The effects of divorce on kids are now so well documented, significantly more couples separating today are opting for “equal shared parenting” – voluntary custody arrangements in which the children live with each parent roughly half the time, says Kruk. While a landmark federal study, For the Sake of the Children, recommended that approach back in 1998 and it has since been adopted by other countries, including Australia, it’s still rarely used by Canadian judges and needs to be made law, except where there are extenuating circumstances, such as domestic violence or mental health issues that make one parent unfit, says Kruk.
Sole custody harms kids: Report
Children “robbed of love” in divorce cases
by Susan Pigg
Family court judges are misguidedly harming children by granting sole custody to one parent – usually the mother – in bitter divorce battles, says a comprehensive new report.Too many children are being “robbed of the love of one parent” by a legal system that is out of touch with the needs of children and treats them like property to be won or lost, says Edward Kruk, an expert on child custody issues.
“The system is set up to polarize parents, to make them enemies, to set up fights over custody and exacerbate conflict rather than reduce it,” says Kruk, an associate professor of social work at the University of British Columbia, whose three-year study is now in the hands of Canada’s justice minister.
He calls what’s happening in Canada’s divorce courts “a national shame” that leaves families bankrupt from legal fees and pushing parents, especially fathers, to suicide.
Especially devastating are the long-term effects of court orders that essentially cut one parent out of children’s lives – usually the dad – in a misguided effort to foster peace between warring parents, the report says.
Citing a host of North American studies, Kruk’s report points to the long-term dangers: Some 85 per cent of youth in prison are fatherless; 71 per cent of high school dropouts grew up without fathers, as did 90 per cent of runaway children. Fatherless youth are also more prone to depression, suicide, delinquency, promiscuity, drug abuse, behavioural problems and teen pregnancy, warns the 84-page report, a compilation of dozens of studies around divorce and custody, including some of his own research over the past 20 years.
“Parent-child bonds are formed through daily routines – preparing breakfast, taking the child to school, having dinner, getting ready for bed. Without that, it’s very difficult for parents to have any real connection with their kids,” Kruk said in a telephone interview from B.C. “It’s so destructive for children to have a loving parent removed from their lives.”
The effects of divorce on kids are now so well documented, significantly more couples separating today are opting for “equal shared parenting” – voluntary custody arrangements in which the children live with each parent roughly half the time, says Kruk. While a landmark federal study, For the Sake of the Children, recommended that approach back in 1998 and it has since been adopted by other countries, including Australia, it’s still rarely used by Canadian judges and needs to be made law, except where there are extenuating circumstances, such as domestic violence or mental health issues that make one parent unfit, says Kruk.
Instead, most judges still rely on a “winner takes all” approach in custody battles. In some three-quarters of cases, judges grant sole custody to mothers, believing that it’s impossible for warring parents to make shared custody work, Kruk’s report finds. That’s despite a growing body of research that shows animosity and even physical violence can increase “significantly0″ when one parent has sole control, says the report, Child Custody, Access and Parental Responsibility: The Search for a Just and Equitable Standard.
Even court-ordered “joint custody” is really a misnomer, Kruk’s report shows. In fact, the non-custodial parent – usually the father – ends up with just a few days a month (typically every second weekend and every Wednesday) with the children. While research shows even that minimal sharing of time actually forces warring parents to lay down their arms and work together on “parenting plans” that work best for each of them and their kids, says Kruk, it makes it far more difficult for the non-custodial parent to develop a strong bond with their kids.
Research has shown that women and men work comparable amounts of time outside the home and now devote almost the exact amount of time – 11.1 hours a week and 10.5 hours a week respectively – to child care, with men playing a key role in their children’s upbringing, says Kruk. Yet divorce lawyers openly tell fathers not to waste their time and money seeking equal custody, unless they can prove the mother is unfit.
All of which gives one parent a huge psychological advantage over the other, and incentive to fight to the death – in some cases actually alienating the kids from the other spouse – to win what comes to be seen as their “property,” says Kruk.
But there are signs even mothers are at risk, Kruk warns. He’s now studying 14 Vancouver-area women who have lost custody of their kids to their ex-husbands, in some cases because fathers argued that demanding careers kept the women away from home too much. Surprisingly, those women are now teaming up with fathers’ right groups to push for legislation making equal, shared parenting the norm.
“No court order can make people get along,” says Justice Harvey Brownstone who wrote the book Tug of War on divorce in Canada. He has seen cases over the past 14 years in which courts imposed shared parenting, only to have one parent refuse to take the child to his hockey game or administer medication as a way to make their viewpoint known to the ex-spouse.
“Parents who are hell-bent on undermining each other’s relationship with the child will inevitably find a way to create conflict, which most often results in further litigation, which in turn prolongs the child’s exposure to a parental tug of war.”
Source: http://coparenting101.org/2009/04/15/sole-custody-harms-kids-canadian-report/
Showing posts with label Edward Kruk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edward Kruk. Show all posts
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Shared Parenting: Child Custody, Access, and Parental Responsibility
The most recent research strongly supports a shift away from the "one size its all," "winner take all" sole custody framework toward the notion of shared parental responsibility.
Prof. Edward Kruk (Canada) has published a definitive paper on the merits and policy for shared parenting.
PDF copies are attached and the text of the summary is included in the box below.
The papter is entitled "Child Custody, Access, and Parental Responsibility: The Search for a Just and Equitable Standard", and was written by professor so social work Edward Kruk, M.S.W., Ph.D., at The University of British Columbia. It is published by Fatherhood Involvement Research Alliance (FIRA), December 2008.
He proposes a four-pillar approach to child custody determination:
1. Harm Reduction: A rebuttable legal presumption of joint physical custody after divorce
2. Treatment: Parenting plans, mediation and intervention / support in high conflict cases
3. Prevention: Shared parenting education and judicial determination in cases of established abuse, along with enforcement of shared parental responsibility orders
4. Enforcement: Judicially-determined arrangements in cases where family violence is a factor
The most recent research strongly supports a shift away from the "one size its all," "winner take all" sole custody framework toward the notion of shared parental responsibility.
The paper provides an empirical foundation for, and a step-by-step process, for implementation of an equal parenting bill.
The paper examines the issues, surveys approaches in UK, USA, Sweden and Australia, examines Canadian Child custody legislation at a provincial level, reviews Canadian efforts to make changes, and critiques the traditional sole custody approach as a basis leading up to the universal four-pillar approach for Equal Parenting.
The full paper, a summary and a Powerpoint presentation, can be download from the following URLs (and are attached below)
Prof. Edward Kruk (Canada) has published a definitive paper on the merits and policy for shared parenting.
PDF copies are attached and the text of the summary is included in the box below.
The papter is entitled "Child Custody, Access, and Parental Responsibility: The Search for a Just and Equitable Standard", and was written by professor so social work Edward Kruk, M.S.W., Ph.D., at The University of British Columbia. It is published by Fatherhood Involvement Research Alliance (FIRA), December 2008.
He proposes a four-pillar approach to child custody determination:
1. Harm Reduction: A rebuttable legal presumption of joint physical custody after divorce
2. Treatment: Parenting plans, mediation and intervention / support in high conflict cases
3. Prevention: Shared parenting education and judicial determination in cases of established abuse, along with enforcement of shared parental responsibility orders
4. Enforcement: Judicially-determined arrangements in cases where family violence is a factor
The most recent research strongly supports a shift away from the "one size its all," "winner take all" sole custody framework toward the notion of shared parental responsibility.
The paper provides an empirical foundation for, and a step-by-step process, for implementation of an equal parenting bill.
The paper examines the issues, surveys approaches in UK, USA, Sweden and Australia, examines Canadian Child custody legislation at a provincial level, reviews Canadian efforts to make changes, and critiques the traditional sole custody approach as a basis leading up to the universal four-pillar approach for Equal Parenting.
The full paper, a summary and a Powerpoint presentation, can be download from the following URLs (and are attached below)
Lorne Gunter: Promote equal parenting
Children who grow up without both parents in their lives are more prone to a whole host of social problems.
According to a three-year study done by Edward Kruk, an associate professor of social work at the University of British Columbia, 85% of young people in prison and youth detention are fatherless. This is a particularly important finding since, according to Statistics Canada, youth crime is the only category of crime that has been consistently increasing over the past decade. Nearly one-in-five young Canadians will have a run-in with the law — more than twice the percentage of adults — and most of them have no father in the home.
A combination of his own research and the findings of dozens of long-term studies of the effects of divorce on children, Professor Kruk’s study explains that 90% of runaways, as well as 71% of dropouts and majorities of depressed, suicidal, addicted and pregnant teens, grew up in father-absent homes.
It’s true: There are bad dads out there — men who abuse their wives or children, or both, or even just abandon them, disappearing entirely from their lives. But more often than not, father absence is the result of divorce, and, increasingly, of our legal system’s deliberate bias in favour of mothers and against fathers in custody awards.
Nearly 80% of custody awards in Canadian courts are made to mothers, and visitation rights are almost never enforced with the same enthusiasm as child support awards. Public officials are quick to condemn so-called deadbeat dads, passing laws to suspend their driver’s licenses and government cheques if they are behind on their payments to their exes. Yet mothers who deny visitation are almost never punished. No province, in practice, has penalties for access denial that match those for falling behind on support.
Federal judges and many appointed to provincial courts are required to take sensitivity training on women’s perspectives of and experiences with the justice system. No similar courses about men’s perceptions are required, because the (badly mistaken) belief within the system is that our laws and courts are stacked in favour of men.
Among all the examples of anti-male bias in our family law, two stand out. In the mid-1990s, then-justice minister Allan Rock changed Canadian law so that men could no longer deduct child support from their taxes, while women receiving support no longer had to pay taxes on that income. In other words, men are taxed on income they do not have, while women — who are the recipients and beneficiaries of the income — don’t pay.
Many judges in divorce cases initially “grossed up” or “grossed down” their support awards to compensate for this new upside-down tax arrangement, so the net effect was neutral. Still, the point of the change was to punish men because the bias within the federal justice department held that men were all heels and women all victims.
Over time, too, the initial neutrality has vanished (if men’s stories of their financial experiences after divorce are to be believed), forcing many divorced fathers into poverty, alienation from their children, depression and even suicide.
The other glaring example of anti-male bias comes from Justice Canada’s rejection of a 1998 recommendation by a joint Commons-Senate committee that all child custody awards in divorce cases start as 50-50 mother-father arrangements. Not only did the justice department ignore the suggestion of “equal parenting,” in 2001 arch-feminist civil servants conducted their own cross-country review in secret, inviting testimony only from those special interest “experts” who agreed with their jaded view of men.
According to the latest census figures, husbands and wives who both work outside the home now spend nearly equal time raising children. If, in divorce, one parent is given far more time than the other with the children, the kids suffer badly from the loss of affection and contact with the non-custodial parent, who is usually the father.
The best solution is for couples to work harder to avoid divorce. It is a modern myth that if the adults are happier after divorce, the children eventually will be, too. Divorce is hard on kids, period.
But given that divorce is unavoidable today, the Conservative government must heed Prof. Kruk’s finding and reconsider the concept of equal parenting when marriages fall apart.
National Post
lgunter@shaw.ca
According to a three-year study done by Edward Kruk, an associate professor of social work at the University of British Columbia, 85% of young people in prison and youth detention are fatherless. This is a particularly important finding since, according to Statistics Canada, youth crime is the only category of crime that has been consistently increasing over the past decade. Nearly one-in-five young Canadians will have a run-in with the law — more than twice the percentage of adults — and most of them have no father in the home.
A combination of his own research and the findings of dozens of long-term studies of the effects of divorce on children, Professor Kruk’s study explains that 90% of runaways, as well as 71% of dropouts and majorities of depressed, suicidal, addicted and pregnant teens, grew up in father-absent homes.
It’s true: There are bad dads out there — men who abuse their wives or children, or both, or even just abandon them, disappearing entirely from their lives. But more often than not, father absence is the result of divorce, and, increasingly, of our legal system’s deliberate bias in favour of mothers and against fathers in custody awards.
Nearly 80% of custody awards in Canadian courts are made to mothers, and visitation rights are almost never enforced with the same enthusiasm as child support awards. Public officials are quick to condemn so-called deadbeat dads, passing laws to suspend their driver’s licenses and government cheques if they are behind on their payments to their exes. Yet mothers who deny visitation are almost never punished. No province, in practice, has penalties for access denial that match those for falling behind on support.
Federal judges and many appointed to provincial courts are required to take sensitivity training on women’s perspectives of and experiences with the justice system. No similar courses about men’s perceptions are required, because the (badly mistaken) belief within the system is that our laws and courts are stacked in favour of men.
Among all the examples of anti-male bias in our family law, two stand out. In the mid-1990s, then-justice minister Allan Rock changed Canadian law so that men could no longer deduct child support from their taxes, while women receiving support no longer had to pay taxes on that income. In other words, men are taxed on income they do not have, while women — who are the recipients and beneficiaries of the income — don’t pay.
Many judges in divorce cases initially “grossed up” or “grossed down” their support awards to compensate for this new upside-down tax arrangement, so the net effect was neutral. Still, the point of the change was to punish men because the bias within the federal justice department held that men were all heels and women all victims.
Over time, too, the initial neutrality has vanished (if men’s stories of their financial experiences after divorce are to be believed), forcing many divorced fathers into poverty, alienation from their children, depression and even suicide.
The other glaring example of anti-male bias comes from Justice Canada’s rejection of a 1998 recommendation by a joint Commons-Senate committee that all child custody awards in divorce cases start as 50-50 mother-father arrangements. Not only did the justice department ignore the suggestion of “equal parenting,” in 2001 arch-feminist civil servants conducted their own cross-country review in secret, inviting testimony only from those special interest “experts” who agreed with their jaded view of men.
According to the latest census figures, husbands and wives who both work outside the home now spend nearly equal time raising children. If, in divorce, one parent is given far more time than the other with the children, the kids suffer badly from the loss of affection and contact with the non-custodial parent, who is usually the father.
The best solution is for couples to work harder to avoid divorce. It is a modern myth that if the adults are happier after divorce, the children eventually will be, too. Divorce is hard on kids, period.
But given that divorce is unavoidable today, the Conservative government must heed Prof. Kruk’s finding and reconsider the concept of equal parenting when marriages fall apart.
National Post
lgunter@shaw.ca
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