Money Money Money

Please Comment on this article;

Money Is More Important Than a Parent
By Don Hubin, Ph.D., Chair, Fathers and Families of Ohio Executive Committee

Don Hubin

Money is more important than a parent. We don’t express this view by our words, of course. But our actions scream it loudly.
Fathers and Families of Ohio is working with legislators to provide a fast, low-cost, effective way for nonresidential parents to have their court-ordered parenting time enforced. It is a scandal that we have a multi-billion dollar bureaucracy to enforce financial child support orders and, yet, we leave parents whose time with their children is denied on their own, with demonstrably ineffective, but very costly, mechanisms for protecting their relationship with their children.

Despite what we profess to believe, our legal rules and governmental institutions suggest that we believe that dollars are more important to children than parents. There's no other way to explain the shameful way we have ignored children's need for time with both parents when they are living apart. 

When parents violate court orders to support their children financially, we have a word for those parents. And we have more than words for them; we have a host of punishments to impose on them: wage garnishment, license suspension, passport denial, interception of tax refunds and workers’ compensation payments, and jail. There is little sympathy for a parent who has the capacity but not the willingness to support his or her children. But, when a parent violates court orders to allow the other parent his or her time with the children, we turn a blind eye. There is no popular derogatory term for such a parent. More importantly, there are no effective measures for dealing with such behavior.

It is not because the behavior is rare. Decades of research have confirmed that this is a common problem. One study found that “40% of mothers reported that they had interfered with the non-custodial father’s visitation on at least one occasion, to punish the ex-spouse.” And it’s not because non-custodial parents find such interference acceptable. A survey commissioned by the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services and released in 2002 indicated that 87% of child support obligors believe that enforcement of visitation rights (parenting time) is “very important” or “extremely important.” Officials from the Cuyahoga County’s Department of Justice Affairs said 8,941 people walked into their office in 2009 to seek help with visitation rights.

The Ohio Revised Code instructs courts, when determining custody, to take into account which “parent [is] more likely to honor and facilitate court-approved parenting time rights or visitation and companionship rights” and Ohio law indicates that it should count against a parent’s bid for custody that he or she has “continuously and willfully denied the other parent’s right to parenting time in accordance with an order of the court.”

But what if custody has already been established and a non-custodial parent finds his or her court-ordered time with the children unjustifiably interfered with? What remedy does Ohio law provide? Unlike with the enforcement of child support obligations, there are no administrative remedies; no agency of the government will help to ensure that children have access to their parents. The only legal remedy is to file a contempt motion. This is a time-consuming and very expensive process beyond the resources of many aggrieved parents.

This problem has not gone unnoticed. In 2001, the Ohio Task Force on Family Law and Children, appointed by the Supreme Court, made strong recommendations for measures to correct this oversight in Ohio law. In 2005, the Supreme Court Advisory Committee on Children, Families and the Courts reiterated the call for an effective solution to the problem. Fully a decade after these recommendations were first made, nothing has been done.

Nothing has been done by the Supreme Court Advisory Committee charged with implementing the recommendations of the Family Law Task Force. The issue is on the “to do” list of that committee, but it has been put on the back burner and the Committee does not expect even to discuss the issue for at least a year. Nothing has been done by the legislature. Perhaps the legislature is waiting for the Supreme Court Committee to address the issue once again. But this would be a mistake. The Supreme Court Advisory Committee is like the kid in Little League who calls the ball, but doesn’t make a move to catch it.

And it’s not just balls that are dropping. Since 2001, when the Task Force on Family Law identified this problem and recommended strong measures to correct it, approximately 200,000 couples with children have divorced; more than 350,000 children have been involved in these divorces. If, as in other states, 40% of Ohio custodial parents interfere with the other parent’s time with the children to “punish the ex-spouse,” that’s about 140,000 children who have been deprived of their time with one of their parents since the original recommendations were made. Each year we delay, another 14,000 children of divorce are subject to this illegal and indecent deprivation. And, that’s counting only the children of divorcing parents, not the tens of thousands a year whose parents were never married.

Fathers and Families of Ohio is working to promote the greater involvement of divorced and separated fathers in their children’s lives. That requires very significant changes in Ohio law and court practices. But, for a start, the legislature must step up to the plate and provide effective and efficient enforcement tools for parents, wrongfully denied their court-ordered time with their children. We are confident that, in fact, Ohioans believe that parents are even more important than money. We want our actions, and our laws, to speak this truth as loudly as do our words.