after case in which they’re inexcusable.

As usual, the family can’t be named. They have three children, a twin girl and boy age two, and a son who’s one. Back in 2011, the twins were born and seemed to be healthy and thriving. But suddenly one day the little girl stopped breathing and had to be rushed to the hospital. That led eventually to an MRI scan of the child’s head that showed intra-cranial bleeding. And X-Ray of her showed a fractured rib and elbow. That led to suspicions on the part of the doctors, so they gave the boy and MRI as well. It too showed bleeding in the brain and fractured ribs.

Now, to any reasonable physician or social worker, those conditions fairly scream “child abuse!” More to the point, they scream “shaken baby syndrome.” In the mind’s eye, it’s all too clear. These are infants; they cry, the parents pick them up by their torsos and in their frustration, shake them. The parents’ fingers grip the little chests so tightly they break ribs. The brain is shaken so violently, blood vessels rupture. It’s perfectly obvious.

So the children were taken from the parents by social services and at least one police officer called it “the worst case of child abuse I have ever come across in my 16-year career.” Fortunately, the children were placed with their grandparents, but the parents weren’t permitted to see them unsupervised.

But there was just one problem; the parents never harmed their children. They were kind, loving parents “besotted” with their children as the judge in the case finally said. Ironically, some of the fractures were probably the fault of the doctors struggling to intubate the children.

Then the woman became pregnant again. She gave birth to a son, but when he was three weeks old, he somehow fell out of his cradle. That fall resulted in – you guessed it – bleeding to the brain.

At that point, social services figured they had two serial child abusers, and after all, who could blame them? The council social workers asked a court to place the babies in what we in the United States would call foster care. The judge refused, but social services had the bit in its teeth.

As the mother says now: ‘It has been a nightmare. So many mistakes were made. We have lived for months under this massive terror that council social workers would take our children away. I was made to feel an evil woman by social workers. They treated me like a liar. We were accused of being child abusers by the police.

It was left to her to hop on the Internet and research the children’s medical condition for herself. That led her to an appointment with a rheumatologist who diagnosed her with a rare condition called Ehlers Danlos Syndrome which can cause bones to be fragile and bleeding in the brain.

Into the bargain, it turned out the babies’ father also has a condition that results in low calcium density in his bones. Each condition apparently can be passed on to the children. The upshot was that, unknown to all, the children were predisposed to fragile bones and bleeding in the brain. Their parents didn’t hurt them, the doctors did. They did so because all were unaware of the uniquely fragile condition of the children. The parents are kind and loving and would never harm their children. Eventually, a judge so ruled and returned the little ones to their rightful home.

So, all’s well that ends well, right? Not quite.

[A]s this family get on with their life, there is another worrying aspect to this case.

It concerns the judge’s decision that the family cannot be identified and that their whereabouts must be kept secret until the children are grown up — even though they have done nothing wrong.

The ruling, by Mr Justice Baker at the High Court in Exeter, means that if this family allow the media to use their real names, they will be in contempt of court and risk being sent to prison.

That’s right. Per the judge’s ruling, everything that happened is top secret. Why? That’s a good question, but I suspect it has to do with the old theory that any court case concerning children has to be kept from the public because some harm might come to the kids if someone were to learn of it. That’s always seemed like patent nonsense to me, a claim that’s utterly unproven and certainly not suficient to trump the public’s right to know what their paid officials are up to.

Whatever the reasoning behind the gag order, it’s common as dirt in English cases.

These gagging orders have become normal in such family court cases where parents are eventually found innocent of any wrongdoing. Last week, Bill Bache, the family’s lawyer and an expert on family courts, said: ‘This ruling impinges on this family’s freedom of speech. This is very troubling.’

And John Hemming, the Lib Dem MP campaigning against court secrecy, added: ‘These rulings stop innocent families talking openly about their experiences and they protect the doctors, social workers and police who wrongly pointed the finger of blame at them.’

His views are endorsed by Alison Stevens, who runs the charity Parents Against Injustice.

She said: ‘Most innocent parents who win their children back face a gagging order from the family courts. It means the mistakes made by social workers, doctors and the family courts are concealed.’

Just so. The secrecy with which British courts and social services agencies operate in cases involving children has far less to do with protecting the children than with protecting social services workers. Remember how the mother described her and her husband’s ordeal? She called it “a nightmare,” “massive terror.” “They treated me like a liar.”

Those are typical tactics used by state employees who know they can’t be called to account for their abusive misdeeds. They know they operate in secret and can get away with virtually anything. That’s how secrecy works. People who don’t fear their actions being exposed to the light of public awareness typically behave worse than those who do.

The article asks what the cause of this scandal was. The answer is clear: secrecy that allows social services to act with complete impunity.

Ask another question. How will these social workers, police, etc. behave the next time they’re faced with a questionable case? What will encourage them to be more balanced, to question their own conclusions? Nothing that I can see. They’re free to visit another nightmare on innocent parents. Again and again and again.

The British willingness to hide the behavior of child welfare workers from public scrutiny paradoxically creates a situation that often encourages the abuse of children by those very workers. After all, that’s what taking children from innocent, caring parents is – abuse.

We’re a bit better about this in the U.S. Yes, child protection agencies are covered by a veneer of secrecy, and they ceaselessly lobby state legislature for yet more. But here, the press actually can get hold of information about what CPS does in cases and what it doesn’t do. It’s often not easy, but there’s seldom a court order that results in prison time if it’s not obeyed. The auditor’s report on the Richmond Department of Social Services I wrote about recently is a good example.

Like every other governmental entity, child welfare agencies function better if We the People know what they’re up to. And, like every other governmental entity, child welfare agencies don’e want any part of it. Their ace in the hole is kids, whom they claim to be protecting by keeping secret what we all should know. The case of the British couple and many others graphically show that to be untrue.

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

President of Nebraska Bar Misrepresents Shared Parenting Bill, Bar’s Opposition to It

Robert Franklin, Esq. — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:33:59 +0000

It looks like the Nebraska State Bar Association is in full damage-control mode. They’ll have to do better than this shoddy piece of agitprop (Journal Star, 5/11/13).

Not long ago, Dr. Les Veskrna, head of the Nebraska organization the Children’s Rights Council, wrote an op-ed in the Journal Star newspaper. I wrote a piece about it here. Veskrna was bemoaning the fact that, once again, the lawyers of the state had banded together to defend their own and, more importantly, their bank accounts. They did that by lobbying against a shared parenting bill that was before the unicameral state legislature this year, LB 22, the text of which is here. They won again; the bill died in committee.

And Veskrna isn’t happy about that, as well he might be. He rightly pointed out that family lawyers had lobbied against the bill despite the fact that masses of social science show that (a) shared parenting is better for kids than the current system, (b) kids desire equal parenting, (c) shared parenting arrangements tend to ameliorate conflict and (d) sole and primary parenting tend to exacerbate it. As we see in state after state, family attorneys oppose shared parenting without knowing much or anything about its effects or those of the primary arrangements they so often endorse. And of course judges know no more about the science of family structure post-divorce than the lawyers who appear before them do.

So Veskrna rightly excoriated the Nebraska State Bar Association for its opposition to the shared parenting bill. Now comes the “response” by the president of the NSBA, Marsha Fangmeyer. She’s indignant - shocked, shocked! – that someone should impugn her organization so.

The NSBA, along with groups like Voices for Children, does oppose an amendment to a bill introduced in the Legislature that seems to require judges to adopt a Parenting Plan that establishes joint custody of children in all cases, instead of deciding such issues based on what is in the best interests of the children, the requirement of current law.

About the best I can say about that statement is that it’s just wrong. I say that assuming that Fangmeyer can read and I make that assumption because she’s a lawyer and therefore passed law school. If I’m wrong, someone correct me. Put simply, the contention that LB 22 requires or even “seems to require… joint custody of children in all cases,” is flat not true. Look at LB 22. Note that it states more than once that the best interests of children are paramount in all custody decisions. Note that it uses the language “absent evidence to the contrary” to show that the goal of shared custody may not be in children’s best interests in all cases. Note also that LB 22 maintains in full force and effect state policy that children shouldn’t be exposed to child abuse or neglect by a parent and therefore evidence of same can be used to negate shared parenting.

In short, Fangmeyer lied. She told the people of the State of Nebraska that which is not true, and not just once.

The amendment we oppose also provides that the judge must divide decision-making authority between the parents.

Again, that’s an outright falsehood. The operative language includes the words “absent evidence to the contrary.” In other words, under this amendment, a judge could hear evidence that joint decision making wasn’t in the child’s best interests and issue a different order. Fangmeyer’s claim that the judge “must” issue a joint order is false, plainly stated in black and white.

Having informed the Nebraska public that LB 22 would have mandated certain behavior by judges that it plainly does not mandate, Fangmeyer then moves on to her real point which is that the status quo is just fine, thank you. She never lets on as to just what that status quo is because that would seriously undercut her argument. Fangmeyer claims that, since the current law encourages parents to agree on a parenting plan, it’s the best thing going. After all, those who agree come up with what’s best for them and their kids and those who can’t, well, we don’t want to force them to do anything, now do we?

It is simple common sense that when two parents can’t agree on the amount of time, or sharing of responsibilities with their children, forcing a 50/50 split and oftentimes inconsistent decision-making is not workable.

It’s simple, alright, and it’s certainly common, but “sense” it’s not. In the first place, “forcing” is what judges do. That’s what court orders are. Court orders tell people to do things and if they refuse, they can be held in contempt of court. So as far as coercion goes, a 50/50 split is no different from the standard 80/20 split. Fangmeyer’s a lawyer; she knows this very well. But she doesn’t want Nebraskans to know it because that would undermine her specious claim that, in some way, the current system isn’t coercive whereas LB 22 would be. That’s patent nonsense. Tell a loving father that a judge’s order that he only see his kid four days a month isn’t coercive.

Why is such a parenting arrangement “workable,” but a 50/50 split “not workable?” Fangmeyer doesn’t explain, likely because she hasn’t the least knowledge about the social science on shared parenting.

In his Local View, Veskrna cited studies that show joint custody provides the best outcome for children. We should look at these studies. We also should look at studies that address “high conflict cases” where the parents cannot or will not communicate in a civil manner and cannot resolve parenting issues. How does that conflict affect the children and how do we address it?

Uh, Marsha, “we” have already done that. There are a great many studies on conflict in custody cases. Some of them have been around for decades. What they show is that sole and primary custody arrangements tend to make conflict worse, not better. Worse, they tend to shove the non-custodial parent out of the lives of his children. By contrast, 50/50 arrangements tend to lessen conflict, particularly over time. That’s because neither parent feels disenfranchised.

Isn’t it strange that the president of the Nebraska State Bar Association would have no knowledge of that large body of social science? Isn’t it odd that she takes to the pages of a major state newspaper only to reveal her ignorance of all that information that bears directly on her chosen topic? I wonder if that’s her level of preparation when she goes to court.

And since I’m stating the obvious, I may as well point out that Fangmeyer lauds the current system in which parents are encouraged to agree on a parenting plan. Most of them do of course because the vast majority of parents don’t have the money to hire a lawyer and fear the increase in adversarial bad blood if they do. So they agree. And what do they agree to? Overwhelmingly, they agree to what they think a judge would order if they left it up to him/her to decide a custody arrangement.

And it turns out that Nebraska, unlike almost all other states, has a method of tracking custody arrangements in both agreed and court-ordered cases. It turns out that mothers get primary custody in about 60% of cases and fathers in about 10%. Joint custody makes up the other 30%. What we don’t know is what “joint custody” actually means. Obviously, 50/50 parenting time qualifies as joint custody, but so would 75/25. What about an 87/13 split which is roughly what Dad getting four nights a month comes to? Do the lawyers that fill out the forms call that joint custody? Sole maternal custody? We don’t know, but suffice it to say that that 30% of joint custody obscures as much as it reveals.

So when Marsha Fangmeyer defends the status quo, that’s what she’s defending. Of course, if LB 22 were the law of the land, the vast majority of parents would be agreeing to 50/50 parenting because they’d know it’s what a judge would likely order anyway.

In perhaps the most scurrilous aspect of her whole sorry piece, Fangmeyer actually claims that the NSBA wants only the best for kids.

We have met recently with the senators who sponsored the legislation in question and will continue to be an active participant in the legislative process on this important issue. The Nebraska State Bar Association will do everything we can to assist in making certain that the interests of children of divorce are protected.

There’s a real problem with that claim that I’ll go into in more detail later, but for now let’s just recall the words of Dr. Veskrna.

Is this why the NSBA opposes shared parenting proposals time and time again? The NSBA has been asked numerous times to make a proposal -– any proposal -– to help kids caught in custody disputes but they haven’t offered any. Not one.

Yep, the NSBA is all for what’s best for kids, just as long as a meaningful relationship with their loving fathers isn’t part of it. Like lawyers in other states, what those in Nebraska prefer and lobby for is the status quo, the high-conflict, shove-Dad-out-of-junior’s-life status quo. It may be good for lawyers’ bank accounts, but it’s lousy for everyone else.

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

Update: Kathleen Dorsett to Serve at Least 51 Years in Murder of Ex-Husband

Robert Franklin, Esq. — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:04:31 +0000

Kathleen, Thomas and Lesley Dorsett all pleaded guilty last week in connection with the murder of Kathleen Dorsett’s ex-husband, Stephen Moore. Read the latest here (Asbury Park Press, 5/10/3). Prosecutors recommended sentences of

• Fifty-eight years, with a 51-year period of parole ineligibility, for Kathleen Dorsett;

• Fifty years, with a 30-year period of parole ineligibility, for Thomas Dorsett;

• Eight years, with an almost-seven-year period of parole ineligibility, for Lesley Dorsett.

Here and here are my original articles on the murder.

Moore and Kathleen married in 2007 and, by 2010, had a 20 month old daughter. They divorced and of course Kathleen got primary custody. But Stephen started demanding more time with his daughter which Kathleen resisted. Also, their divorce decree specified that, if Kathleen moved to Florida, she had to provide Stephen with living accommodations and not charge him more than $600 a month rent. Sure enough, the whole Dorsett clan planned to move from their native New Jersey to Florida and Moore, not wanting to lose contact with his daughter, planned to move too.

All of that seemed to provoke the Dorsetts who are invariably described as a “close-knit” family. So they all planned Stephen Moore’s murder. Here’s how Kathleen described it in court:

Kathleen Dorsett knew the end was near for her ex-husband, Stephen, when she sent him to pick up tools that he left at her house.

Stephen Moore had no idea what was waiting for him that day, when he dropped his 20-month-old daughter at his ex-wife’s house.

“I took my daughter into the house, knowing all the time my father was back there, waiting to kill him,” said Dorsett, a former third-grade teacher in Neptune.

As she changed her daughter’s diaper, she heard screaming coming from the driveway, she said.

…Kathleen Dorsett told of how after she heard her ex-husband’s dying screams, she went back outside. He was lying in the driveway, so she got down next to him to shield his body from her neighbor, who was yelling out her window, asking what was wrong. Later that day, she told the neighbor the dog was having a seizure, a former county jail inmate testified earlier this year…

Then, Kathleen Dorsett said she and her father lifted Moore’s body into the trunk of his mother’s car and her father drove off in it.

She said she met her father at Rooney’s restaurant in Long Branch, and then followed him to another location in Long Branch to abandon the car. She drove her father home, and they cleaned up the area where her former husband had been killed, she said.

She later learned her father disposed of the cleanup items in a dumpster at Rooney’s, she said in court Thursday.

Prosecutors say Thomas Dorsett paid another man — Anthony Morris of Long Branch — $3,000 to set the car on fire. When he entered a guilty plea to conspiracy to desecrate human remains, Morris admitted he took the money, but claimed he did not set the fire, which took place down the street from the apartment where he had been living.

It didn’t take the police long to figure that one out. After all, Stephen and Kathleen were having a custody dispute and – lo and behold! – he ended up “missing.” Morris, the man who torched the car, rolled on both of them the first time police questioned him, and Thomas and Kathleen were jailed and charged with murder.

But the three weren’t finished. While in jail awaiting trial, Kathleen found something else that warranted murder, at least in her mind. With Stephen dead and Kathleen behind bars, the family court had to place their daughter in someone’s care. That person turned out to be Evlyn Moore, Stephen’s mother, which didn’t sit well with Kathleen. She started talking to a fellow inmate about murdering Evlyn and of course the inmate told her she could find someone to do the job.

Instead, she went straight to the police who set up an undercover officer as a “hit man.” Kathleen dragooned her mother Lesley into making the arrangements and delivering the $1,000 down payment on the hit. In due course, she did so and was herself arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

Into the bargain, Thomas and Lesley were involved in laundering money – about $96,000. What that has to do with the murder of Stephen Moore, if anything, I have no idea. What it looks like is that the Dorsetts were a family, however “close-knit,” that all too readily turned to crime to solve their problems. After all, one murder and a second attempted one, just because Dad wanted to see his kid, seems a bit excessive, don’t you think?

In all this, Stephen Moore has been largely forgotten. The linked-to article has only this to say about him:

Donald Lomurro, the Freehold Township attorney representing the interests of the little girl, said the tireless work of the prosecuting attorneys and detectives led to the plea agreements and admissions of wrongdoing by the Dorsett family. But, he said, nothing will change the fact that a child will now grow up without her father.

“As we reflect on the events of today, the one thing of which we should not lose sight is that a good 42-year-old man will never get to raise his daughter and see her graduate from high school, marry and all the significant events in her life to which he was looking forward,” Lomurro said.

In his younger days, Stephen Moore was a world-class speed skater. More recently, he seems to have been loved and respected by many. Here’s a quotation from an article back in 2010:

“Stephen never had a mean bone in his body,” said Donn Calvano, who was Moore’s skating coach after he moved to New Jersey about seven years ago. “His life revolved around his daughter and his mother who needed his help. Skating was his passion…”

Missy Queen, his former roommate and skating buddy for more than 20 years, says Moore was the best roommate she has ever had.

“Stephen was loved by many, many people here in Orange County,” said Queen, sobbing. “He did not deserve to die like this.”

He sounds like a thoroughly decent man. Funny, isn’t it; just 2 1/2 years after his murder, he’s largely omitted from the article about the plea bargains of his killers.

As I mentioned in my first piece on the murder of Stephen Moore, it’s a classic case of maternal gatekeeping gone to its greatest extreme. Kathleen Dorsett had decided to cut Stephen out of his daughter’s life. He resisted and paid the highest price a father can pay – to be bludgeoned to death because he loved his daughter.

The connections between parents and children can be amazing to behold.

Oh, and do I have to add that no article has yet referred to this case as domestic violence?

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

Parental Alienation Affects Mothers as Well as Fathers

Robert Franklin, Esq. — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:43:22 +0000

This is why the anti-dad crowd is so wrong about parental alienation (Sydney Morning Herald, 4/19/13). Well, it’s far from the only reason, but it’s an important one.

Those who reflexively oppose fathers’ rights to custody of their children also oppose the concept of parental alienation and its consequence, Parental Alienation Syndrome. That’s because, as they see it, parental alienation is just a clever ruse devised by unscrupulous fathers to get something they have no right to – a relationship with their children that’s not solely at the discretion of the mother. Over the years, they’ve developed talking points whose only purpose is to discredit PA and PAS in the eyes of whoever is gullible enough to read the nonsense they publish.

So just a couple of years ago Ms. magazine published a short piece that utterly misrepresented PAS. The National Organization for Women is even less circumspect. NOW produced a white paper on PAS that would get an ‘F’ if an eighth-grader turned it in. Here’s my original take on it (Fathers and Families, 7/2/12).

Over almost thirty years, the science on PAS has been building steadily. In the 1980s, six different researchers working independently began advancing the idea that children sometimes were saddled with a parent who was determined to exclude the other parent from the child’s life. Unsurprisingly, the parent’s campaign of alienation often occurred in the context of divorce and child custody cases. They described the parental behavior and its effects on the children with one researcher, Dr. Richard Gardner, calling those effects Parental Alienation Syndrome.

Over the years, countless researchers and clinicians have observed similar behaviors on the part of parents and some have studied the effects on children which turn out to last a lifetime in some cases. By now, there are several book-length treatises on the subject, the most comprehensive of which is Vanderbilt Psychology professor William Bernet’s compendium Parental Alienation, DSM-5, ICD-11. That book includes papers by some 70 mental health researchers around the world as well as 630 citations to scholarly articles on PAS. The undeniable fact of parental alienation is a regular feature of custody cases in courtrooms around the country and the world. Case history after case history has been recorded by researchers like Linda Gottlieb in her recent book The Parental Alienation Syndrome: A Family Therapy and Collaborative Systems Approach to Amelioration.

Given this weight of scholarly evidence, how does the NOW Foundation describe PAS?

- PAS is a tactical ploy used by attorneys whose clients (primarily fathers) are seeking custody of their children.

And who are these countless researchers who, over 30 + years have pioneered the study of PAS?

- Proponents of PAS[are] predominantly right-wing “fathers’ rights” groups…

How does the NOW Foundation describe the huge mass of empirical research accumulated by countless researchers in all parts of the globe?

- …no valid, empirical evidence exists for such a mental disorder…

The intellectual dishonesty of NOW’s piece would be astonishing were it not so common.

In short, NOW’s opposition to PAS is many things, none of them good. It’s anti-science, anti-intellectual honesty and of course anti-father. Worse, it’s anti-child. After all, severe alienation that results in the syndrome is plainly child abuse. Its purpose is the removal of the other parent from the child’s life. It also seeks to convince the child that a loving parent is actually someone to be loathed and feared. Needless to say, PAS can have long-term consequences for a child’s mental/emotional health.

All of that – the blatant ignorance, the outright lies, the animus against children and fathers – would be bad enough, but actually it’s worse than that. That’s because fathers can be alienators of children just as much as mothers can. We don’t see it as often because so few fathers have enough contact with their children following divorce to alienate them. The simple fact is that alienation takes time and diligence, and when you only see the kids four nights out of 30, that’s not easy to do. And alienation is harder to accomplish if the child has a lot of time with the targeted parent. That time allows him/her to see that the targeted parent isn’t the ogre the alienator has claimed.

So it’s no surprise that mothers are the huge majority of alienating parents. They’ve got the kids and therefore the opportunity to alienate should they so choose.

But what NOW and its disgraceful sisters overlook is that, when a dad does get the majority of parenting time, he too can work on the child’s trust to turn him/her against his ex. Sadly, sometimes this happens. So what NOW and the rest of the anti-father forces do when they oppose recognition of PA and PAS is, in addition to everything else, a direct blow at mothers. If PAS were more widely recognized, mothers would have an easier time demonstrating its terrible effects in court. Non-custodial mothers could have a greater chance to wrest custody from alienating fathers. Astonishingly, NOW doesn’t want them to have that influence in the courtroom. How’s that for “empowering women?”

Which brings us to the Sydney Morning Herald piece in which a non-custodial mother writes in to an advice column with much the same sad story we hear from fathers on a regular basis.

I’ve been separated from my husband for six months and been estranged from my daughters, aged 12 and 14, since then, due in part to his working to alienate them from me. I don’t see them and they don’t respond to my calls or messages. They will occasionally call me but only in their father’s presence and often only to ask questions on his behalf. I hope for an opportunity to rebuild my relationship with the girls through court action but I am terrified by not knowing where to begin. Please help.

It’s not the most heart-rending story I’ve heard, but still makes the point. This mother is the type NOW is happy to ignore. Her ex is destroying her relationships with their kids and damaging the children in the process, and to NOW, that’s perfectly fine. As far as that fighter for women’s rights and empowerment is concerned, this mother and all the others like her can go soak their heads. NOW’s blatant misandry turns out to be anti-mother as well.

Meanwhile, the person addressing the mother’s question is under no such politically motivated illusions. Elly Taylor knows about alienation and PAS and doesn’t mince words.

In the absence of a child’s risk of harm, parental alienation is a form of child abuse. It occurs when a parent attempts to put their own agenda ahead of their child’s vital need to have a positive relationship with both parents.

Check. PAS is child abuse.

Parental alienation can be achieved to different degrees in both overt and covert psychologically controlling ways: expecting the child to take sides, giving the child adult decision-making power, asking them to spy on the other parent, twisting the other parent’s words or intentions, using violence or intimidation towards the other parent in front of the child to make the child submissive, reinforcing poor treatment of the other parent, asking leading questions, and controlling the child’s interactions or phone calls.

If the parent is successful in getting the child to reject the other parent, this is known as parental alienation syndrome, and the children who experience it are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and relationship problems as adults.

Check. Its effects can last well into adulthood.

Alienation can be smoke-screened as “protecting” or “advocating” for the child. and The longer it goes on, the harder it is to address. For these reasons, the court usually needs to intervene to redress the balance of power between parents.

Check. Elly doesn’t say it in so many words, but it’s common as dirt to read mothers’ blogs claiming that the worst possible alienating mothers are just “protecting” their children. Rot. They’re not protecting the children, they’re abusing them, just as Elly Taylor says.

Remember Lori Handrahan? To this day, she claims to have been “protecting” her daughter Mila. Her own special ways of doing so included subjecting a five-year-old to some 21 pelvic exams all of which were negative. She posted photos of the little girl naked on her website. She slammed her against a car in the driving sleet in front of appalled daycare workers. Eventually Handrahan’s bizarre and abusive behavior got her labeled by one mental health professional as the worst case of narcissism she’d ever seen. So abusive was Handrahan that she ultimately lost all custody of her daughter and may not regain it until she has some rigorous therapy that is shown to be effective before she can even be in the child’s presence. Handrahan’s response? She now ignores her daughter altogether, neither contacting her by phone or Skype (which she’s allowed to do) nor keeping up with her child support obligation.

PAS is as real as it gets. NOW’s opposition to its recognition by the American Psychiatric Association is just one more example of the fact that the organization is far more anti-male than pro-female. Plenty of women, in all walks of life, in all sorts of ways, suffer for NOW’s knee-jerk misandry.

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

Richmond Virginia Child Welfare Agency in Chaos

Robert Franklin, Esq. — Sun, 12 May 2013 14:25:19 +0000

A newly released audit of the Richmond, Virginia Department of Social Services (the city’s child welfare agency) reveals an astonishing pattern of incompetence and dysfunctional management/employee relations resulting in danger to children. Read about it here (Richmond Times Dispatch, 5/10/13).

Hours after the Richmond Office of the Inspector General presented the report to the city Audit Committee, Mayor Dwight C. Jones announced the retirement of Social Services Director Doris D. Moseley and the resignation of former Deputy Director Gayle L. Turner, who was placed on paid leave and then reassigned amid three separate investigations into whether the department was endangering children.

The audit can be found here. It details much of what we’ve learned to expect when child protective agencies are put in the public spotlight. For example, although industry standards for caseworker caseloads are about 12 per month, Richmond DSS caseworkers averaged 46 cases per month during the time studied. Unsurprisingly, much of what was found was slap-dash work.

Likewise, as we’ve learned from Texas and Arizona, the auditor, Umesh Dalal, found unsustainably high rates of employee turnover. Those reached 35% during 2012.

But there are a few things in Richmond that we haven’t seen before, perhaps because it’s often so hard to get information from children’s welfare agencies that routinely hide behind the “confidentiality” of case files to obscure public information on them. But the Richmond audit makes a few things clear that are sure to shock even veterans of CPS inquiries.

The first is lost files. The auditor asked to examine 226 files maintained by RDSS, but 77 of them (34%) simply couldn’t be located. One file had been checked out in 1995 by someone and never returned. Of the remaining 149 files, many were “missing key documentation.” It’s hard to do good child welfare work when the files on cases can’t be found. How would they know if a parent had been cited before for child endangerment?

The second is the utter lack of communication between management and staff. From what the audit indicates, management seems to have only communicated with case workers to upbraid or humiliate them. Legitimate questions and requests for meetings went entirely ignored by managers. So the auditor found that managers were routinely rude to caseworkers; one method of discipline involved humiliation by reprimanding them in public. If a caseworker challenged a management practice, it was certain to mean removal and transfer to another service area.

As a result, employee morale hit rock bottom. When six caseworkers gave a written request to meet with the Director to resolve morale problems, she ignored them completely, neither taking any action nor even offering to meet with them. On being interviewed for the auditor’s report, the Director professed ignorance of the employee discontent. Mosely was, in other words, at best completely out of touch with the people working under her.

Then there was the problem of training. Caseworkers received initial training when they were hired, but none thereafter. None. No refresher courses, nothing to update them on current best practices. It’s a prescription for bad casework.

Management stopped the practice of allowing caseworkers to remove children from homes in emergency situations. All such decisions had to be done with the prior approval of the manager. That of course made the process slow and cumbersome, but far worse, managers falsified documentation to make cases seem more benign than they were for the courts. In some cases, RDSS managers simply substituted their own amateur medical judgements for those of doctors.

All that meant bad service to the children supposedly protected by RDSS. The auditor closely examined four cases, each of which revealed children at risk and RDSS caseworkers who failed them. Each case involved a child who clearly should have been taken from the parent, but wasn’t. These children were injured, sometimes showing up at school bleeding and bruised, with broken bones and the like. There were parents with mental problems, drug and alcohol problems and cognitive deficits that rendered them incapable of caring for a child. But these children were allowed to remain in their parents’ homes.

All of that describes a children’s welfare agency in disarray and utterly incapable of carrying out the tasks taxpayers set for it. Fortunately, the Director has, er, retired and her second-in-command replaced. When I spoke with the auditor, Umesh Dalal, he told me that was what was responsible for the immediate decline in caseworker turnover so far in 2013. In 2012, it was 35%; now it’s 14%, a step in the right direction.

But that’s not the wholes story. As is so often the case, the story is, well, the story. That is, the conclusions drawn about the debacle that is the RDSS may be as important as the debacle itself. What’s the narrative that’s being constructed to explain what’s been happening over the past few years? Here’s how that narrative is sketched by the Times Dispatch article, accurately reflecting the auditor’s report:

As part of a statewide shift aimed at reducing the number of children in foster care, the department “decided to apply the philosophy of keeping vulnerable children, assisted by the Child Protective Services program, in their homes,” the report says.

However, in implementing the state initiative, which centered on shifting resources to struggling families in an attempt to keep children in their homes with an emphasis on child safety, the city “went too far in its quest to reduce the number of removals.”

In other words, what the Commonwealth of Virginia did and required Richmond to do is what I and many others nationwide have been arguing for – reduce referrals to foster care and redirect those savings to services aimed at making parents better at parenting. Now it looks like the auditor and the press are setting the stage for a rollback of those policies. It seems like they want people to believe that, in some way, keeping kids out of foster care is the problem, not incompetent management or hugely overblown caseloads.

And of course many of the errors identified in the four cases studied by the auditor involved exactly that – caseworkers erring on the side of keeping children in their homes sometimes with dangerous caregivers.

But what neither the auditor nor the article seems to notice is that, when caseworkers have almost four times the number of cases they’re supposed to deal with, errors will inevitably be made. And when state policy dictates a decrease in the number of children in foster care, a lot of those errors will be in keeping children out of foster care. That’s exactly what happened in Richmond. Of course incompetent management didn’t help matters.

What’s also true is that in other states with too few caseworkers, but no policy of keeping children out of foster care, mistakes will also be made. But there, they’ll tend to err on the side of taking children from their parents.

It’s a simple concept. Caseworkers forced by unconscionable caseloads will sometimes just wing it. They’ll make off-the-cuff decisions with too little information. In Virginia they did that in order to comply with state policy; in Arizona and Texas, they do it, as one caseworker said, “to appear proactive.”

The clear lesson is that child protection agencies are likely to make bad decisions when there aren’t enough caseworkers to deal with all the cases. Fewer kids in foster care is a good idea as long as those resources are redirected toward services for parents. No one is served by hiring 25% of the caseworkers needed. That’s true regardless of state policy on foster care.

But no one should conclude that the Virginia experiment with lowering the number of kids in foster care has failed because it couldn’t be properly executed by overburdened caseworkers and incompetent management.

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

Idaho Child Protective Services Take Children from Medical Pot Advocates

Robert Franklin, Esq. — Sat, 11 May 2013 20:10:44 +0000

I’ve often pointed out that the behavior of Child Protective Services employees often resembles an exercise of state power for its own sake. It’s as if child welfare agencies want to make it clear that they can act any way they choose for any reason they choose and just let someone try to do anything about it. Everyone on the planet knows they can and will take your child from you on the slightest pretext and, if you resist, things only get worse. In the timeless tradition of state actors everywhere, any assertion of your rights is met with threats and intimidation. The police often behave the same. The old saying “You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride,” didn’t come from nowhere. It’s the accurate description of the power of every police officer; he/she can take you in, book you and you spend at least one night in the tank with a bunch of drunks before you can get out and prove your innocence. Who wants to go through that? Not many people, so they typically accede to the officer’s demands, whatever they may be, rather than asserting their rights.

Child Protective Services does something similar. If they show up at your house, you have the same rights as you do if it’s the police knocking. You don’t have to let them in; you don’t have to talk to them. They have no power to make you give them anything, show them anything, etc. All that’s true assuming they don’t have a warrant. If they do, it’s a different situation, of course. But if you assert those rights, you’re in trouble. They can go back and, with whatever information they had in the first place, likely convince a judge to issue a warrant. And then, you have a target on your back. You have affronted their authority and every flunky since the Flood resents that and will make you pay. The chances of their taking your children just went up.

But everything I’ve written about CPS to date has at least had something to do with children. When CPS comes to your house, they usually at least have some allegation of child abuse or neglect to go on. It may be specious, but they’re required to check it out.

This case looks different (Huffington Post, 4/29/13). This case looks like an exercise of state power by child welfare workers for another purpose altogether. In this one, the children look to have been used as weapons against the parents, not because of their parenting, but because of their views on pot.

Lindsey and Josh Rinehart and Sarah Caldwell, three of Idaho’s most outspoken medical marijuana advocates, returned from a trip last week to find that their children had been turned over to Child Protective Services. They were quickly informed that authorities had raided the Rineharts’ house, where the four boys had been left with a babysitter, on suspicion of marijuana trafficking, possession and injury to a child, the activists told KTVB last week.

“They say their goal is to return our children to our home once it is deemed safe. They say our children will be in foster care for 30 days,” Lindsey Rinehart said during a KTVB segment. While she’s denied that the children were in any sort of danger and said the marijuana was only for personal treatment, Rinehart has expressed concern that her boys could be held for longer. The two children belonging to Caldwell have reportedly been returned.

So how were the children in danger? The parents weren’t even home and they’d left the boys in the care of a babysitter who presumably is qualified to do the job. What warrants the children having been taken in the first place and why should they be separated from their parents for 30 days or perhaps longer? And how does possession of only enough marijuana for personal use require placing the children in foster care? After all, if states took the children of every person with an ounce or less of pot on the premises, there’d be more homeless children than parents to care for them; a lot more. So again, why were these children taken?

Well, it looks suspiciously like their parents were zealous advocates for a cause someone in authority disagrees with. And that someone had the power to get CPS out there to shanghai the kids into foster care. What else can we conclude when Lindsey Rinehart sees as the solution to their problem that she cease pot use for her medical condition? How does that affect the kids? Not at all as far as anyone’s been able to show. So why should her cessation of pot use lead to the return of the children. The only way I can see is that CPS is using the kids to stop the Rinehart’s advocacy for the medical uses of pot.

From here it looks like taking a couple’s kids to quash their freedom of speech. Hey, it turns out children can be of use in all sorts of ways. The possibilities are limitless.

The National Parents Organization Promotes Shared Parenting

‘Shared Parenting – Good for Kids, Bad for Lawyers’

Robert Franklin, Esq. — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:26:39 +0000

There was another equal parenting bill before a state legislature this year. It met the fate most of them do; it didn’t make it out of committee. The legislature’s Judiciary Committee deadlocked 4 - 4 on the bill, so it died there. Why do equal parenting laws have so much difficulty passing and being signed into law? Well, as this article makes clear, one of the main reasons is the family law bar (Journal Star, 4/29/13).

The piece was written by Dr. Les Veskrna who’s head of the Children’s Rights Council that was a prime backer of LB 22 that sought to equalize fathers’ and mothers’ rights in custody disputes. As such, he was front and center for the fight over LB 22 that took place in the state’s unicameral legislature. Veskrna saw what happened; sadly, it’s a familiar sight. Veskrna gets it right. What he says, I’ve said for many years.

More than three dozen medical studies indicate that shared parenting arrangements after divorce – joint decision making and near-equal parenting time — provide the best outcomes for children. These studies also show that every-other-weekend parenting time arrangements, which are commonly ordered by Nebraska judges, are harmful to children.

Shared parenting reform bills have been introduced in the Unicameral every year for the past several years. Despite the strong consensus in the mental health literature in favor of shared parenting, the Nebraska State Bar Association has opposed every shared parenting reform bill. You might ask what vital interest of lawyers causes the NSBA to oppose these bills.

Shared parenting laws have been shown to reduce the level of conflict between parents. This is important because conflict between parents creates an enormous amount of stress for the kids, which can lead to emotional and medical problems. However, lawyers like conflict because it gives them things to fight about and increases their fees. Lawyers dislike shared parenting laws because it reduces their fees. Shared parenting — good for kids, bad for lawyers.

Is this why the NSBA opposes shared parenting proposals time and time again? The NSBA has been asked numerous times to make a proposal -– any proposal -– to help kids caught in custody disputes but they haven’t offered any. Not one.

That’s about the size of it. The social science on the benefits of shared parenting and the detriments of sole custody have been around for decades. The case for equal parenting only gets stronger with time. Equal parenting post-divorce results in better outcomes for children and the only studies of children’s preferences about custody show they overwhelmingly want equality for their mothers and fathers. That’s true of kids in equal parenting arrangements as well as those in unequal ones.

For a while, the anti-father crowd fell back on the claim that, yes, in an ideal situation, equality might work, but surely it must heighten conflict between parents. Nope. Like every other claim the anti-father forces have come up with, that one too fell before the onslaught of science. Social science shows that, far from exacerbating conflict, over time, shared parenting tends to do the opposite – ameliorate it.

The opposite proves true for the “winner-take-all” system utilized by most courts. And no wonder. Imagine how any father would feel when he’s told that all his love and devotion, all his hard work on behalf of his child means nothing in divorce court. He’s relegated to four + nights per month with his children and not allowed to have a say in the important decisions in their lives. On top of that, even his meager visitation can be casually ignored by Mom with little or no consequences for doing so. But let him fall behind on child support and the weight of state and federal enforcement bureaucracies come down on him like a ton of bricks.

So how do you imagine he feels about all that? Is he happy with the arrangement, content? Does he feel honored and respected? Or is he inclined to fight for what he knows to be his by right (if not by law) – a decent relationship with the person he loves most in the world? The lesson? Of course primary custody arrangements increase conflict. How could they not?

Conflict is the stock in trade of attorneys. Not for nothing is our court system called - by lawyers, courts, law schools, etc. – an adversary one. As a personality type, the profession attracts fighters, verbal jousters. The surest future lawyer is the kid who placed first in high school debate. Once licensed, that attorney finds that the greater the conflict, the greater the fee. The more litigants hate each other, the more motions get filed, hearings held, phone calls made, briefs written and filed, etc. And for each of those, the client pays.

Now, many litigants, both civil and criminal are pretty savvy about when to fight and when to settle. They have enough experience to know when to go for the gold and when to cut their losses. Insurance companies have entire departments that do little but analyze those very things. To many litigants, fighting in court is a sometimes-necessary evil, but in the final analysis, whether to do it or not is nothing but a cost-benefit analysis. It’s a cold-blooded calculation.

Not so parties to custody cases. Those are not experienced litigants for the most part and, since the breakup of a marriage and custody of kids are involved, it’s as personal as it ever gets in court. Family law attorneys take that to the bank.

So it’s no surprise to see them opposed equal custody legislation. It’s been shown to reduce conflict and even the divorce rate itself, both of which would strike a blow at the bottom lines of every family lawyer in the jurisdiction ruled by such a law.

Shared parenting laws reduce the ability of parents to use kids as leverage in property and child support disputes. One of the more unseemly aspects of family law is the buying and selling of children. This usually takes the form of “You want more time with the kids, then you need to increase my child support.” In extreme cases, one parent may abduct the kids or deny access to them unless the other parent agrees to make a payment. While rarely discussed outside the court house, the buying and selling of children is a routine part of Nebraska divorces. Shared parenting laws treat kids as human beings instead of chattel that can be bought and sold. By making it harder to buy and sell kids, shared parenting makes it harder for one parent to extort property from the other. Shared parenting — good for kids, bad for lawyers.

Shared parenting laws reduce the incidence of divorce. According to the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, “two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women. [However,] in states where there is a presumption of shared custody with the husband the percentage of women who initiate divorces is much lower.” One study found shared parenting was associated with a lowering of divorce rates in 19 states surveyed. Divorce is extremely harmful to children and reducing divorce rates would improve outcomes for many children. However, it would also reduce the need for divorce lawyers. Shared parenting — good for kids, bad for lawyers.

It’s high time we started putting the well-being of children, parents and society generally ahead of the pocketbooks of family lawyers. It’s time we forced family judges to acknowledge the social science on the best interests of children and rule accordingly.