Month: June 2017

Our youngest is almost two years old, so it is time for him to get a passport. He needs to catch up to Lani Shea, who had visited 100 countries by age 2 years, 8 months (Wikipedia entry on Travelers’ Century Club; also this BBC article on Lani’s dad). First stop: Niagara Falls! (Can we see everything that matters to toddlers in one day? Do we actually need to go to the Canadian side? Or if we ride Maid of the Mist will we get a good enough view of the Canadian falls to avoid La Migra?)

The State Department passport application form provides only two options for “Sex”: “male” and “female”. This is true both for the applicant and the applicant’s (not to say “his or her”) parents. Could this be Rex Tillerson’s fault? (see “Proof that being straight and gay are not treated the same in the world of business“) Or do we blame Donald Trump?

Separately, I looked for places where we could go and submit the application (both parents, lots of IDs, etc.) and our local post office showed up at the top of the list. Thursday is the walk-in day for passports. But you can’t go during the lunch break. “Lunch Start” is at 10:00 and “Lunch End” is at 14:00. (There are only three establishments in our town that serve lunch commercially. The farthest from the post office is a 1-minute walk.)

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Presenters and attendees at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017 had some ideas for improving the way that custody disputes in U.S. family courts are resolved (see Real World Divorce for how they typically are resolved now).

Presenters agreed the the temporary order process, which comes early in what might be years of divorce or custody litigation, is a critical part of why shared parenting is so uncommon in the United States. “That’s the end of the children’s relationship with one parent,” said a panel speaker regarding temporary orders favoring the other parent, and the rest of the panel nodded. Kari Adamsons, of the University of Connecticut (a great state for alimony plaintiffs!), summarized this with “there is a lot of momentum from temporary orders, especially for kids.”

The psychologists suggested mandated 50/50 shared parenting via temporary orders because it gives judges the opportunity to test the workability of shared parenting. When the trial comes around months (or two years, in Massachusetts, or maybe never, in Canada) later, the court will know whether or not shared parenting has been successful. Kentucky has recently put this suggestion into effect (see “New child-custody law lets Ky. children win with shared parenting,” April 12, 2017, Lexington Herald Leader). [Note that litigation over possession of children is less intense in Kentucky than in many other states because it is difficult for a plaintiff parent to get more than $14,700 per year per child in child support revenue.]

Given that a lot of states’ family courts see their mission as “maintain the status quo,” this Kentucky-style temporary order presumption would be likely to change the custody outcome statistics.

Some of the psychologists wanted courts (with the help of paid psychologists, typically!) to investigate “conflict.” Instead of simply ignoring one party’s assertion of “conflict,” as a lot of Western states do when awarding a 50/50 schedule to children, psychologists should try to figure out which parent was responsible for the conflict. The psychologists said that there was usually one parent who had “moved on” with a new lover, maybe some new kids, etc. while the other person had “not moved on” and would generate conflict. They never explained, however, how this was better than a fairly strict 50/50 presumption. Nor did they address “How are people supposed to move on when one person has to pay the other every month?” (unlike in England, for example, where they try to achieve a “clean break” of transferring assets from defendant to plaintiff in one big lump) The most that they came up with was that parents would be “taught” (by psychologists?) how to cooperate. Professor Linda Nielsen didn’t contradict her colleagues directly, but she noted that “most shared parenting arrangements are in fact parallel parenting. There is very little need for communication. Children are not benefiting from parents being buddies. There should be less emphasis on looking at parent-parent relationship and more on the parent-child relationship.”

Psychologists were sometimes realistic about the limitations of their profession. Pamela Ludolph, a PhD in clinical psych at University of Michigan, said “there are some awful custody evaluators out there” but admitted that she doesn’t know how to fix the problem.

Some of the American experts presenting almost tripped over themselves in advocating for victims of domestic violence, though they simultaneously presented statistics showing that domestic violence was generally not a relevant factor for separated parents, whether children in 50/50 or primary/secondary parenting. Richard Warshak, for example, opened his panel talk by saying that judges shouldn’t award shared parenting if there was “a history of intimate partner violence.” He didn’t acknowledge, however, that the financial and practical rewards to becoming the winner parent might shade witness testimony and make it challenging for judges to determine the truth of “intimate partner violence” allegations. Nor did he explain how, if one parent is actually violent, why it is a good idea for the children to be with that violent person roughly 30 percent of the time or for the violent parent and the victim parent to have four or five face-to-face interactions every two weeks (Wednesday pick-up for dinner, Wednesday drop-off after dinner; Sunday night drop-off every other weekend) as opposed to zero face-to-face interactions in a 50/50 week-on/week-off arrangement with exchanges at school or camp.

A European researcher in the audience reacted privately to these righteous sentiments by asking why American courts would even want to hear either parent-parent or parent-child abuse allegations simultaneously with a divorce or custody dispute. “People can have a child and care for the child 100 percent of the time, but the state will take the child away if he is being abused. Why not presume a 50/50 care arrangement and then, separately, the state can investigate whether or not the child is being abused under one or both parents’ care? If one parent is abusive, the child can then be taken away by the child abuse agency and put into the other parent’s care for 100 percent of the time.” (Certainly every state in the U.S. does have the machinery in place to implement her idea. There is always a DSS or DCF or CPS. See Family Law Reform Conference Report, for example: “Child Protective Services [in Texas] gets a report on every father in high-income custody and child support cases. They love to go out and investigate upper-middle-class white men in safe neighborhoods and will spend a whole day with a father who is the target of a custody action. CPS social workers don’t like to go into housing projects where they might get their asses kicked.”)

Summary: It is tough to believe that American voters would, starting from scratch, ask for a litigation-based parenting dispute system like the one that we have. On the other hand, even the experts are reluctant to let it go and their suggestions tend to be tweaks of the legacy system that can easily consume 100 percent of what would have been a child’s inheritance in order to protect his or her “best interests.”

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Text message from a friend:

Mother of our kid’s friend emails Susie: “I am really sorry to ask, but I always do this. Do you have any guns in the house? Any trampolines? Do you have a pool?” Susie replies “Yes. Yes. Yes.” Mother says “Oh, ok. Thank you for telling me. We will bring him over to play at 3.”

What is the point of asking if you are going to let your kid play there anyway?

[Names changed to protect the guilty, but knowing that this message originated in Massachusetts I am sure that any of my face-to-face friends will immediately recognize the source!]

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Professor Linda Nielsen of Wake Forest University presented at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017. We interviewed Nielsen for a chapter in Real World Divorce:

What does Nielsen think of the winner/loser custody system that prevails in most U.S. states? “A lot of social scientists say that a court cannot possibly pull together enough custody evaluators and psychology experts to accurately predict what is going to be the best parenting plan for each child in a particular family ” responded Nielsen. “The premise that custody evaluators can always give an objective recommendation is flawed. It is not like a driving test or a math test. There may be no standard set of credentials for custody evaluators. There is not necessarily consistency from one evaluator to another and many of the measures used in these evaluations were not designed for that purpose.. A psychologist can’t walk into an intact family, do an assessment and determine which parent is better for which child at which age in that family – or who will be the better parent four years from now. So why bring that difficult task into family court?”

Nielsen says that a deeper problem with courts picking the “better parent” at the time of divorce may be that the judge is answering the wrong question. “It doesn’t matter who is a better parent at the time of the divorce,” says Nielsen. “I ask students [in a Wake Forest University Department of Psychology course] ‘Was your mother or father the better parent when you were 6, 10, 16 years old? Now answer the same question for your brother or sister. The answer is different at each age and, with siblings, depending on the personality of the siblings and the parents. The importance or effectiveness of each parent will go up and down as the child ages, which is one reason that children who are in shared parenting arrangements do better than children who spend less than 35 percent of their time with one parent.”

In other words, if Nielsen’s research-informed perspective is correct, states are collectively spending billions of dollars of tax money (to pay for judges and courthouses) and consumers are spending tens of billions of dollars (on litigators) on an exercise that, in most cases, should not be undertaken.

What about the fact that some divorce lawsuit defendants turn out to be “Disney Dads” post-divorce? Doesn’t that confirm the wisdom of the judges who assigned them a secondary role? “Research shows that the type of parenting you can do depends on what activities and how much time you get to share with the child,” says Professor Nielsen. “The best kind of parenting is called ‘authoritative parenting’, as distinct from ‘permissive parenting’, which is the worst. An authoritative parent sets rules and talks to children about important things. He is a child’s parent, not the child’s uncle. For this to be possible the children must spend ample time with the father and have a full range of activities with him, including ample time during the school week. When you cut the parenting time down to every other weekend there’s not an opportunity to be an authoritative parent. It is not that the dad is a different person. He’s the same person with the same parenting skills but in a restricted situation.”

She displayed more of her academic side at the conference, talking about a meta-analysis of 52 studies of shared parenting. She started by looking at all published studies in the English language, which used definitions of “shared” parenting ranging from a 35/65 to a 50/50 schedule. Generally these studies looked at shared parenting versus every-other-weekend-with-the-loser parenting. Nielsen first gave the raw results:

• 30 studies found children in shared parenting did better on all metrics; 12 were equal or better on all metrics; 6 were better on most, worse on 1; 4 studies showed no difference

Nielsen explains that people tend to dismiss shared parenting studies by pointing out that children in shared parenting tend to have wealthier parents, if only because when the parents have a low income there are only sufficient resources for one household physically large enough to hold the kids (e.g., one parent will have a house, perhaps provided by taxpayers, while the other parent will have a studio apartment). Nielsen explained that the skepticism might be motivated by a false assumption. For children in intact families who aren’t in poverty there are “not strong links between family income and children’s emotional, behavioral, and psychological well-being. In fact, richer kids may do worse.” (see Are rich kids better off overall?)

Nielsen looked the subset of the 52 studies where income data were available. These showed similar benefits to children from shared parenting, with 17 studies finding that children did better on all metrics.

American family courts in a lot of states will deny a defendant’s request for shared parenting if a plaintiff seeking sole/primary custody asserts that there is “conflict” between the parties (see the Massachusetts chapter for some examples). The winner/loser schedule almost always results in more parent-to-parent contact than a week-on/week-off shared parenting schedule, but courts simply posit that there will be less fighting if one parent is reduced to loser/babysitter.

Nielsen looked at 6 studies where the “level of agreement” between the parents was recorded. It turns out that 50-80 percent of separated parents generally fall into the category of “do not agree.” For those “do not agree” parents, shared parenting still resulted in equal or better outcomes for the children.

What about fomenting additional conflict between parents? 15 studies showed the parents of children in shared parenting had an equal amount of conflict compared to children in sole custody, 2 showed less conflict, 1 showed more conflict from shared parenting, and 2 showed mixed results.

Nielsen’s overall conclusion: Adults participating in a shared parenting arrangement did not have higher incomes, less conflict, better cooperation, or better parenting skills.

From my point of view, one big weakness in the American studies is the failure to distinguish between 35/65 and 50/50 parenting schedules. The 35/65 threshold is used for historical reasons (some early studies used it) and, like most things that the research psychologists do, it considers practical issues of litigation and cashflow to be irrelevant to human behavior and emotions. From our Rationale chapter:

In November 2014 we interviewed Margaret Bennett, a prominent divorce litigator in the Chicago area and a member of legislative committees redrafting the core Illinois family law statutes and creating a new child support formula. We asked her what she thought of the existing Illinois winner-take-all system in which one parent is designated as primary and receives potentially unlimited amounts of child support. Did that give parents a cash incentive to fight? The answer was “no,” a typical perspective among attorneys involved in making laws and guidelines in the winner-take-all states.

We gave Bennett a concrete example of two doctors were splitting up, each with an after-tax income of $200,000. If they had two children the parent who won custody would get $56,000 per year. That would work out to roughly $1 million over the 18-year period of child support eligibility in Illinois. If the parents had a 60/40 time split, the parent with whom the children spent 60 percent of the time would be $2 million wealthier than the parent who took care of the kids 40 percent time. Bennett said that “upper income parents spend a lot on their kids” and that this $56,000 per year annual payment would not cover what the victorious parent was actually spending. Why did parents spend so much on legal fees fighting over custody if not because of the $2 million at stake? Bennett responded that it was primarily because “it is a big status symbol to be the residential custodian.”

When the two litigants have similar incomes, an increasingly common situation in family court lawsuits, there is an enormous practical difference between a 35/65 schedule outcome and a 50/50 outcome. At 50/50 the parties will end up with equal spending power. At 35/65, one party will be paying the other and therefore, depending on the state and the number of children, the winner may have 2X the after-tax spending power of the loser. The dynamics of the co-parenting relationship, particularly when stepparents are involved, may be very different when one household is living off the other household’s income compared to when the two parents are financially independent of each other.

Thus I think that the European studies provide better guidance to the psychology per se. They tend to use a strict 50/50 definition of “shared” and the child support formulae in Europe don’t result in large spending power differences even if one parent does emerge as “primary.”

What did Nielsen think about putting presumptions of 50/50 shared parenting into the law? She was for it: “Children with cancer should not be vaccinated, but we still have a presumption of vaccination. It is the same with shared parenting. There are rare exceptions where it wouldn’t be in a child’s best interest.” Professor Kari Adamsons responded with “We have a presumption of innocent, but that doesn’t mean nobody goes to jail.”

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The Senate has failed to pass a bill repealing Obamacare. One sticking point is that Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, “stood up for what’s right” (a Facebook friend) and refused to support a reduction in the Medicaid cash river (Maine has the highest percentage of residents on Medicaid among the 50 states; the New York Times article that describes Senator Collins’s opposition to the “repeal Obamacare, sort-of” bill doesn’t give readers this context!).

Back in February I wrote “End-of-Obamacare fears a good illustration of why government has to grow?“. I’m wondering if I can just cut and paste that posting and have it be relevant content every three months or so!

Related:

• Adventures in Obamacare
• The senior citizen and Obamacare tax penalties (did it make sense to have the tax collection agency be the Obamacare enforcement agency also?)
• Obamacare gets the IRS into the domestic abuse evaluation business
• Obamacare for multi-millionaires (one friend is happy with Obamacare!)

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“The Challenge of Fighting Mistrust in Science” was right at the top of the Atlantic web site for a while.

This is interesting partly because searching online biographies reveals that a journalist with no experience as a scientist interviewed a foundation manager with no experience as a scientist (well, he did major in political science for a bachelor’s and master’s).

Mostly it is interesting because the article shows how some of America’s non-scientists think about science: as a body of correct knowledge that is being gradually refined. Why is that remarkable? Michael Myers, the foundation manager interviewed, appears to be at least 60. Thus he was born into a more-or-less static Earth, contracting from its birth heat and thus sometimes wrinkling up into mountains. Around 1968, however, at least the younger geologists began to accept the continental drift hypothesis (some history from New York Times). So he should know as well as anyone that to talk about someone rejecting “science” is a rather vague accusation. Does the denier deny today’s theories or yesterday’s?

Can it be that for these non-scientists science is actually a religion? That would explain why they get so upset that someone would dare to “deny science”. And that would explain why they can’t remember that the best minds of science used to believe completely different stuff than what they currently believe. Religious dogma tends to be mostly static, with gradual refinement.

[Separately, the journalist and the foundation manager show confidence regarding aviation and aerodynamics with “Like the extreme heat that was grounding planes in Phoenix this week” (with a link to a misleading article in WIRED). These folks believe that a regional jet with two engines spinning isn’t going to lift off the runway because it is 2 degrees hotter than yesterday? What else can we sell them? From WIRED: “According to news reports, the heat poses a particular problem for the Bombardier CRJ airliners, which have a maximum operating temperature of 118 degrees. Bigger planes from Airbus and Boeing can handle 126 degrees or so.”

In fact, the limits are related to regulation and paperwork. If the manufacturer doesn’t supply the airline with FAA-approved data for takeoff performance (really “fly down the runway, lose one engine, and continue the takeoff on one engine” performance) then it is a regulatory violation to fly, even though there is no reason that the plane can’t fly with the same safety margins at a reduced weight (unload some fuel or throw 5 fat passengers off for every degree above 118!).

What may be funniest of all is that the article promotes using this false statement about airplanes and jet engines (“they are grounded due to heat”) to “rebuild people’s trust in science.”]

Readers: What do you think of this? Obviously the journalist and the interview subject are just 2 people out of 325+ million in the U.S. So maybe it isn’t even worth looking at. But on the other hand, the Atlantic featured it and there are hundreds of comments.

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Professor Kari Adamsons of the University of Connecticut spoke about her research at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017.

What is American society getting from the roughly 3 percent of GDP that we spend making sure that alimony and child support cashflows are established and maintained? Professor Adamsons says that research psychologists can’t find any effect on American children’s well-being whether or not child support was being paid from one parent to the other.

Part of this may be due to the fact that adults who receive child support cash often respond by cutting their working hours and therefore the net spending power within the winner parent’s household may not change much.

Adamsons, however, described big differences in child-support/well-being correlation based on the race of the mother. For “non-white mothers” (Rachel Dolezal qualifies?), when child support was paid there was a negative effect on the children’s well-being. This is consistent with previous research, to the extent that “low-income” in the U.S. tends to overlap with “non-white,” e.g., see the Children, Mothers and Fathers chapter:

“Child Support and Young Children’s Development” (Nepomnyaschy, et al, 2012; Social Science Review 86:1), a Rutgers and University of Wisconsin study of children of lower income unmarried parents, found that any kind of court involvement was associated with harm to children: “We also find that provision of formal [court-ordered] child support is associated with worse withdrawn and aggressive behaviors.” The authors found that informal (voluntary) support from fathers could be helpful to children living with single mothers but court-ordered support, even when the cash was actually transferred, was on balance harmful.

It turns out that contact with the father was also a negative for well-being when the mother was non-white. Certainly Adamsons wouldn’t have suggested this, given that even tenure has its limits, but it seems that if what society cares about is child well-being and we accept that courts must deal with children on a rushed wholesale basis, the laws and defaults should be different depending on the race of the litigants(!).

Somewhat separately, Adamsons talked about what research psychologists have found regarding the effects of losing a father. Why are we always in the running for World’s Fattest Nation? Could that be related to the fact that we have the largest percentage of children without two parents (stats)? Adamsons said that “fathers have a strong and unique [not replaceable by another adult, such as the mother] influence on obesity.” What about the fact that courts usually assign a father to at least an every-other-weekend babysitting role? “That kind of parental involvement is probably not helpful. It isn’t normal. When they’re visiting with the father, the kids are waiting to go home to the mother.”

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A friend is on a California organ transplant surgical team, which apparently means long weekends in Tahoe every weekend. She posted the following on Facebook:

[stream of updates with pictures of snow in the Sierra and continued skiing]

Snowboard accident. Hit some little jumps, that I’ve gone over and landed fine. Bad landing/tumble today.

Shouldn’t think I can jump like Millenials

Guessing it’s tendon/ligament… when I took my SB boots off, pressed everything 1-5″ above medial malleous, didn’t feel like bone pain. Didn’t feel anything crunch. And my dexa was 2.5 SD above now for my age. Was suppose to hit Squaw next weekend and was hoping another mammoth visit in July

Thank God for Arctica race shorts… they won’t need to cut off any clothing

Wtf!!!? Been here almost 3 hrs!! If it weren’t for the painful hobbling to fuel, I woulda just waited til tomorrow. But I was a tad concerned if I wouldn’t be able to stand/drive in am. Guess next time (fingers crossed never again), unless I have a bone protrusion, bullet wound, knife wound, or CP…. not going to the ED. This is such a waste of time!

[response to comment blaming Donald Trump for the long wait times] I swear- no bone protrusion = no ED! This is a joke!

(“ED” = “Emergency Room”; see Medical School 2020)

Related:

• “Seriously!!?? 73 minute commute for 23 miles??? So over the Bay Area!” (same friend; May 31 status)

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Professor Irwin Sandler of Arizona State University spoke at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017. He was introduced as “an expert on children in high stress situations, including divorce.”

Sandler said that research psychologists had put a lot of effort into figuring out how badly damaged children were by divorce, by living primarily with one parent, and by low-quality parenting. He has been experimenting instead with training parents to do a better job. He and his colleagues run training programs for both mothers and fathers and then interview children. Based on the data from children, Sandler says that the training has been effective for both mothers and fathers and that it works best for adults who exhibited “poor parenting to begin with.”

(By “poor parenting” he wasn’t talking about the stuff that the $600/hour litigators throw around, e.g., one parent lets the kid stay up late. This program is run in cooperation with the local court system so the participants sounded as though they were struggling low-income types.)

What I found most interesting about the talk was that we run a family court litigation system that, compared to a European-style system, shrinks our GDP by about $500 billion per year (source). Most of this expenditure is ostensibly for the welfare of our children. Yet, assuming Sandler’s data are correct, if we put $500 billion of time and effort into training parents, both together and separated, our society’s children would be vastly better off. Since we aren’t trying this, must we infer that most Americans don’t actually care about how well the next generation turns out? (obviously they do profess to care, especially on Facebook!)

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Friends on Facebook are discussing “A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news for liberals” (Washington Post). Of course, like most things in the U.S. media, this starts off with a lie (the minimum wage in Seattle is $13/hour, not $15/hour). But let’s look at the rest of the article…

With labor more expensive, employers are getting rid of their lowest-skilled employees (certainly those for whom the market wage would be less than the minimum legal wage). Okay, that’s Econ 101. But is it “bad news for liberals”?

Suppose that the goal of a liberal is to live in a city without too many unsightly low-skilled people (see Tyler Cowen explains why rich white Democrats freely express love for immigrants and people of color for how liberals already have segregated themselves away from dark-skinned Americans and immigrants).

Can the liberal make it illegal for anyone without a college degree to live in his or her city? Probably not. Can the liberal make it illegal for anyone without a college degree to work in his or her city? Sure! That’s the minimum wage.

With a minimum wage much higher than other parts of the U.S., a city can limit its residents to (1) folks with high-paying jobs or pensions, (2) Official Poor who are already established in public housing and other welfare systems (mostly funded by state and federal taxpayers), and (3) divorce or custody plaintiffs who collected a free house, child support, and/or alimony through the family law system.

Low-skilled immigrants don’t fit into any of these categories. By definition they can’t have high-paying jobs (since they are “low-skill”). They would have to survive in the city for 5-10 years on a waiting list before they get their free apartment and they don’t have sufficient family connections to do this. Immigrants are unaware that having sex with a high-income American will yield the spending power of a medium-to-upper-income American and/or they have religious or social scruples that prevent them from having sex with an already-married dermatologist.

What do readers think? Instead of building a wall or aggressively preventing 8 low-wage people from sharing a 2-bedroom apartment, a city simply puts in a high minimum wage. With no jobs available for undesirable/Deplorable people, the city is left with the sought-after “creative class” plus some folks on Welfare who vote for Democrats and make the city wealthier by pulling in Federal Medicaid, food stamp, and housing dollars. If you’re a Democrat on the city council or in the mayor’s office, what’s not to like about that outcome?

Related:

• Can Puerto Rico be a laboratory for the future of the rest of the U.S.? (Puerto Rico already has the equivalent of a $15/hour minimum wage)

Update: A Facebooker commented on the above with “To illustrate that point, Singapore enforces a minimum wage on immigrant labor, but not on its own citizens. Does anybody believe a government would pass a law to treat foreigners worse than its own citizens?” (this post from a law firm suggests that it the minimum wage is about $2,660 per month)

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