Jolie wants child support from Brad Pitt

I cannot keep up with the Brad Pitt Angelina Jolie divorce, and the bizarre way they are raising their first daughter as a boy and buying kids from other continents.

As Pitt and Jolie are super-rich, popular, famous, well-liked, beautiful actors, you would think that they would find a way to avoid the trashy accusations of divorce court. They can each in one movie make more money than the rest of us can spend in our entire lives.

They claimed that they did not get married earlier because they were waiting for same-sex marriages, and only got married because their kids nagged them into it.

They had waited for gay marriage to become legal, with Pitt telling Esquire magazine in 2006: "Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able to." source

Nevertheless, Jolie is making accusations that could win her as much as $50 million in child support payments.

It is all about money. The bad incentives are huge.

Georgia upholds free speech for parents

I have quit posting, but here are a couple of things that came to my attention recently.

A family court judge ordered parents not to comment about the court on Facebook, as he took personal offense at some of the criticisms.

A Wash. Post blogger reports:

Georgia appellate court overturns custody order that barred both parents from commenting about the case

As the United States Supreme Court has stated,

[w]hatever differences may exist about interpretations of the First Amendment, there is practically universal agreement that a major purpose of that Amendment was to protect the free discussion of governmental affairs. Although it is assumed that judges will ignore the public clamor or media reports and editorials in reaching their decisions and by tradition will not respond to public commentary, the law gives judges as persons, or courts as institutions no greater immunity from criticism than other persons or institutions. The operations of the courts and the judicial conduct of judges are matters of utmost public concern.

Among other things, a parent was complaining that the court transcript did not match the official audio recording of a hearing, and the judge was relying on the inaccurate transcript.

Fathers’ rights campaigners in Israel have long complained about what is surely the most archaic and anti-child feature of Israeli law regarding child custody – its retention of the Tender Years Doctrine. In Israeli law, that’s called the “early childhood clause.” Under it, mothers receive custody of any child under the age of six. All considerations except the child’s age are off the table. Is the mother mentally unbalanced, abusive, a drunk, a drug addict? It makes no difference. Is Dad a paragon of virtue and paternal love? It makes no difference. Mom gets custody. Period.

People complain about the possibility of Sharia law creeping into the court, but they should also complain about Jewish law creeping in.

AP reportw:

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — People who deliberately refuse to pay court-ordered child support can go to jail for consecutive six-month sentences for repeat violations, New York's highest court ruled Tuesday.

State law generally limits Family Court to imposing single six-month sentences.

The Court of Appeals, with six judges ruling unanimously, said Family Court can revisit jail sentences for willful violations that were previously suspended and order an offender jailed on all of them. Those sentences can run consecutively, extending the time an offender can be locked up.

These jail terms are without a jury trial or other due process protections that a criminal defendant is entitled to.

Parents cannot settle support issues

According to USA law, a women has the unilateral right to opt out of parenthood by having an abortion at any time. A man has no such right, and can be forced into fatherhood. Furthermore, he can be forced into continuing involvement with the child, even if both parents agree to a financial settlement.

And when both parents agree to a settlement, both the judge and the press will blame the man.

The NY Post reports:

An Ivy League Lothario’s bid to get out of child support by giving his baby mama a one-time $150,000 payment was spanked by a Manhattan judge Thursday.

The 2013 Dartmouth grad offered the woman the pile of cash to “irrevocably terminate [his] parental rights” — because he was mad she refused to get an abortion and didn’t want to support the kid until he was 18.

The man, identified in court papers only as Avery G., 24, actually convinced the woman to take the lottery-style reduced-sum payout — which would be a lot of money up front but less than she would get from taking a monthly support check. ...

Avery G. will pay $832 a month for support, ...

Goldstein calls Avery’s bid both “unusual” and “extraordinary” and says there is no similar precedent for voluntarily signing away parental rights.

The mom, an $85,000-a-year marketing director, has sole legal and physical custody of the baby.

This anti-man, but it is also anti-woman, as the mom did not get the deal she wanted either.

I do not know how parents will ever get their rights back. Here both parents went to court with a settlement agreement, and the judge rejected the deal and insisted on supervising the child's upbringing for the next 18 years. And the newspaper agrees with the judge.

I don't know why the judge says that voluntarily signing away parental rights is so unusual. I have seen it in the local family court lots of times. Sometimes it happens just because a parent misses a couple of court appearances.

The same newspaper says Bernie Sanders is a communist.

In another attack on parental rights, the NY Times reports:

But anti-abortion groups argue that such cases should be decided according to the best interests of the embryos, the same legal standard used in child-custody disputes. In a friend-of-the-court brief filed last month in the Missouri dispute, they say an embryo’s most fundamental interest is to be born: “No other right is of any avail if a human being is not around to invoke it.”

The BIOTCh is called a legal standard, but it is not. Saying "best interests of the embryos" sounds like satire.

What would they do, appoint a court psychologist to evalate the embryo? That is not much more ridiculous than the family court does already.

The black studs of Omaha

Omaha.com reports:

[Norman] Bennett became a reproductive citizen: At age 31, he has at least 13 kids by 11 women.

That’s a tentative tally, because various court records seem to indicate that the Omaha man may have 15 kids by 13 women. Or more. ...

Turns out, Bennett isn’t even Omaha’s most prolific procreator.

Attorney Meagan Spomer, who works in child-support enforcement, told Polk that she has heard of a deadbeat dad with 23 kids by 15 women. ...

Some judges have required deadbeat dads to name each child. Any slip-ups, and certain judges will send dads to jail on the spot.

By law, child-support cases are supposed to stop short of becoming a sort of punitive paternity court. High court rulings have essentially outlawed the concept of a debtor’s prison — where defendants go to jail simply because they can’t pay down their financial obligations such as child support.

The Nebraska Supreme Court has ruled that any jail time in child-support cases should be coercive — an attempt to force the dad to chip away at whatever he owes.

One important note: Whether Bennett pays up or not, the women he impregnated are receiving child support through the welfare program formerly known as Aid to Dependent Children.
In other words, state and federal taxpayers are partly footing the bill for Bennett’s brood.
In turn, the State of Nebraska seeks reimbursement from fathers, such as Bennett, who have impregnated the women now receiving welfare.

Do not expect the Obama-Clinton Democrats to do anything about this, because all those kids are likely to become Democrat voters.

To maintain their power, they have to destroy the family and keep a permanent underclass.

Happy New Year. Vote for Donald J. Trump.

Actress loses final decision

I previously reported, in 2012, 2014, and 2015, on this actress whose scorched-earth sole custody tactics backfired. The dad won a final decision:

Kelly Rutherford has lost custody of her two children with a Monaco judge making a final decision on the lengthy legal case that has seen her locked in litigation with her ex-husband for more than six years. ...

As per the ruling, Rutherford will also receive $3,281 a month from Giersch in maintenance.

“I think like any parent would feel, you know”.

As she exited the Monacan court, Rutherford, who founded the Children’s Justice Campaign to help families with similar legal issues, told the waiting paparazzi that she “had no words”.

She stole the kids, got him deported, and got the American media on her side. I don't know why she is getting support payments, if he has the kids and she is a successful Hollywood actress.

The news article might have been machine-translated. It is getting harder to tell.

Most readers blame the parents, but the fault is really with the legal system for creating a 6-year process for a high-stakes winner-take-all battle for proving who is the better parent. But I have given up making this point. I only post this because I previously followed the case.

Update: (Dec. 30) Dad sues Vanity Fair in Germany for libel, as it took the mom's side.

Texas child support collection monster

The child support collection system is a monster, with both the feds and states to blame. It has a glitch in Texas:

The federal government has frozen payments to Texas’ problem-plagued bid to upgrade its child-support data system, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office disclosed Friday.

In a letter to Legislative Budget Board director Ursula Parks, a top Paxton aide said the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement has halted payments for tech giant Accenture’s part of the data project, known as “T2.”

Federal officials want more information about a proposed new work schedule and a “corrective action plan” that would explain “the root causes of delays on this program and how they will be addressed moving forward,” said Mara F. Friesen, Texas’ deputy attorney general for child support. ...

The federal government pays two-thirds of the costs of the upgrade,

The cost is many millions of dollars:

By 2012, agency officials realized that the project's costs were far higher than expected, and concerns were growing about Accenture's handling of its share of the work. By this summer, the project's price tag had grown by more than $70 million. The current estimate for the project is $310 million, more than $100 million above the initial $202 million budget, according to the attorney general's office. ...

More than half of the attorney general’s budget goes to child support enforcement. For years, the agency has prided itself on being the national leader in child support collections.

Millions of parents and thousands of state employees rely on the office’s computer system to handle the complicated and often delicate aspects of managing child support cases, including locating parents, collecting payments and distributing funds to custodial parents. But the technology rests on a rickety, 20-year-old framework that becomes more unwieldy with every passing year. Agency officials say the system is slow, convoluted and difficult when it comes to training new employees.

Wow, I had no idea this was such a big operation. Texas has criminals, illegal aliens, drug dealers, and all sorts of problems for prosecutors, and they are spending most of their money on child support enforcement?!

The legal evils of child support are detailed in Real World Divorce, a draft book that is freely online.

Republicans blame family without fixing incentives

I have quit posting this nonsense, but someone sent me this WSJ op-ed from behind a paywall:

The Poverty Cure: Get Married
Black children bear the brunt of single parenthood’s harms.

... Of the many barriers to equal opportunity for African-Americans, differences of family background may well be the most consequential — and the least likely to yield to public policy. ...

In fact, the researchers conclude, neighborhoods and schools are less important than the “direct effect of family structure itself.” ...

the advantages of marriage for child well-being are “hard to replicate through policy interventions other than those that bolster marriages themselves.” And as evaluations of the George W. Bush administration’s marriage-promotion efforts show, we don’t know how to do that.

Liberals just want to give black people more welfare, so that they will vote Democrat. The conservatives, like this author, make more of an attempt to address the problems, and correctly notice the breakdown of the family as a cause, but then they are stumped. They have no idea how to strengthen the family, except maybe to promote religion.

A letter to the WSJ editor correctly explains:

Federal and state laws have created incentives for mostly poor individuals to not marry and to throw fathers out of children’s lives. Federal laws such as Title IV-D of the Social Security Act, the Tax Code, the Bradley Amendment and the Violence Against Women Act have perverse incentives that help to throw biological fathers out of children’s lives and promote single-parent households. Until we create the incentives to bring back dads and bring back marriages, we can never help these children rise out of the poverty the government helped to create.

Peter G. Hill
Weston, Mass.

Another letter points out that the WSJ publish a 2014 op-ed by a Bush administration official blamely the family, just like the above op-ed:

Given how deep the problem of poverty is, taking even more money from one citizen and handing it to another will only diminish one while doing very little to help the other. A better and more compassionate policy to fight income inequality would be helping the poor realize that the most important decision they can make is to stay in school, get married and have children — in that order.

The Republicans may recognize the breakdown of the family as a problem, but they show no sign of attempting to reverse the bad incentives that killed the family.

Kansas raises the parent tax

Under current American law, child support is essentially a tax. That is, the govt orders the payment based on a percentage of income, with no requirement that the money be spent on the kids.

Most taxes require a vote of elected representatives, or of the people. Any tax increase is controversial and requires justification.

But Kansas raises child support, more accurately called a parent tax, by some lawyers and judges who attend a meeting and decide what they think is fair!

This sounds like what a dictatorship might do, not the USA.

A Kansas TV station reports:

For those of you who pay child support, start planning to pay more.

Every four years, federal law requires the state to review their child support guidelines.

In Kansas last year, more than $35 million was paid in child support by both dads and moms, but why?

“Children in Kansas are our most important asset so we want to make sure they’re protected financially,” said Larry Rute, Attorney at Law

Rute is part of a 14 member committee which says that the current payment schedule isn’t enough to do that.

They want to increase child support payments by an average of 3.5 percent across all income groups statewide. ...

“If you look at the guidelines and you feel that for any reason they’re unfair to you, then let us know and tell us why,” Rute said. “I promise you we will look at it.”

After the public comment is reviewed, the Kansas Supreme Court will have the final say on this possible change.

If the court adopts the proposal, then the increase in payments might start as soon as January 1, 2016.

So raising the parent tax is a way of protecting children? This is sick.

Update: A reader asks why this is a tax, and division of community property is not.

In community property states, the spouses are agreeing to split their incomes for the duration of the marriage. The division of property at divorce time is just each spouse claiming what he or she already owns.

With child support, there is no such agreement and no such ownership. It is imposed after the marriage, or if there was no marriage. No agreement between the parents comes into place. It is a tax on future earnings, or future judge-imputed earnings. It is imposed at the judge's discretion, and collected like a tax.

Amd yes, this Kansas parent tax is already too high. See this book chapter of Real World Divorce for details.

Judicial discretion means money for women

Jeff Landers describes himself "as a divorce financial professional who works exclusively with women", and writes in Forbes:

I’ve written before about alimony reform and how new laws eliminating lifelong alimony and reducing judicial discretion can pose real financial hardship to divorcing women. Unfortunately, there’s another legislative trend sweeping the nation that’s just as concerning. According to The Wall Street Journal, some 20 states are considering laws that would substantially change the way child custody is decided in divorce.

As with alimony reform, much of the proposed “shared parenting” legislation targets judicial discretion. Rather than evaluate individual cases based on their circumstances, judges will be strongly encouraged, or even mandated, to enact custody arrangements that are as close to 50-50 as possible. In some states, including Colorado, New York, and Washington, the proposed laws make that the mandatory default. To make a different arrangement, it must be proven that the child would not be best served by spending substantially equal time with each parent.

Such legislative changes have been proposed by men who feel they’ve been treated unfairly by a system that has, for many reasons over the years, favored mothers as custodial parents. I understand that. As a father myself, I can absolutely imagine how painful it would be to be unfairly denied time with my children.

But here’s the thing: that’s what judicial discretion is for! Experienced, knowledgeable judges are empowered to evaluate the circumstances of each case before them, and direct the litigants to the fairest possible solution to their individual case. The proposed laws remove or severely limit that flexibility. To my mind, that’s the wrong solution.

Yes, judicial discretion is for circumventing the rule of law.

Imagine if anything else in our society worked that way. Suppose every month, when you pay rent, some judge says what you should pay. Or on April 15, instead of using tax returns, some IRS agent uses his discretion on what you ought to be paying.

And of course, some cases are not just nuanced, but dangerous. Critics of the proposed child custody laws rightly contend that insisting on a 50/50 custody arrangement gives undue influence to abusive husbands, and wrongly places the burden on the spouse in the weaker position – usually the wife – to have to prove that the arrangement is not right. Furthermore, say the critics, the vast majority of custody cases are settled out of court. The ones that go to litigation are the ugliest and most contentious cases – arguably the ones for which shared custody, an arrangement requiring maturity and cooperation, is least likely to succeed.

No, this is all backwards. Women are in the stronger position. Cases are settled on an expectation of what the court will do. The most contentious cases are the ones needing 50/50 custody the most, as those need the forced involvement of both parents.

Child support, too, is undergoing “reform.” The New York Times recently reported about a demoralizing cycle in which men who can’t afford to make payments are jailed for failure to pay, then lose their jobs, then get deeper in arrears with child support payments, and so on. This is certainly a problem. Reform advocates claim that the current practice of calculating child support on the basis of imputed income (what a person is expected to earn) instead of actual income is unfair and unrealistic when jobs are hard to find and making payments is just not possible. The federal government is reportedly proposing to use actual income to calculate child support and also to consider that the noncustodial parent must have enough to live on himself.

At first glance, this seems reasonable, and even good – so why do I find it troubling? Well, as a divorce financial professional who works exclusively with women, I can tell you that such legislation could have many unintended consequences.

IRS taxes, Obamacare, and food stamps are based on actual income, not what some bureaucrat thinks that you ought to be making.

Landers' arguments seem stupid to me, but he is speaking for the financial interests of a lot of ex-wives, so I am pessimistic that legislatures will pass meaningful reforms.

NPO has more criticism of Landers, and here.

Child support is modern debt slavery

Vox Day writes:

And the South Carolina prison system is essentially debtor's prison:

A recent MSNBC investigation highlighted that in South Carolina, noncustodial parents can be held in contempt of civil court if their child support payments are just five days late, which means a judge can send them to jail.

Libba Patterson, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and a former director of the South Carolina Department of Social Services, has been a vocal supporter of an ongoing effort to reform the way South Carolina punishes those who owe child support payments -- an effort that has gone all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

In 2009, Patterson conducted a survey of 33 county jails in South Carolina, which found that one out of every eight inmates -- or 13.2 percent of the inmate population -- was behind bars for contempt of civil court after falling behind on child support payments. In Charleston County, where Walter owed his back payments on child support, Patterson’s survey found that over 15 percent of inmates had been imprisoned for not paying child support. In a handful of the other counties studied, the figure was as high as 20 percent.

This is further evidence that feminism, in all its forms, lunatic, liberal, and conservative, is intrinsically anti-societal and anti-civilizational. It's not a simple matter of left and right, because the conservative form of feminism is more insidious, and may actually be more damaging, in some cases, than the overt outrages of lunatic and liberal feminism.

When you read Dalrock talking about Churchians, and The Only Man in the Room leaders, and Man Up and Marry Those Single Mothers, you're seeing conservative feminism. The liberal feminist fallacy is to claim that women deserve more rights than men because men are oppressive. The conservative feminist fallacy is to claim that women deserve more rights than men because women are purer of spirit and it is a man's noble right and duty to preemptively sacrifice himself for the pure sex.

The liberal Democrats are more dangerous because they have built their whole party out of being anti-family, pro-dependency, anti-man, and anti-parental-rights. But conservative feminists are also damaging.

A NY Times comment says:

Simple Solution. Make Shared Parenting LAW where NO child support is paid. The parents each get 50-50 custody requiring each parent to pay for the child when with them. FORCE "alleged" Domestic Violence cases into criminal courts where PROOF must be shown and custody stripped of False Accusers. This is the literature currently inserted into every Shared Parenting Bill in which bias usually occurs and False allegations made to take Fathers out of the picture and reduce him to a wallet. The reason support orders are initially set high is because the Feds push States ( and Judges ) to make them high for a better reimbursement rate of 2-1. This ensures the Judge and the State get a cut of the man's income before its passed to yet more State initiatives such as yet more Domestic Violence shelters in which only women can use. These shelters encourage more divorcing moms to make yet another false allegation to get custody and.........more child support.

That's right. Making 50-50 shared parenting the law would get rid of the vast majority of child custody trials and other family court disputes.

What would likely happen is that many dads would pay the moms to take the kids 5+ days a week, thru a voluntary negotiation. Even if the result turned out to be identical to what a court might order, I would still say that it would be better because the parents would be in control of their own lives. I would likewise say that it is better for salaries to be negotiated between employers and employees, rather than dictated by government bureaucrats and formulas.

However I do not see any politicians on the right side of this issue. Maybe Hillary Clinton will be elected President, and the Democrats will be more clearly the mommy-socialist-dependency party.

Here are some sensible letters to the WSJ:

Involved Fathers’ Rights Are Poorly Protected in Divorce
State divorce laws should mandate that family-court judges divide physical custody time 50/50.

Regarding the article “Fathers Seek Parity in Custody Cases” (U.S. News, April 17), opponents of 50/50 physical custody of children invariably trot out the old argument that shared custody works only for parents who can cooperate. As a veteran of a six-year child-custody battle, I’ve learned that it is the litigation itself that causes friction between parents. Parents demonize each other to win custody, which causes them to mistrust each other, and the downward spiral begins. In addition, as a legal strategy, whichever parent begins with the upper hand in the legal proceedings has an incentive to not get along with the other parent. That way, he or she can tell the judge: “Your honor, we don’t get along; therefore sharing custody won’t work.” If we had a legal presumption of 50/50 physical custody, suddenly there would be nothing to fight over and most separated parents would cooperate well.

[name omitted]
Santa Fe, N.M.

Our 50-state divorce-court system isn’t designed for judges to force negotiated settlements that are arrived at and honored by both parents. It isn’t uncommon for American fathers to undergo financial ruin, emotional fatigue and physical collapse through time-consuming litigation. The money I was forced to burn up in litigation would have been better spent on my children’s college educations. Absent overriding fact-specific considerations in individual cases, state divorce laws should mandate that family-court judges divide physical custody time 50/50 to allow fathers the ability to exercise a more active and permanent role in their children’s lives. But that isn’t enough. State divorce laws need to be amended to force the parties to pay their own attorneys’ fees and litigation expenses. The laws should impose severe financial sanctions on attorneys and parties filing meritless post-dissolution motions. The laws also need to be amended so that both parents share in the equal financial responsibility of raising their children.

Alan Jay Koshner
St. Louis

Yes, 50/50 physical custody of children is all the more important if the parents disagree. Then neither can force decisions on the other.

The original WSJ article is behind a paywall, but is mirrored here and here.

Defending child support enforcement

C-SPAN TV had a program in child support enforcement, and you can watch the video online.

The guest defends the enforcement processes. Many callers complain about some of the problems.

From an opinion cited yesterday:

The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement itself has said that “the average incarcerated parent with a child support case has $10,000 in arrears when entering state prison, and leaves with $20,000 in arrears. Not only is this debt unlikely to ever be collected, but it adds to the barriers formerly incarcerated parents face in reentering their communities.”

Just scanning comments on this subject, there is a distressingly large number of people who accept the principle that the system should extract as much money as possible from the dad, but no more. Those who favor less punitive measures usually just make the argument they would extract more money.

And there are a distressing number of man-haters who are happy to punish the man. They say he won't produce more illegitimate kids while in jail.

I once an interview of a college president who argued that the colleges should be able to extract as much money as possible from the parents of students. Well, she did not phrase it that way, but she strenuously argued that it was unjust that a student might attend a different college because he got a better financial deal. She wanted the colleges to have an exemption from anti-trust law so that they could collude in price-fixing tuition, and prevent students from shopping around different colleges.

Obamacare is also based on using income information to extract as much money as you can be reasonably expected to pay for pre-paid medical care.

And taxation schemes are usually designed to extract as much money as possible

We are told that what we pay for college or medical care has very little to do with actual costs. And child support is designed to have almost nothing to do with child costs.

I don't agree with any of this. Colleges and medical providers should have to compete. A man should have the choice of paying child support or taking care of the kid himself.

Followups on child support and parents rights

I cited a law professor saying that Free Range Parenting is a Constitutional Right. Now he admits that, as a practical matter, it is nearly impossible for parents to assert those constitutional rights.

I posted last year Old Iowa man charged with raping his wife because prosecuted said that her dementia was bad enuf to prevent her from legally consenting. Now he has been acquitted of all charges in a jury trial. Remember that whenever someone tells you that the jury system is obsolete. Sometimes the jurors are the only ones in the justice system with any common sense.

I posted about a proposed California vaccine law, and now:

Vaccine laws across the nation may be toughened, observers say, if California passes a fervently debated bill that would strip parents' rights to exempt kids from immunizations based on personal beliefs.

A potential end to California's opt-out provision gained ground Wednesday when the state senate's education committee voted 7-2 to require full vaccinations for almost all public school students. ...

But some experts see California as the most potent social and medical laboratory, the state where such legislative action could create national waves. ...

That's a roadmap that worries some parents like Shtein, who describes herself not as anti-vaccination but as "pro-health" with deep concerns about any government dictating any child's vaccination schedule.

And she believes the momentum from California, should the bill become law, could color future immunization laws for Americans of all ages.

The ACLU is against it because:

If the bill passes, vaccine-resistant parents will have to home-school their children.

They are left-wingers who are probably against home-schooling. I would rather oppose the law on the grounds that parents should have the right to direct the medical care of their kids. The measles outbreak was caused by Filipinos visiting Disneyland, so it would make more sense to vaccinate Filipinos visiting Disneyland.

I have posted about kids arrested for walking home unsupervised, and the usual response is that kids did this a generation ago, but the world is more dangerous today. A Wash. Post article debunks this notion:

The first thing to note is that the overall child mortality rate in the United States has literally never been lower. In 1935, for instance, there were nearly 450 deaths for every 100,000 children aged 1 to 4. Today, there are fewer than 30 deaths for every 100,000 kids in that age group -- more than a tenfold decrease. ...

Part of that decline is a drop in child homicides. As of 2008, the homicide rate for kids under the age of 14 stood at a near-record low 1.5 cases per 100,000, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And the homicide rate for teens ages 14 to 17 plummeted from 12 homicides per 100,000 in 1993 to just 5.1 in 2008, another near-record low.

Long story short: for a kid between the ages of 5 and 14 today, the chances of premature death by any means are roughly 1 in 10,000, or 0.01 percent. ...

The FBI has several decades of data on missing persons now, and those numbers show that the number of missing person reports involving minors has been at record low levels in recent years. Overall, the number of these reports have fallen by 40 percent since 1997. This is more impressive when you consider that the overall U.S. population has risen by 30 percent over that same time period, meaning that the actual rate of missing person reports for children has fallen faster than 40 percent. ...

Data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that between 1993 and 2013, the number of child pedestrians struck and killed by cars fell by more than two-thirds, from more than 800 deaths to fewer than 250. The number of traffic-related pedestrian injuries in this age group fell by a similar percentage over the same period. Again these are raw numbers, and as the population has grown over that period, the actual rate has fallen even faster.

So being a child is safer than ever before, whether at home or in public.

I posted Idaho against federalized child support, and a week later the NY Times got excited about it:

It took five years for negotiators to work out the details of a multinational treaty on child support that would make it easier to track delinquent parents around the world. It took only a couple of minutes for a committee of the Idaho Legislature to endanger America’s participation.

In a 9-to-8 vote in the closing hours of the legislative session, the House Judiciary, Rules and Administration Committee killed a bill that state and federal officials had said was crucial to the finely crafted choreography of the child support treaty reached at The Hague. All 50 states must approve the mechanics of the treaty for American ratification to proceed, and 19 have signed off thus far.

A major factor seems to be Idaho’s ornery streak, the part of the state’s identity that does not like the federal government — or, worse still, foreign governments — telling it what to do.

Idaho's action would make more sense if foreign countries were imposing onerous child support orders. But the USA is by far the worst country in the world, as documented by this draft book: Real World Divorce. It has a wealth of info about differing state child support laws.

Most people think that child support is purely a matter of state law, but this story shows how federal policy and money drives much of what the states do. See this article for more detail. Here is the official federal and Idaho sides to the story.

It is true that some legislators expressed concern about foreign countries imposing onerous child support orders, but what Idaho really did was to resist the United States government imposing onerous child support rules and regulations on Idaho -- even though the government's position is that no state can operate its own child support system (or enforce its own child support orders) without the supervision and assistance of the federal child support agency.

So now, the federal agency is threatening to exclude Idaho from the entire system unless Idaho passes this bill. This proves that the whole child support system is controlled and managed by the federal government under rules passed by Congress, and states have no significant discretion to vary those required rules and procedures.

THere is more fallout in Idaho on Allgov.com and Idaho TV.

I posted on Why Scott was running from the police, and 11 days later the NY Times said similar things in a front page story titled Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat. It was sympathetic to the black man who was killed while in child support arrears. I guess the liberal NY whites can side with a dad if he is a black fugitive in the South, and his problems can be blamed on white people. The article drew over 1000 comments, and an editorial opinion debate.

The NY Times calls it a debate, but all the debaters are in favor of extracting more money from dads and giving it to moms.

Most of the comments agree that the child support system has many inequities that should be reformed. But there are a distressing number of comments that say that there should be no limits to the punitive measures imposed on deadbeat dads. Here is one of those solicited debate opinions:

As a single mother who has raised a child with virtually no assistance from the biological father, I feel strongly that child support enforcement measures are not strong enough. ...

He is one of many parents who avoid child support obligations, by working under the table jobs such as yard work, or by obtaining fake Social Security numbers to work under a different identity, or by dealing drugs. Many of these individuals may already have criminal records that may act as very real barriers in obtaining legitimate employment. But this does not mean that they should be absolved of their responsibility to their children. ...

A noncustodial parent's financial hardship should not absolve them of responsibilities to the children who they choose to create. The custodial parent often has an even harder time.

So she had a kid with a criminal drug-dealer who cannot get a legitimate job, and she complains about the child he chose to create? And his lack of money should not be any excuse for his lack of money?!

Unfortunately these dopey single mom opinions intimidate politicians against doing anything to solve the problem. Unless you agree that women have an unrestricted right to choose an abortion at any time and for any reason, and to choose to have sex with any man at any time, and to freeload off welfare, and to cut the dad off from even seeing his kid, then you are part of the war on women. And if the man does not want to spend all his money on the child he supposedly chose to create, then no punishment is too severe.

This country is doomed.

Idaho against federalized child support

Idaho is threatening to opt out of federal child support enforcement:

An Idaho House panel voted 9-8 on Friday to kill legislation to bring the state into compliance with federal child-support collection rules after some lawmakers said they were concerned about Sharia law influencing Idaho's enforcement authority.

Idaho child support program director Kandace Yearsley said the committee's decision has placed Idaho at risk of losing nearly $46 million in federal child-support funding as well as access to the federal enforcement tools used to collect child-support payments from parents living in other states.

But some members of the House committee said they were concerned the bill was tied to an international convention regarding cross-border recovery of child-support payments. Rep. Heather Scott and Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll, both Republicans, said they feared the bill could force Idaho to enforce child-support rulings made under Islamic law or foreign tribunals.

"There is no specific language in the bill that would protect the rights of those dealing with parentage, child support and support orders from a foreign country that would contradict our laws here," Nuxoll said, adding she would change her vote on the bill to "no" if she could. "There are other countries listed in the treaty —France, Belgium— that have recognized sharia courts as quasi-courts. So I just feel that you should be aware of those facts."

Also here:

Idaho Health and Welfare Department officials plan to meet with U.S. Health and Human Services representatives this week. They expect to have 60 days to find a solution from that point.

"This is a new experience for Idaho," the department said in a statement Monday. "We have been told the federal support for Idaho's Child Support Program will end if Idaho is not in compliance."

Without federal tools, parents who are owed child-support payments will have no means to receive them. Idaho uses federal programs to process child support payments.

About 80 percent of payments are taken from paychecks, but noncompliance would prevent Idaho from making such collections.

There are about 50 things wrong with American child support, and the possibility of enforcement relating to Sharia law is way down at the bottom of the list. Eg, Walter Scott being shot by a cop. Millions of people get screwed by it, and no one cares.

Sharia law? Are they joking? I understand not wanting to comply with Sharia law, but I am not sure they even have child support.

This news item demonstrates that the federal government provides most of the funding for child support collection agents in every state and county. These bureaucrats are nominally employed by state and county government, but their budgets are funded by the federal government, under uniform rules passed by Congress and administered by a federal agency.

Why Scott was running from the police

The race-baiting leftist news media finally have a story of a white cop unjustifiably shooting a black man. The cop has been fired and is likely to be charged with murder, so the system seems to be working. I doubt that the story will stay in the news, because it does not fit the narrative.

People are saying that the video exposed the cop, but he might have been charged anyway. The autopsy will show that the cop shot Scott in the back at a distance. It is hard to justify that.

But why was the black man running? What crime had he committed that made him so afraid of the cops after being pulled over for a broken tail light?

He was afraid of being jailed for unpaid child support.

Philip Greenspun writes:

Four children lost their father and a woman lost her companion when Walter Lamer Scott was shot on April 4. The Wikipedia article on Mr. Scott notes that he had been repeatedly arrested for failure to pay child support. News articles linked to by the Wikipedia posting indicate that Scott was running away from the police officer who murdered him due to fears about being incarcerated for being behind on child support.

How common is it for an American to be on the wrong side of the law due to our child support system and how realistic were Scott’s fears? The “Post-Divorce Litigation” chapter of our book cites some statistics indicating that roughly 1 in 7 men who are ordered to pay child support will eventually be imprisoned. As they are being imprisoned for contempt of court rather than a criminal offense they are not entitled to an attorney nor do they enjoy a presumption of innocence.

The media coverage of the event stresses the fact that Mr. Scott was in conflict with the police due to his skin color. Yet they could equally have stressed that he was in conflict with our justice system due to the fact that he had children and, for whatever reason, was not living with their custodial parent(s).

This was a sad event, obviously, but I am not sure that it must be interpreted as a black-white event.

I do not agree with jailing anyone for a debt, or taking away licenses. That latter idea has spread to student loans:

In 22 states, defaulters can have the professional licenses they need to do their jobs suspended or revoked if they fall behind in their student loan payments, licenses for things like nursing or engineering. The percentage of Americans defaulting on their student loans has more than doubled since 2003.

If you lose a judgment over a debt, your wages can be attached. That ought to be enuf.

Update: This suggests that Scott fired the taser at the cop. If so, then the cop is not as guilty as everyone thinks.

Update: The NY Times has finally picked up this story on its April 20 front page, and gotten 1000 comments.

What's wrong with American child support

Philip Greenspun writes:

I am part of a team of five authors that has researched divorce laws and customs in the 51 jurisdictions nationwide. For our forthcoming book we have interviewed roughly 100 divorce litigations nationwide as well as in nearly 10 foreign jurisdictions. We have also interviewed research psychologists, retired judges, and legislators.

We found that the U.S. was unique worldwide. We seem to be the only country where simultaneously (1) obtaining custody of a child can produce more cash than going to college and working at the average college graduate wage and (2) custody of a child is up for grabs and therefore open to litigation. In other countries either the maximum child support obtainable will cover only basic expenses, e.g., $2,000 to $8,000 per year in Scandinavia, or there are strong presumptions regarding how a custody dispute will be resolved, e.g., “mom always wins” or “children’s time split 50/50.” The result is that, as a society, we expose our children to far more custody litigation than any other country in the world. In addition to the psychic toll, this costs us close to $50 billion in cash every year and consumes additional public resources for investigating litigation-motivated claims that a custody defendant is a molester, prosecuting and imprisoning parents who don’t pay child support ordered, etc. ...

The incentives are simplest to understand in a state such as Wisconsin, where custody of one child entitles the winner to 17 percent of the loser parent’s pre-tax income (about 33 percent of after-tax income). This means that the person who has a one-night sexual encounter with a surgeon will have one third of a surgeon’s spending power. If that person has a second child with a different surgeon, as predicted by the Danish study above, he or she will now have two thirds of a surgeon’s spending power. If the child support recipient then has a third child with a third surgeon, he or she will have the same spending power as a surgeon. Politicians tell Americans to study STEM subjects and work hard in college, but a thoughtful child support plaintiff can enjoy a comparable spending power without ever attending college, working, or paying income tax. ...

The incentives are simplest to understand in a state such as Wisconsin, where custody of one child entitles the winner to 17 percent of the loser parent’s pre-tax income (about 33 percent of after-tax income). This means that the person who has a one-night sexual encounter with a surgeon will have one third of a surgeon’s spending power. If that person has a second child with a different surgeon, as predicted by the Danish study above, he or she will now have two thirds of a surgeon’s spending power. If the child support recipient then has a third child with a third surgeon, he or she will have the same spending power as a surgeon. Politicians tell Americans to study STEM subjects and work hard in college, but a thoughtful child support plaintiff can enjoy a comparable spending power without ever attending college, working, or paying income tax.

I don't know if anyone is listening to him, but he clearly explains some of the problems with the current system.

Dalrock writes:

Child support, far more than no fault divorce, abortion, and contraception, is the legal force which underpins modern feminism. Child support is the solution to shotgun weddings, unhappy marriages, and strong husbands & fathers. No fault divorce is designed not just to destroy families, but to weaken husbands in all marriages. However child support is the economic arm which makes divorce an attractive option for wives, and therefore makes divorce a credible threat when there are children involved. Child support is also the incentive which makes it more attractive for single mothers to remain single than to marry the father.

He blames conservatives for not recognizing this.

Greenspun is a private pilot and has some sensible comments about the recent German pilot crashing plane, but in the middle of it he says:

Thus my layperson’s perspective is that pilots tend to be reliable, patient, and sober/drug-free. There is one big exception, however: divorce, custody, and child support. Pilots are away from home 10-22 days/month. Suppose the stay-at-home spouse decides he or she is bored and needs to have a lover. If the stay-at-home spouse progresses to the plaintiff stage, most U.S. states will reward that spouse with the house, the children, and at least half of the pilot’s income going forward. The cash and the house go with the kids. The pilot is the slam-dunk loser for any custody lawsuit because he or she was away much of the month and therefore cannot meet the “historical primary caregiver” standard that is used when courts allocate children and the child support profits that accompany them. “Suing a pilot is almost as easy as suing someone deployed overseas in the military,” is how one litigator put it. ...

Thus my layperson’s perspective is that pilots tend to be reliable, patient, and sober/drug-free. There is one big exception, however: divorce, custody, and child support. Pilots are away from home 10-22 days/month. Suppose the stay-at-home spouse decides he or she is bored and needs to have a lover. If the stay-at-home spouse progresses to the plaintiff stage, most U.S. states will reward that spouse with the house, the children, and at least half of the pilot’s income going forward. The cash and the house go with the kids. The pilot is the slam-dunk loser for any custody lawsuit because he or she was away much of the month and therefore cannot meet the “historical primary caregiver” standard that is used when courts allocate children and the child support profits that accompany them. “Suing a pilot is almost as easy as suing someone deployed overseas in the military,” is how one litigator put it.

I would rather fix the family court, of course, but it is increasingly obvious that the family court is not going to get fixed.

Suing for alimony 20 years after their divorce

London Telegraph reports:

The ex-wife of a former new-age traveller who later became multi-millionaire wind farm entrepreneur has been told she can bring a claim for financial support from his fortune more than 30 years after their marriage broke down.

Dale Vince, owner of the green energy provider Ecotricity, described the Supreme Court ruling as “mad” and said it would leave people “looking over our shoulders” for decades in case a former partner came after them for a share of money they made later in life.

Divorce lawyers described the ruling in favour of Kathleen Wyatt as “unprecedented” and said it meant spouses could keep their options open “indefinitely” before staking a claim.

The foolishness of this is explained here, if it is necessary.

More comments on child support article

Yesterday's WSJ child support essay drew some comments on another blog:

I have to agree with Obama on this one. The idea of child support is archaic. It hearkens back to a time when it was assumed that people didn’t have sex until after they were married, and if it happened before marriage it was assumed that the man scammed the woman into doing something she didn’t want to do. Child support, perhaps, was seen as punishment for doing something immoral and then not getting married.

The blogger is a very class-conscious Jewish Republican.

Other comments:

If the parents have joint custody, which should be the norm unless one parent is unfit, there should not be child support. Each parent supports the children when they are living with him/her. If one parent has sole custody, the other one should pay child support. People do have a moral obligation to take care of their children.

Why does a man have a moral obligation to “support a child” the other ripped away from his care with a unilateral divorce?

Do men have a moral obligation to take care of a child they never wanted? Women don’t.

I agree with most of that.

I have to thoroughly disagree with any policy that makes the United States more like a Black ghetto hellhole. I don’t want to live in a world where non-Blacks have the incentive to live like Blacks. In fact, if such legislation were passed in all majority-White countries, I would have to seriously consider living among different race peoples. ...

This article genuinely made me angry.

We are reaching end-game of alpha-fucks, beta-bucks, and even the government is in on it.

Due to the ever diminishing integrity of our country and rule-of-law, the government is giving up on trying to extract money from alphas to pay for their children, so instead they double down on the low hanging fruit – beta bucks. ...

A woman needs child support like a fish needs a bicycle.

Live by your own standards, bitches. ...

Philp Greenspun’s blog (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/) is mostly about the U.S child support system, and he has me convinced that the system is both insane and evil (and he has collected alot of data on the subject). Essentially its evolved to yet another way to reward system gamers.

Its probably impossible to enforce child support in a way to ensure the money is actually spent on the child (there is now no requirement to do this at all, and the money is often not spent on the child), but it should be a flat rate per child calculated off of the poverty rate. If the custodial parent effectively denies visitation rights to the paying parent (such as by moving out of the area), then the obligation should be suspended. I’m actually fine with just automatically awarding custody to the women and support obligations to the man, unless the woman is in jail, crazy, otherwise incapacitated, or waives, mainly to avoid the nasty custody battles, though capping child support at a fixed amount would accomplish alot of this anyway.

Women are no longer disadvantaged in the labor market, at worst it is harder for women to get really high level jobs (but the studies show it is easier for them to get entry level jobs), so alimony should no longer exist.

There are many things wrong with the current system. They are just scratching the surface.

Update: Just to be clear, I am quoting the comments of others. I regard them as only partial understandings of what is wrong with child support. I will post on Greenspun separately.

Obama getting soft on dead-beat dads

I have been criticizing Pres. Obama for many things, but here is something where he is not as bad as the Republicans, as there is bipartisan agreement to screw dead-beat dads as much as possible.

The Wall Street Journal has left-wing reporters and right-wing editorial, and here is an op-ed opinion. I am quoting it in full, as it is behind a paywall:

Making It Easier to Skip Paying Child Support
The Obama administration seems more focused on absent parents’ interests than on their children’s welfare.
By Robert Doar
March 9, 2015 7:20 p.m. ET

With little public attention, the Obama administration has been changing America’s child-support enforcement. The most recent Census Bureau report found that in 2011 fewer than 50% of single mothers had child-support orders — down from almost 60% in 2003. At least part of this decline reflects the administration’s shifting the focus from helping single parents with children toward helping absent parents who say they can’t afford payments. This is good news for delinquents, but bad news for children already coping with not having two parents at home.

Making absent parents (usually fathers) provide financial help for their children used to have bipartisan support and plenty of media attention. Begun in 1975 and strengthened by the 1996 welfare reform, child-support enforcement is one of the few antipoverty programs that stresses personal responsibility over government dependency. State child-support enforcement agencies — with federal funding — use wage garnishments and other techniques to hold absent parents responsible for contributing financially to the care of their children.

Reimbursing the government for welfare payments to poor single mothers used to be a primary goal. But increasingly the program has shifted from “cost recovery” to distributing the vast majority of collections to families. In 2013, 95% of the $28 billion collected was distributed to custodial parents to help pay for the daily needs of their children and to reduce their need for government assistance. For such families living below the poverty line who receive child support, the income from collections averages 45% of their family income. These numbers make child-support enforcement arguably the most cost-effective antipoverty program, collecting more than $5 for every $1 of administrative cost.

Despite its success, the program has always had critics. In the past especially, orders for monthly child support were often out of line with what some low-income parents could be reasonably expected to pay. Arrearage balances could grow so high that they condemned parents to a lifetime of debt.

Over the years, however, much progress has been made in addressing these problems. Child-support programs have found ways to reduce arrears and to “right size” payment amounts for noncustodial parents who were willing to accept responsibility but had no way of paying excessive arrears or payments. This evolution has not been fast enough for the Obama administration, which is why it has diluted the focus on personal responsibility by emphasizing “arrears forgiveness,” and “discretionary enforcement,” for absent parents.

This also may be why the administration has proposed a major update of federal regulations governing the program—without seeking congressional approval. The administration is expected to announce the final rule this summer, when states will need to comply or face possible sanctions from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Some of the proposed changes are positive. One provision would let state child-support programs use federal child-support funding to implement job-training programs for some of the unemployed parents from whom they are trying to collect. Washington used to tell states not to use child-support funding for jobs programs. The Obama administration has decided to change that.

Other changes are problematic and reflect the administration’s ambivalence about a program that once operated on the principle that paying child support should be like death and taxes—something that cannot be escaped. Federal regulations discouraged child-support programs from categorizing cases as “uncollectable.” The administration’s changes will make it easier to give up on such cases. Since states can earn additional federal funds if their collection rate increases, one way to collect more on a per-case basis is to close the hardest cases. Now states would have an incentive to do so.

Other new provisions would limit the agency’s ability to determine the income of delinquent parents. Some people will go to great lengths to hide, or avoid earning, income that could be used to pay child support. The ability to ask a court to consider what the absent parent could be making, or appears to be making based on his standard of living, gives the authorities a stronger hand with evaders.

Authorities used to have help in this effort under a provision of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which requires single applicants for cash welfare payments to participate in court and administrative proceedings to establish child-support orders. Since the late 1990s, however, the number of TANF recipients has declined dramatically as poor single mothers went to work and sought assistance from other government programs (food stamps, Medicaid, housing help). While some advocates have suggested imposing the child-support requirement on recipients of these other, non-TANF forms of assistance, the administration has shown no interest.

In the past, President Obama has emphasized parental responsibility and the important roles that fathers play in their children’s lives. As White House officials conduct their final review of the proposed new child-support regulations, they would be wise to make the final product match the president’s rhetoric.

Mr. Doar is the Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He served as the New York state Child Support Enforcement director from 1995 to 2000.

The proposed changes are here. Comments were accepted through Jan. 16, 2015.

No, I do not agree with taking away a man's drivers license in order to extract welfare reimbursements. I guess the Democrats like it because it expands the welfare systems, and breeds losers who vote Democrat, and the Republicans like it because it punishes deadbeats and is not considered a tax.

I question whether any man should ever have to pay for a child that he has no say in rearing. I think that the whole system is immoral, because all the incentives are wrong.

Most hateful quotes of 2014

AVFM has a long list, starting:

1. Amanda Childress, sexual assault awareness program coordinator at Dartmouth College, declared that campus policies aren’t going far enough to protect students. She asked, “Why could we not expel a student based on an allegation?” Dartmouth defended Childress’s comment, noting that she “was asking a question—a provocative one—meant to generate dialogue around complex issues….”

2. Ms. Magazine quoted Caroline Heldman, a professor at Occidental College, on suits filed by men for alleged violations of their due process rights in connection with sexual assault claims: “These lawsuits are an incredible display of entitlement, the same entitlement that drove them to rape.”

3. California’s new “affirmative consent” law requires “affirmative” consent at each step of a sexual encounter on its college campuses. The co-author of the bill in the state assembly, Bonnie Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), was asked how an innocent person is supposed to prove consent. She said, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

There is much more. This was a year of GamerGate, of the press announcing that Hillary Clinton will be the next President, of a UVa frat party hoax being taken seriously, of a NYC subway campaign against manspreading, of the President, Attorney General, and NYC Mayor encouraging blacks to riot and kill cops, and many others. The Democrat Party has become the hate-white-men party.

Here was the most hateful story:

Over at 28 Sherman, SoBL has links to all 106 New York Times articles referencing “Michael Brown” that the Newspaper of Record published just from August 10 to August 30. That’s five per day!

As you’ll recall, the Myth of Michael Brown collapsed in mid-August due to two revelations. On August 15, the convenience store video appeared showing gentle giant Michael Brown violently shoving the poor little Asian store clerk who tried to stop him from stealing. Then two days later, the Brown family’s privately-hired coroner announced Brown wasn’t shot in the back. His wounds were fairly consistent with the cop’s story.

A black thug robbed a convenience story, got stopped by a cop, and then tried to kill the cop. The cop gave him every chance to stop, but he kept charging a cop with a loaded gun pointed straight at him.

Then Barack Obama and the America-haters at the NY Times and else decided to keep Ferguson Mo in the news until election day, in order to get more blacks to vote. Obama himself issued public statements about how racist white cops are to blame, and that black riots are understandable.

NPR Radio reports:

Eger, a retired police officer who is now a professor at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, Calif., found that nationwide about 40 percent of people whose licenses are suspended lose them for reasons other than bad driving.

It all started with laws passed by Congress in the late 1980s. First, a law took away the driver's license of men who didn't pay child support. Then came one for people caught with drugs. ...

"Driving is a privilege, and if you're not willing to support your children and [you] expect society to do it," she says, "then you should lose the privilege of driving."

But you do get that privilege if you are an illegal alien:

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is bracing for a massive increase in demand when it begins issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants starting Jan. 2.

The agency has hired close to 900 new workers, expanded its hours and opened four new field offices in order to deal with the more than 1 million applications that are expected from illegals.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation authorizing the change in October 2013, and since then, state officials have been urging residents who are illegally in the country to apply for driver’s licenses.

That's right, illegal aliens now have more rights that dads behind on child support. I hate to even call it "child support", because no law requires that the money be spent on the kids.

Parents still ordered to pay for college

I posted about the Divorced parents have to pay college tuition. Now there is an update:

THE 21-year-old student suing her estranged parents for university fees was back in court this week claiming they should be held in contempt because they refuse to pay.

Caitlyn Ricci filed a motion on Monday arguing that her parents, Michael Ricci and Maura McGarvey, violated a judge’s previous decision by failing to pay her $US16,000 ($19,200) tuition at Temple University, Philadelphia.

Ricci’s father said he has no intention of paying until his daughter reconnects with the New Jersey family. Ricci hasn’t spoken with her parents for two years.

“That’s fine. They can hold me in contempt of court. They can do whatever they want,” Mr Ricci told US TV station WPVI-TV. “I’m not going to pay. I’m not going to give them any money until my daughter has a relationship with me and we start to heal our family.”

Here is the dad's story (also here):

Most nights before I fall asleep, I have tears in my eyes thinking about the difficulty my family is going through. My daughter is suing her mother and me for $16,000 towards college tuition, and a judge has ruled in her favor. My daughter moved out, and I only ever see her in court. It’s certainly not what I wanted for my family.

Every day I wake up and miss my daughter. I miss talking to her, seeing her, asking her about her day, and being involved in her life. I understand that after she was kicked out of her Disney internship, a program she participated in to help prepare for college, she was upset and angry at the rules her mother and I set for her. She was kicked out of the program for underage drinking, and so we had to set boundaries. That included chores, a curfew, and summer classes. When Caitlyn left our home in February 2013, to go to her grandparents, we thought we’d let her go for a couple days and then she would come home. When we called her grandparents to ask that they send her home, they said, “No, she can stay here as long as she wants.” That’s when we knew we had problems.

There is a mindset that says that college is such a good thing that it is worth any cost, and parents should make any sacrifice for the good of the kids, and therefore should do whatever it takes to pay for college. This view is very destructive. There are decent alternatives. The girl can get college loans, she can attend a cheap community college, she can work to support herself, and she can reconcile with her parents.

Here is another attack on parents:

A tattooed-up Brooklyn middle school teacher with a criminal record left her three kids home alone so she could get ink — and then went on a whiskey-drinking binge at a Lower East Side bar until Thursday morning, according to police sources and social media.

Laura Aguero, 35, who works at M.S. 88 in Park Slope, and her husband, Alfredo Bobe,41, allegedly left their 4,5, and 12 year old kids by themselves while she got tatted up at Inborn Tattoo in the Lower East Side on Wednesday night, according to police sources and posts on Facebook.

“I’m getting tatted on ludlow (Inborn) so I’ll stop by to have a drink!!! Xoxo!” she wrote on Local 138 bar’s “Whiskey Wednesday” event page at 10:32 p.m.on Wednesday. ...

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said, “While this alleged behavior is not school-related, it is unacceptable. Ms. Aguero Dupla has been reassigned away from any classroom, and will not be in contact with students.

Sounds wacky to me, but I guess tattoos and whiskey make for a good time for others.

But now it is criminal:

However, he didn't have his keys, so he punched out a glass panel on the front door.

The shattering glass woke up neighbors who called 911, the New York Daily News reports.

Police arrived to Aguero pacing outside the building while Bobe was inside the apartment.

The couple was arrested for after police learned the kids had been left home alone for hours, according to WPIX-TV.

Aguero-Dupla was charged with three counts of endangering the welfare of a child, while Bobe was charged with acting in a manner injurious to a child.

I assume the "three counts" is for the 3 kids. But millions of parents think that it is perfectly fine for a 12yo child to babysit 4yo and 5yo kids. Who was endangered? Maybe you think that a middle-school teacher should not have an evening of tattoos and whiskey, and I might even agree with that, but we have a society where that is legal and acceptable.