Champion Speed Skater Embroiled in Custody Dispute Found Dead in Burning Car
August 30, 2010
Stephen Moore was a world-class speed skater in his time. But according to this article, Moore was savagely beaten to death and stuffed into the trunk of his mother's car (Star-Ledger, 8/26/10). The car was then driven around for a couple of days before being torched. As of now, Moore's ex-wife Kathleen Dorsett and her father Thomas Dorsett, are charged with his murder. An employee of Thomas Dorsett, Anthony Morris, is charged with setting fire to the car.
Of course these are nothing but allegations at this point. No one has been convicted of anything. Still, the case appears to have followed a distressingly familiar pattern. Moore and Dorsett had been married since 2007 and had a daughter who is 20 months old. Dorsett had custody, but Moore was seeking to expand his visitation rights. The legal case grew bitter and the next thing anyone knew, Stephen Moore had disappeared, only to turn up dead, his body partly burned, on August 18th.
This article tells us that Moore was truly a gentle, friendly guy (Orange County Register, 8/28/10).
"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."
Apparently Dorsett had acted normally prior to the birth of their child. But then, according to Cam Graham, a longtime friend of Moore, everything changed. Moore complained to him that, after the birth of their daughter, Dorsett completely withdrew from him.
"Stephen told me that she just didn't want him around any more," Graham said. "There was no intimacy, no communication...nothing."
In short, it looks like another case in which maternal gatekeeping takes its most extreme form. In the Mazoltuv Borukhova case, a mother hired someone to once and for all remove their daughter's father from her life. Here it looks like Kathleen's father did the job with her acquiescence, and then got his employee to cover up the crime. That's certainly the theory prosecutors are pursuing and any different scenario looks unlikely at this point, but, as I said, we don't yet know for certain.
Time and the judicial process will tell. But part of that process will involve Anthony Morris who finds himself charged with serious criminal wrongdoing in a murder case in which the victim is a man against whom Morris had no animus whatsoever. In short, Morris never had a dog in the Moore-Dorsett fight and that means he'll be powerfully motivated to tell prosecutors everything he knows in exchange for leniency.
We'll see how it all shakes out. If, as appears likely now, the murder went down as prosecutors think, will those who pretend that domestic violence, even including murder, is only done by men to women finally admit the truth? The truth is that, in the U.S. about 1,200 women are killed each year by an intimate partner and about 400 men are.
But what's also true is that women are far more inclined than men to hire the job done or, if no money changes hands, get a friend or relative to do it. Those cases are coded by police as "multiple offender" killings and therefore aren't reflected in the figures on homicide by an intimate partner. How many women kill their husbands/partners, or have the job done by someone else? We don't know. That looks like what happened to Stephen Moore, but whatever we eventually learn to be the case, it's high time the domestic violence industry admits the truth.
Attorney: Best Interests of the Child Determination ‘Subjective, Inconsistent, Often Erroneous’
August 30, 2010
With this piece in Lisa Belkin's Motherlode blog at the New York Times, I couldn't agree more (New York Times, 8/26/10).
It's written by an attorney named Chris Gottlieb who defends parents in cases in which the child protection agency accuses them of abuse or neglect and wants to take their kids and put them in foster care. In short, Gottlieb works in the trenches of one of the most emotionally difficult areas of law, and, having done so, she's got some things to say about CPS and the courts that adjudicate those matters.
And what she says is much like what I and so many others have been saying for years. Judges and caseworkers are supposed to figure out which parents truly are a danger to their children or are unable to care for them. No one pretends that that is always an easy job; it isn't. But that job has morphed into second-guessing legitimate parental decision making. As Gottlieb says,
One judge wants more discipline; another wants less. I have heard caseworkers criticize mothers for everything from giving their children Chinese takeout food or Kool-Aid (the mother told me orange juice was too expensive for her) to having beer in the house to letting a child get wet under a sprinkler. A judge ordered one of my clients to take her child to the park every day. Every day!
As Gottlieb points out, there is nothing in the law that permits that type of micromanagement of parents by government officials be they judges or caseworkers. The Constitution doesn't permit it, but it happens every day, thousands of times a day. The camel's nose is under the tent and it's not going away. At the rate we're going, the beast will be sitting down to dinner with us any day now.
And what gave the camel its opening? "The best interests of the child," that's what. As Gottlieb points out,
[O]nce government intervention in family life is authorized, the legal standard often becomes “best interests of the child.” How do courts and caseworkers determine what is in a child’s best interests? The same way the rest of us do: subjectively, inconsistently, and often erroneously.
She said a mouthful there. As it happens, I'm currently reading a book by Canadian academic Paul Millar in which he quotes clinical psychologists W. O'Donahue and A. R. Bradley on the subject of "the best interests of the child," thus:
There is no useful operational definition of what the best interests of the child actually are. There is inconsistency across states of legal criteria for assessing the best interest of the child. There is a lack of consensus within the field of psychology as to what the relevant variables should be... The validity and reliability of standardized tests for use in custody assessments are largely unknown.
That's the state of psychology on "the best interests of the child," and yet how often do judges, who know far less about the matter than do psychologists, intone the mantra as if there were some certainty about the matter?
As Gottlieb makes clear, the vast majority of CPS cases don't involve any form of abuse; rather, they're about neglect, some of which of course is serious, but much of which is of the "Horrors, you gave the child Chinese take-out!" variety.
Governments tend to arrogate power to themselves when they can, and the breakdown of the traditional two-parent family has given states a golden (literally) opportunity to do just that. They've seized on family breakdown, not just to intervene in families in which children are truly at risk, but to substitute their own decisions about childcare for those of parents. "Kool-Aid? No, I think orange juice is better."
There's a reason that strangers on the train criticize Gottlieb for holding her baby too close to a newspaper or not dressing him to suit them. The loss of the two-parent family has absolutely terrified us, and with good reason. Children overwhelmingly do better in intact, two-parent families than anywhere else. And when that family system broke down, as it did years ago, governments, primarily in the form of CPS agencies and courts, stepped in.
That may be understandable, but it's not right. What's right is for governments to educate people about the importance to children of parents staying together if at all possible. And when it's not possible, governments must do all they can to promote equal parenting after the split-up. Those two things will do far more and be far cheaper than all the micromanagement of parents done by all the caseworkers and judges in the world.
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Edge Boston Article Shows the Way on Domestic Violence Reporting
August 29, 2010
This article is worth reading (Edge Boston, 8/23/10).
Edge Boston is a publication whose primary markets are the gay, lesbian and transgendered communities in the Boston area. Nominally, the piece is about a case in which a lesbian woman is alleged to have murdered a friend of her partner.
A Brockton woman walked into that city's police station on August 9 and allegedly confessed to killing her ex-girlfriend’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor because the woman allegedly had come between the couple.
Eunice Field, 54, told police she killed Lorraine Wachsman, 62, at Wachsman’s Bridgewater condo, according to Assistant District Attorney Thomas Flanagan.
Field left a note for her ex-girlfriend, Renee Williams, in the Brockton apartment they shared stating that she killed Wachsman, a retired school teacher, "for taking away the love of her life", Flanagan said at Field’s Aug. 10 arraignment. The prosecutor said Field stabbed Wachsman three or four times in the back and neck with a serrated knife.
So the short story is that a lesbian woman is alleged to have murdered her ex's new lover. By itself, that wouldn't warrant much notice.
But the article doesn't stop there. It goes on to remind readers of other recent deaths due to DV in the Boston area. The lover of Annemarie Rentala is considered a "person of interest" in her strangling death. In another incident a lesbian woman was found guilty of second-degree murder in the deaths of two children who died in a fire she had set at the home of her ex.
With that basis, the article goes on to make the points that
[d]omestic violence, both physical and emotional, remains a major problem among gay and lesbian couples.
The Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project reports one in four gay men experience domestic violence. The rate is even higher among lesbians. One in three likely will experience domestic violence during their lifetimes, the same rate as straight women.
The Network/La Red said many lesbians have the misconception their space is safe.
"We know from the recent cases that women physically and emotionally abuse their female partners, as well as their partners that may identify as transgender," Kaitlin Nichols, director of organizing and education, told EDGE in e-mail. "We also know that women have been seriously injured or killed by their female partners, or lost everything and become homeless due to domestic violence. The myth of women’s communities as safe communities has prevented many women from reaching out for support. If they have shared what is happening, they are met with disbelief from their community."
Now, let's be clear; the "one in three women will be a victim of DV in her lifetime" claim is false. That figure is derived from studies, not of the population generally, but of women in DV shelters. As such, it seriously overstates the rate of DV victimization among straight women.
And since much of serious DV is concentrated in a relatively few victims, the danger to most people of becoming a victim of truly injurious domestic violence is remote. For example, in Scotland's study of domestic violence published last December, 5% of men and 5% of women said they had been a victim of DV in the previous year. About 1.4% of all people said they'd experienced more than one incident of DV in the previous year. Given the gender equality of victimization generally, that would suggest that DV is a serious, ongoing problem for about 0.7% of all women in relationships.
Apart from the well-known-to-be-wrong claim of "one in three," it's refreshing to read an article that says in effect "we - not 'they' - commit DV." (Of course this blog routinely points out that men and women commit DV equally. It does that because some 300 separate studies over 35 years show it to be the case, and in so doing refuses to shy away from the DV done by men.)
But when was the last time any mainstream media made the simple statement that Edge Boston makes - "we commit DV"? The simple fact is that the MSM together with legislative bodies and a multitude of non-profit organizations ignore the facts, by now conclusively established. They ignore not only well-known facts, but also the responsibility of half of DV perpetrators in favor of a narrative of male corruption and female innocence.
The Edge Boston piece proves that the issue of DV doesn't have to be treated that way. It proves that the subject can be treated honestly; it proves that it's possible to demand that responsibility be taken on the part of all those who commit DV, not just half. There's no misandry, just a clear statement of facts and the admonition to pay attention to the problem and try to ameliorate it.
What a concept.
Into the bargain, read again Kaitlin Nichols inveighing against the "myth of women's communities as safe..." Shouldn't someone in the MSM ask themselves how it's possible for lesbian women to commit DV but not straight women? Shouldn't someone in the DV industry that's so bent on demonizing men be forced to explain that simple, basic inconsistency?
The answer is "of course they should," but will they?
I won't hold my breath waiting, but, with that one exception, the Edge Boston piece is an example of how DV reporting should be done.
Thanks to Ned for the heads-up.
Edge Boston Article Shows the Way on Domestic Violence Reporting
August 29, 2010
This article is worth reading (Edge Boston, 8/23/10).
Edge Boston is a publication whose primary markets are the gay, lesbian and transgendered communities in the Boston area. Nominally, the piece is about a case in which a lesbian woman is alleged to have murdered a friend of her partner.
A Brockton woman walked into that city's police station on August 9 and allegedly confessed to killing her ex-girlfriend’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor because the woman allegedly had come between the couple.
Eunice Field, 54, told police she killed Lorraine Wachsman, 62, at Wachsman’s Bridgewater condo, according to Assistant District Attorney Thomas Flanagan.
Field left a note for her ex-girlfriend, Renee Williams, in the Brockton apartment they shared stating that she killed Wachsman, a retired school teacher, "for taking away the love of her life", Flanagan said at Field’s Aug. 10 arraignment. The prosecutor said Field stabbed Wachsman three or four times in the back and neck with a serrated knife.
So the short story is that a lesbian woman is alleged to have murdered her ex's new lover. By itself, that wouldn't warrant much notice.
But the article doesn't stop there. It goes on to remind readers of other recent deaths due to DV in the Boston area. The lover of Annemarie Rentala is considered a "person of interest" in her strangling death. In another incident a lesbian woman was found guilty of second-degree murder in the deaths of two children who died in a fire she had set at the home of her ex.
With that basis, the article goes on to make the points that
[d]omestic violence, both physical and emotional, remains a major problem among gay and lesbian couples.
The Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project reports one in four gay men experience domestic violence. The rate is even higher among lesbians. One in three likely will experience domestic violence during their lifetimes, the same rate as straight women.
The Network/La Red said many lesbians have the misconception their space is safe.
"We know from the recent cases that women physically and emotionally abuse their female partners, as well as their partners that may identify as transgender," Kaitlin Nichols, director of organizing and education, told EDGE in e-mail. "We also know that women have been seriously injured or killed by their female partners, or lost everything and become homeless due to domestic violence. The myth of women’s communities as safe communities has prevented many women from reaching out for support. If they have shared what is happening, they are met with disbelief from their community."
Now, let's be clear; the "one in three women will be a victim of DV in her lifetime" claim is false. That figure is derived from studies, not of the population generally, but of women in DV shelters. As such, it seriously overstates the rate of DV victimization among straight women.
And since much of serious DV is concentrated in a relatively few victims, the danger to most people of becoming a victim of truly injurious domestic violence is remote. For example, in Scotland's study of domestic violence published last December, 5% of men and 5% of women said they had been a victim of DV in the previous year. About 1.4% of all people said they'd experienced more than one incident of DV in the previous year. Given the gender equality of victimization generally, that would suggest that DV is a serious, ongoing problem for about 0.7% of all women in relationships.
Apart from the well-known-to-be-wrong claim of "one in three," it's refreshing to read an article that says in effect "we - not 'they' - commit DV." (Of course this blog routinely points out that men and women commit DV equally. It does that because some 300 separate studies over 35 years show it to be the case, and in so doing refuses to shy away from the DV done by men.)
But when was the last time any mainstream media made the simple statement that Edge Boston makes - "we commit DV"? The simple fact is that the MSM together with legislative bodies and a multitude of non-profit organizations ignore the facts, by now conclusively established. They ignore not only well-known facts, but also the responsibility of half of DV perpetrators in favor of a narrative of male corruption and female innocence.
The Edge Boston piece proves that the issue of DV doesn't have to be treated that way. It proves that the subject can be treated honestly; it proves that it's possible to demand that responsibility be taken on the part of all those who commit DV, not just half. There's no misandry, just a clear statement of facts and the admonition to pay attention to the problem and try to ameliorate it.
What a concept.
Into the bargain, read again Kaitlin Nichols inveighing against the "myth of women's communities as safe..." Shouldn't someone in the MSM ask themselves how it's possible for lesbian women to commit DV but not straight women? Shouldn't someone in the DV industry that's so bent on demonizing men be forced to explain that simple, basic inconsistency?
The answer is "of course they should," but will they?
I won't hold my breath waiting, but, with that one exception, the Edge Boston piece is an example of how DV reporting should be done.
Thanks to Ned for the heads-up.
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Canadian Greens Endorse Presumption of Equally Shared Parenting
August 29, 2010
Canadian Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott has announced that the Green Party of Canada has officially endorsed making the presumption of equally shared parenting following separation or divorce the law of Canada. Here's his press release which includes this:
Over the weekend, the Green Party passed a policy motion declaring that “the Green Party of Canada will make the necessary changes to the Canada Divorce Act so that in the event of a marital breakdown, the Divorce Act will mandate a default of equal parenting – defined as equal time and responsibility unless there is consent from both parents, or there are specific criminal convictions related to the children that preclude equal parenting.
The Green Party of Canada is a small party. It has so far failed to elect a single person to parliament. But recently, popular discontent with the major parties has redounded to the Greens' benefit. The party has steadily increased its share of the popular vote in both national and local elections. In 2004 it garnered over 4.3% of the vote which is important because it qualified the party for federal funding of its electoral efforts. With that funding, its vote tallies have steadily risen.
The politics of the Green Party are of course well left of center. That makes their endorsement of equally shared parenting that's also contained in Vellacott's bill C-422 significant because it shows that left and right can come together over the issues of stable families and parent-child relationships. Indeed, I and others have long argued that equally-shared parenting should appeal to both left and right. Family stability should appeal to the right while gender equality between parents should appeal to the left, and both are advanced by equally-shared parenting.
It's always been hypocritical for those on the left to oppose fathers' rights. For decades, many leftists have paid lip service to gender equality, but when they're given the opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, they always seem to hide behind bad logic and bad data. For example, show me a feminist organization in the U.S. that supports equally shared parenting. I've never seen one and that's in spite of the fact that equally shared parenting would promote greater involvement of women in the workplace which in turn would result in more promotions for women, increased earnings and greater savings. Feminists say they support all those things, but when it comes to promoting one of the surest ways to achieve all of them - equally shared parenting - they refuse.
Well, now the Green Party of Canada has shown NOW how to live their principles. We'll see if they learn.
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Australian Ombudsman: Child Support Agency Unfairly Targets Dads
August 27, 2010
In Australia, the report by the acting Commonwealth Ombudsman into the policies and practices of the Child Support Agency is complete. The full report is not publicly available, but the abridged version is here. And here is an article about the report (Sydney Morning Herald, 8/26/10).
Predictably the report is written in the blandest language imaginable, but a picture of the process and the behavior of CSA investigators comes into focus. To be polite, CSA investigators are poorly trained and primarily motivated to increase support levels.
They tend to see their job as that of increasing support levels and tend to ignore the other side of the coin - cases in which it should be lowered. That's why the Ombudsman reports that, for example, when a father targeted by the CSA called the investigator to give information he hoped would help his case, the investigator simply didn't return the call and went ahead and increased the amount owed as if the man had never tried to talk to him/her. People who truly want to come to the right conclusion don't do things like that.
In other cases, the CSA investigator seems to have been, well, not very smart.
The financial investigator treated a depreciation amount as the parent’s income, without having any regard to the size of the business’s overall trading loss. This analysis was flawed as a matter of simple arithmetic—disregarding the depreciation figure still meant that the business had traded at a loss. In any case, the CSA’s policy is that an amount claimed for depreciation will only be ‘added back’ if the sum is available for the parent’s day-to-day living expenses.
So the investigator failed at "simple arithmetic."
Worst of all, the Ombudsman found that the CSA chose to pursue cases in which more child support might be owed and ignored those in which increased income received by the payee (usually the mother) would have meant lower support levels for the payer (usually the father). He recommends that CSA change its policy about how it selects cases to pursue.
[T]he CSA should not prioritise its CTP investigations on the basis of the parent’s role (i.e. payer or payee). In other words, the CSA should also investigate cases where the payee parent appears to have additional financial resources (see recommendations 1 and 14).
That anti-father bias directly contradicts the CSA's own public descriptions of its policies and its mission which are even-handed treatment of both payers and payees. The Ombudsman urges that the CSA do what it claims it does.
The Ombudsman also pointed out that the CSA
also created the impression that parents under CTP (Capacity to Pay) investigation are those who deliberately attempted to avoid their child support responsibilities. This was not borne out by the cases that we examined in our sample. The CSA’s CTP investigations include many where parents had perfectly legitimate business arrangements for taxation purposes, and the question of their motivation was usually irrelevant.
Once again, even those targeted by CSA turned out not to be "deadbeats," but in the cases sampled, people claiming legitimate reductions to income.
Finally, the CSA "routinely" demands the financial information of a payer's new partner or spouse despite the fact that that information is "usually not relevant to the CTP investigation." It's unduly intrusive and has nothing to do with the case, but they do it anyway.
Picture the stereotypical crooked cop. He knows he's essentially above the law, so he can get away with whatever petty shakedown schemes he can think up. And it's not just the money he can get from you that's enraging, but the fact that he can walk into your home any time, track mud in, look around, kick your dog, insult your kid and generally disrupt your life, your privacy, your peace of mind. There's not one thing you can do about it, and he knows it and you know it.
Get the picture? That's your friendly neighborhood CSA investigator. Have a good day.
Thanks to John for the heads-up.
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National Survey of Families and Households Omits Data on Household Work Done by Men
August 27, 2010
In my piece on Alexa Aguilar's article in the Chicago Tribune about Marc and Amy Vachon's book and website promoting equal parenting, the writer, Alexa Aguilar, referred to figures on time spent compiled by the National Survey of Families and Households at the University of Wisconsin. Aguilar relied on the NSFH data for the proposition that men don't do as much household work as women do.
(Of course she, like seemingly every other writer on the subject, neglected to mention that while women are doing childcare and housework, men are doing paid work. She also failed to notice that, when paid and unpaid work are aggregated, men and women's time spent are statistically identical.)
I went to the NSFH website and noticed an interesting thing about how they collect their data. To compile their figures on time spent doing work around the house other than childcare, the survey asks respondents about nine different types of tasks - Preparing Meals, Washing Dishes, Cleaning House, Outdoor Tasks, Shopping, Washing/Ironing, Paying Bills, Automobile Maintenance and Driving. Respondents are asked to estimate the amount of time they spend at each activity.
Anyone see anything missing? Yep, I did too. Of those nine categories, five are typically done mostly by women while only one, Automobile Maintenance, is done mostly by men. What about Home Repair and Maintenance, for example, that would include plumbing and electrical repair, painting, drywall and tile repair, appliance repair, etc.? Or what about a category called, say, Home Construction and Improvement that would include the deck he built, the room he added on, the wall he tore out and replaced? In short, whoever decided on those categories neglected whole areas of typically male-done household tasks. It's easy to underestimate men's contributions to the household if you exclude those areas, and that's exactly what the NSFH does.
So I emailed the NSFH asking them why they left those areas out of their data. Here is their prompt and courteous response.
Thank you for your interest in NSFH! I have checked the filed report and the working paper for wave 1 and could not locate any information on why the PI picked those nine household tasks used in the self-enumerated questionnaire for the respondents. The survey was designed in 1984-1985. According to the working paper, a nine-member research team "... reviewed the literature and compiled past survey experience within each substantive area. The group often considered the pros and cons of replicating questions from earlier surveys versus creating new ones."
The best answer I can give you is a statement on page 5 of the working paper 1 (http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/nsfhwp/nsfh1.pdf). "As with every data collection effort, we will soon discover that we have made errors of judgment on scientific priorities, that some of our innovations have been unsuccessful, and that we have inadvertently omitted key measures and made errors of logic. We accept responsibility for such errors and omissions. However, we ask that users of the data temper their frustration with the limitations of the data with an appreciation of what can be done with them."
So I asked if they intended to add categories that reflected those typically male endeavors I suggested. They informed me that the NSFH project was discontinued in 2006. So, like a fly in amber, the NSFH data are forever preserved and available for use by anyone.
And needless to say, they can ask people for an "appreciation of what can be done" with the data all they want to. That's just their way of warning people that the data are limited and asking that readers be scrupulous in how they interpret them.
But people with anti-male/anti-dad agendas have proven themselves time and again to be anything but scrupulous. So it comes as no surprise that they use the NSFH data as proof positive that men do less household work than women, while ignoring the omissions that allow them to draw that conclusion.
Men probably do spend less time on household work and childcare than do women, because they spend more time earning. But that's no excuse for institutions like the NSFH to distort reality by excluding from their survey entire categories of household tasks that are usually done by men.
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New Holstein Column Criticizes Influential MA. Senator for Opposing F & F’s Shared Parenting Bill
August 26, 2010
Ned Holstein, MD, MS, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Fathers and Families, criticizes Massachusetts Senator Cynthia Creem, co-chair of the Joint Committee on The Judiciary, for her opposition to shared parenting bill in his new column Holstein: Senator Creem and Mr. Rudnick, Help our children (Newton Tab, 8/24/10).
HB 1400, Fathers and Families' most recent bill promoting the presumption of shared parenting, was bottled up in committee this legislative session, despite enjoying widespread support. The Newton Tab is an influential local paper in Creem's district. To join the debate in the comments section, click here.
Dr. Holstein wrote:
Senator Creem has represented her district well in many respects. But Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe was correct when he pointed out that as co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, she has a conflict of interest on alimony reform. This is because her main livelihood as a divorce lawyer thrives when parents have something big to fight about.
She also has a conflict of interest on child custody legislation. Because what could be bigger than the custody of one’s children? As an actively practicing divorce attorney, Senator Creem should not simultaneously be holding up legislative reform of child custody when doing so has the potential to create parental battles from which she may profit. Especially when 86 percent of voters have shown that they want change. And if she does not already do this, she should inform her clients who wish to share the parenting of their children that she opposes shared parenting legislation.
Meanwhile, Senator Creem’s opponent in the Democratic primary, Charles Rudnick, has remained unduly cautious on these issues despite the clear mandate from voters to reform custody law. There is no indication that he would help children any more than Senator Creem has, but at least he would not have a financial conflict of interest and would not be able to blunt reform as co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I urge him to support shared parenting legislation that would help children, diminish parental conflict, and preserve the loving bonds between both parents and their children.
There is a large and growing movement of parents nationally who call for urgent reform of our family courts to rid them of practices that do not serve modern needs. We need Mr. Rudnick to tell us where he stands on issues that affect nearly 40 percent of our children. Senator Creem, whose positions are clear, should recuse herself from deliberations on child custody, alimony and other issues on which she has a conflict of interest.
Read the full piece here.
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Article Lauds Equally Shared Parenting, but With Funky Figures and Twisted Logic
August 26, 2010
Here's yet another piece that lauds equality between mothers and fathers in childrearing, but uses some very questionable "facts" and figures to do it (Chicago Tribune, 8/20/10).
The writer, Alexa Aguilar, wants to think of her marriage as non-traditional enough that both partners work and both do childcare. But she notices that, when push comes to shove, she's more likely to control childcare and housework while her husband does the more traditionally male tasks around the house. She even refers to herself as the "gatekeeper," and I wonder if she knows about the social science that refers to mothers' control over fathers' access to children and childcare as 'maternal gatekeeping.' If she does, she doesn't let on.
While Aguilar is interested in the concept of equally shared parenting, she still feels the need to detour through some very carefully selected numbers before she does it.
The University of Wisconsin's National Survey of Families and Households show that today, the number of hours a woman spends on housework still outnumbers a man's by almost 2 to 1, and that's when both partners work outside of the home full time. When it comes to child care, such as feeding, clothing and bathing the kids, women spend 15 hours a week tending to children. Dads spend two. In families where both parents earn a paycheck, the mother does an average of 11 hours of child care a week, while the father does three.
Those figures by themselves are accurate enough. But that's the problem, those figures are by themselves; they don't include all the other figures that show that, when men's and women's paid labor is added to their domestic chores, their total time spent is statistically identical. So her words "where both parents earn a paycheck" suggest rough equality in time spent at work. That in turn leads to the conclusion that men are laggards because they don't do as much childcare.
But of course that's wrong. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics data regularly show, even when men and women work full time, men still spend about 50 minutes a day more at gainful employment. And overall, far fewer women work full time than do men, resulting in 56% of the total hours worked in the United States being worked by men (see here, p.10).
So, although Aguilar may not know it, while women are at home with the kids, men are at work earning. And, like seemingly every other article written on the subject, Aguilar adopts the attitude that men are in some way deficient for not doing more childcare, but doesn't criticize women for not doing more paid work.
Aguilar moves on to the website set up by Marc and Amy Vachon, the equal-parenting mavens, and that's a good thing because they provide a close look at what is actually required to increase dad's part in his children's lives. Tellingly,
[w]hen it comes to equally shared parenting, the Vachons say, a woman has to "abdicate her dictatorship" and fathers can't take refuge in the stereotypes of a bumbling dad who gets applause if he changes a diaper or takes the kids to buy new school clothes.
That's that old maternal gatekeeping problem again. Aguilar and the Vachons are right to point out the part dads sometimes play in that. After all, the same culture that tells mothers they have to be everything to their children, tells men that they're incompetent at and uninterested in childcare. So, if they're to be equal parents, mothers and fathers both have to be able to set aside those prescriptions they see every day for how to be a woman and how to be a man.
Unlike Aguilar and the NSFH, the Vachons realize that equal parenting requires equal "breadwinning." By that they don't necessarily mean that each spouse earns the same (although that helps to keep one job from becoming "better" than the other), but simply that each spends about the same amount of time doing paid work. In other words, the Vachons do what I've never seen done, by Aguilar or anyone else (except here); they admit that if one person spends more time at work, he/she likely will spend less time on domestic chores, and vice versa.
It's a simple concept that, in our culture's enthusiasm for disrespecting dads, goes mostly unmentioned.
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Article Lauds Equally Shared Parenting, but With Funky Figures and Twisted Logic
August 26, 2010
Here's yet another piece that lauds equality between mothers and fathers in childrearing, but uses some very questionable "facts" and figures to do it (Chicago Tribune, 8/20/10).
The writer, Alexa Aguilar, wants to think of her marriage as non-traditional enough that both partners work and both do childcare. But she notices that, when push comes to shove, she's more likely to control childcare and housework while her husband does the more traditionally male tasks around the house. She even refers to herself as the "gatekeeper," and I wonder if she knows about the social science that refers to mothers' control over fathers' access to children and childcare as 'maternal gatekeeping.' If she does, she doesn't let on.
While Aguilar is interested in the concept of equally shared parenting, she still feels the need to detour through some very carefully selected numbers before she does it.
The University of Wisconsin's National Survey of Families and Households show that today, the number of hours a woman spends on housework still outnumbers a man's by almost 2 to 1, and that's when both partners work outside of the home full time. When it comes to child care, such as feeding, clothing and bathing the kids, women spend 15 hours a week tending to children. Dads spend two. In families where both parents earn a paycheck, the mother does an average of 11 hours of child care a week, while the father does three.
Those figures by themselves are accurate enough. But that's the problem, those figures are by themselves; they don't include all the other figures that show that, when men's and women's paid labor is added to their domestic chores, their total time spent is statistically identical. So her words "where both parents earn a paycheck" suggest rough equality in time spent at work. That in turn leads to the conclusion that men are laggards because they don't do as much childcare.
But of course that's wrong. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics data regularly show, even when men and women work full time, men still spend about 50 minutes a day more at gainful employment. And overall, far fewer women work full time than do men, resulting in 56% of the total hours worked in the United States being worked by men (see here, p.10).
So, although Aguilar may not know it, while women are at home with the kids, men are at work earning. And, like seemingly every other article written on the subject, Aguilar adopts the attitude that men are in some way deficient for not doing more childcare, but doesn't criticize women for not doing more paid work.
Aguilar moves on to the website set up by Marc and Amy Vachon, the equal-parenting mavens, and that's a good thing because they provide a close look at what is actually required to increase dad's part in his children's lives. Tellingly,
[w]hen it comes to equally shared parenting, the Vachons say, a woman has to "abdicate her dictatorship" and fathers can't take refuge in the stereotypes of a bumbling dad who gets applause if he changes a diaper or takes the kids to buy new school clothes.
That's that old maternal gatekeeping problem again. Aguilar and the Vachons are right to point out the part dads sometimes play in that. After all, the same culture that tells mothers they have to be everything to their children, tells men that they're incompetent at and uninterested in childcare. So, if they're to be equal parents, mothers and fathers both have to be able to set aside those prescriptions they see every day for how to be a woman and how to be a man.
Unlike Aguilar and the NSFH, the Vachons realize that equal parenting requires equal "breadwinning." By that they don't necessarily mean that each spouse earns the same (although that helps to keep one job from becoming "better" than the other), but simply that each spends about the same amount of time doing paid work. In other words, the Vachons do what I've never seen done, by Aguilar or anyone else (except here); they admit that if one person spends more time at work, he/she likely will spend less time on domestic chores, and vice versa.
It's a simple concept that, in our culture's enthusiasm for disrespecting dads, goes mostly unmentioned.
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