Last night a group of mothers met with me at Advice & Aid Pregnancy Center.  For about an hour I responded to their legal questions regarding their struggles in raising their babies under challenging circumstances.

One mom told how her husband will be deported to Guatemala in the fall.  He will leave her with their toddler and an expected newborn.  Another recounted how she had been molested by a family member.  A young mom told how she had been raped at the age of 14.

We talked about restraining orders, child support, disability benefits, and custody.  The women impressed me with their courage, strength, and devotion to their children.  I felt privileged to serve them.

Foster children who participate in their court proceedings gain a sense of control and ownership.  They may  better understand the process.  The court gains valuable insight by engaging youth in solving their own problems.

Yesterday I attended a presentation in Lawrence, Kansas by the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law .  Their Youth Empowerment Project tries to involve foster children more actively in their court proceedings.

Courts must consult with foster children according to the federal Child and Family Service Improvement Act of 2006.  In Kansas, foster children are recognized parties in their court proceedings.  Nonetheless, sometimes matters arise in court which could inappropriately disturb young children.

Children are required to attend their juvenile offender hearings.  In custody litigation, children usually do not attend their trials.  Instead, judges use other means to solicit the preferences of children, such as custody evaluations and CASA reports.  Some judges will interview children in private chambers with only the lawyers present.

Last Friday I rescued a child from foster care.  The child left the state with his grandparents.

The child’s mother was drunk when she tried to pick him up from his daycare.  The daycare refused to let her leave with her child.  Instead, they called the police.  The police arrested the mother and put the child into police protective custody.

Fortunately, I already had met the grandparents when they were visiting from their home on the West Coast.  As soon as we learned the child was lost to foster care, we started working furiously on a voluntary guardianship.  We had to act fast, before the state sought temporary custody.

I have to credit the prosecutor and the SRS social worker for working openly with me and trusting this family.  They agreed to release the child if I could obtain guardianship orders in less than a day.  I faced a stressful, rushed day, trying to obtain signatures from the mother in Kansas City, the grandmother on the West Coast and the grandfather on a business trip in Chicago.  I found a judge on Friday afternoon to sign temporary orders, and then delivered the orders to the prosecutor and the SRS all before 5 pm.

With a lot of hard work and cooperation from all participants, the plan worked.  By Friday evening, the grandfather picked up the child from foster care.  By Saturday morning, he left with his grandchild to return home.

The child was spared months in foster care.  He can live with his grandparents instead.  His mother now has the opportunity to work on her own rehabilitation while knowing that her child is safe and well cared for.   The state saved scarce resources to use for other children who really need foster care.  Everyone wins.

If you share custody of your children with a porn addict, you probably feel worried and scared for your children. You might become especially panicked if your children are the age and gender preferred by the porn addict.

Our clients in child custody litigation come to us feeling frustrated with family court. Fortunately, through their work with us they found that prompt action can help children avoid the harmful effects of pornography.

You should start by educating yourself about the addiction. Like drugs and alcohol, pornography delivers a consistent, effortless path to pleasure. These pleasurable sensations are immediate, but also illusory. They quickly prove to be temporary and harmful. They leave the abuser diminished in his capacity to love anyone, even himself and his children.

As with all addictions, pornography leads to a vicious cycle. The pleasure lasts only a few minutes. The user then finds his disease leaves him even worse than before. The same triggers that led to his first use still compel him, yet even stronger. He therefore requires repeated use. He discovers that he needs even greater stimulation to reach the same climax.

Each successive use perpetuates his dependency, until the disease overwhelms his humanity. Nearly all addicts pervert their priorities. They make bad choices regarding their values, which manifest in the improper use of their time and money. They become poor parents. Some even look for opportunities to carry out their fantasies in real life on real people.

If you find yourself in child custody litigation with a porn addict, your strategy should take three steps. First, you prove that your co-parent is addicted. Second, you convince the court to care about his dependency. Third, you propose specific action for the court to protect your children.

The first step requires you to prove that the addiction exists. Unlike drugs or alcohol, no chemical test can prove when someone uses pornography. However, you might be able to find evidence in credit card statements, computer records, and phone bills. When examining a computer, check not only the contents of the hard drive but also the internet browser history.

You may also ask the court to require him to submit to a psychological evaluation. A psychological evaluation relies almost entirely on self disclosure. He might be able to hide his compulsion from the evaluator. Hopefully, though, he will use the evaluation as an opportunity to seek help.

Once you prove that he is addicted, you proceed to the second step of convincing the court to care. Many families and their attorneys skip this critical step. However, you can’t assume that your judge agrees with you that he is harmful your children.

Different states take different tacks on considering the moral fitness of parents in custody litigation. For example, Louisiana contains an explicit statute to require consideration of “the moral fitness of each party, insofar as it affects the welfare of the child.” The Missouri Court of Appeals held that the father’s viewing of pornography should be considered in deciding child custody, but that this factor alone is not determinative. A Florida court ruled that a home based pornography business operated by the mother’s boyfriend had to affect her fitness to parent, even if the children themselves never saw his products.

Once you prove the addiction and convince the court to care, you begin step three: You tell the court specifically how to protect your children. If your children live primarily with the addicted parent, you could ask the court to transfer custody and residency to you. You might ask the court to require the other parent not to display inappropriate materials in the home when your children visit. You could even move the court to order that his parenting time be contingent on treatment. He could find a support group for sex addicts, modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous.

As with most issues involving child custody, you may best protect your children outside of court. Ideally, your attorney can use the court process to convince the other parent to seek help for his disease. If he loves your children as he claims, he should want to be the best parent possible for them.

Addiction to pornography grows worse with time. Act now before your children suffer irreparable harm. If you share custody with a porn addict, promptly contact a family law attorney with experience in these matters.

I received this post from the Mental Health Association of the Heartland, along with a request to circulate it widely:

Kansas law adopted in 2001 requires health insurance companies to cover up to 45 in-patient days and 45 outpatient visits on an annual basis for treatment of biologically-based mental illnesses. However, recent data from the top 10 health insurance providers, as reported by the Kansas Insurance Department (KID), reveal that policyholders typically receive an average of six in-patient days or outpatient visits regardless of diagnosis.

The 2006 Mental Health Parity Task Force of the Governor’s Mental Health Services Planning Council suggested that there must be a significant number of health insurance policy holders who have had one or more of the following experiences which have resulted in the denial of adequate, appropriate or timely treatment since the 2001 Mental Health Parity legislation:

• Denial of claims for treatment of mental illness

• Excessive co-pays or deductibles for mental health treatment
• Refusal to authorize an adequate number of in-patient days and/or outpatient visits
• Inability to obtain or understand the standards and rationale used to deny authorization of treatment by an insurer
• Insurers recommending that “difficult” cases be referred to law enforcement or public mental health services
• Other problems with authorization of treatment of a mental disorder

We want to hear from individual policy holders, group health care administrators and mental health providers who have experienced any of these problems. Please share with us your personal written and/or oral accounts of your experiences.

We will listen to your experiences and help you, as appropriate, to file a formal complaint with the Kansas Insurance Department. To initiate a complaint with the KID, you may click on the following link to their website: http://www.ksinsurance.org/consumers/complaint.htm.

You may also put your concerns in writing and address them to the KID using the following contact information:

Kansas Insurance Department
Attn: Consumer Assistance
420 SW 9th Street
Topeka, Kansas 66612-1678
Phone: (785) 296-3071
Toll-Free: 1-800-432-2484
TTY/TDD: 1-877-235-3151
www.ksinsurance.org

Please let us hear from you if decide to file a complaint with the KID. We are collecting this information to better understand how to help Kansans get the care and treatment they need.

Senate Bill 380 was introduced during the 2007 session of the Kansas Legislature to provide health insurance coverage for the treatment of mental illnesses that is equivalent to coverage for other illnesses. Equal coverage is known as parity. We are hopeful that the bill will be considered in the 2008 session.

The lack of parity in coverage for the treatment of mental illnesses is a major factor in the perpetuation of the stigma associated with mental illness and a clear barrier to accessing treatment and moving toward recovery.

Thank you for your assistance with this effort.

Rick Cagan
For the Kansas Mental Health Coalition

Rick Cagan, Executive Director
National Alliance on Mental Illness - NAMI Kansas
112 SW 6th Avenue
PO Box 675
Topeka, Kansas 66601
785-233-0755
785-233-4804 FAX
800-539-2660
rcagan@nami.org
www.namikansas.org

Parents in separate households with joint custody of their children face a daunting task to coordinate schedules. It’s hard enough tracking who gets the children on which day. When activities for the children or the parents cause adjustments, the communication and cooperating gets even harder.

Several companies have created software to help parents communicate and coordinate their joint custody and parenting time. Some of the software installs on your own computer, but I recommend the software that runs over the web. With web software, both parents can access the data and hopefully avoid conflicts.

Here are a few links. If you have any experience with these or can suggest any others, please post a comment to this post.

• Jointparents.com Raising a child after a divorce or separation is challenging for parents. JointParents.com provides the tools to keep parents well organized and communicating effectively.

• Parentingtime.net (Optimal) OPTIMAL is an online custody calendar that allows you to easily schedule and track parenting time as well as monitor compliance with your custody arrangement. OPTIMAL reduces conflict between you and your child’s other parent by providing a shared tool for scheduling parenting time, and by providing an unbiased, easily accessed record of scheduled time versus actual time.
  
  
• Google calendar Though not specifically targeted to managing joint custody, Google’s on line calendar hosts enough tools to make it useful for any situation. Best of all, it’s free.

• Custody Toolbox Custody Toolbox features a calendar, a journal, a child information database, an address book, and a to-do list.

• Shared Ground Unlike the web calendars, this software runs on your own computer. So, you can use it to keep yourself organized, but not to coordinate with your co-parent.
• Kidmate Another program that runs on your own computer instead of the web. Helps you visually display parenting schedules and calculate percentages.

An ever increasing phenomenon that I have come across in my law practice is grandparents wanting to provide for their grandchildren. Grandparents come to me frustrated, confused, and broken because their grandchildren are in state custody and they are being forced to choose between their grandchild and their own child.

Unfortunately, many grandparents that I have encountered in my practice have faced resistance from state agencies when they have tried to take on the responsibility of raising their grandchildren because of a parents inability to do so. The reality is grandparents are often forced to choose between supporting their own child or caring for their grandchild. A choice that is far too often minimized by professionals in the child in need of care system.

If grandparents choose to support their own child they are accused of enabling. Grandparents are very often faulted for their own child’s poor choices. Faced with these obstacles despite Kansas state law and family service policy and procedure manuals requiring state agencies and their contractors to turn to family first, grandparents wishing to be considered as a resource option are far too often snubbed. Social workers tend to rationalize that a grandparents alleged enabling behavior will continue in their rearing of their grandchild and the “mistakes” the grandparents made in raising their own child will be made again this time around.

If grandparents decide to support their own child in hopes of helping him/her recover from his/her own current plight and get him/her into a position where he/she is able to raise his/her own child, grandparents are often condemned. The best chance that these parents have at recovery is when they turn to their support network for help, their family. Social workers assigned to these parents are often overworked and underpaid and do not have the time, energy, or commitment to offer these parents the support they need to fully recover. But if grandparents offer their child support and that parent subsequently fails and does not successfully recover or does not recover quick enough and the court system finds the parent to be “unfit” the grandparents loose their grandchild to the state.

If a grandparent cuts their own child off they are heartless, and they risk losing him or her. If they support their child they are “unfit” to raise their own grandchild. This phenomenon that grandparents face is far too often minimized and most be more thoughtfully considered by social workers when making placement decisions.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. This video provides instruction about mental health issues in children and adolescents. Although the production quality is not great, it contains some information that might help a child and a family. It addresses:

• Understanding Of Mental Health

• Causes
• Families Assisting
• What To Look For

Presidential candidate Senator Barak Obama talks about the importance of fathers in the lives of their children. He also discusses the problems that arise when a father is absent.

Father’s rights groups suppose he meant to criticize fathers who choose not to support their children. That is certainly a part of his message. However, in this video his words could just as well advocate for courts to allow fathers to fulfill meaningful roles in lives of their children.

The father wants to share equal parenting time. The mother wants primary residential custody. She wants their children to live with her but spend every other weekend with their father.

Both parents believe they are being fair, rational, and good to their kids. If they can’t reach an agreement among themselves, a court will decide for them.

So who gets the kids? We have argued this scenario from both sides, both for fathers and for mothers. We litigate from the specific facts in each family’s situation.

Mothers often can show that they have been the primary care giver for the entire life of the children. This argument can be especially persuasive if the mother has stayed home with the children. Sometimes we put a spin on this argument by showing that the mother is the “detailed” parent or the “structured” parent. While the father’s contributions are also important, the children can take advantage of both parents’ strengths by living with their mother during the week and with their father every other weekend.

Fathers are appalled by this suggestion. When we represent fathers, we argue that children need a real father, not a visitor. The sundry details of every day life cannot be replaced: feeding, bathing, homework, and getting the children ready for bed. Even if this was not the father’s primary responsibility during the marriage, many things will change after the marriage. Moreover, it is unfair to require the father to support the mother through spousal maintenance (alimony) and child support so that she can retain primary custody of the children.

In the end, we hope that parents can work out an arrangement among themselves without resorting to court. A judge has biases and prejudices like any other human. A court would make its decision based on a limited amount of evidence. It is impossible to guess in advance what little detail will trigger a response from the judge. Parents leaving family court often consider the results irrational and unfair.

No one loves your children as the parents do. We hope the parents can keep control over their own children without turning them over to the stranger in the black robe.