Keep Your Eye on the Ball?
Every now and then, it is necessary to push aside all of the distractions and make sure that the main energy is focussed onto the most important issues.
It is necessary to identify actions that should have been taken place but didn’t, as much as the actions that did take place.
But what are they?
This is especially important as we drift out of control towards the next election…
Recent topics covered in posts have been:
Human rights man/woman
Child support operation
Decisions about care of children when one parent demands separation
Corruption in Government and courts
Happiness wellness for adults
Suicide issues for men
Protection of men at work – really human rights again
Education system failing to properly develop boys – human rights again
Hidden sexism in social policy
Just at present, my tuppence worth is the deferral of child support changes that would have been fairer to non-custodial parents 85% men. This quiet deferral would have had much more impact onto separating parents negotiations, than the supposed reform of familycaught$.
Closely followed by the changes to familycaught$, that are supposed to be happening right now. I think these changes have not been carefully thought through and will result in a long drawn out, slow speed train wreck in familycaught$?
The most important point is that the single most important factor for the familycaught$ changes to partly succeed, would be that the child support reforms were already completed.
Both of the above impact critically onto children, but there has been insufficient public debate on these impacts onto children.
What are your opinions?
That ball is bouncing around a lot.
We haven’t have our eyes focussed on certain people and certain places. If some of us had been watching parliamentary activity closer we would have seen what Judith Collins was up to behind the scenes pushing through her personal agenda on child support (posted here)
This wasn’t picked up until after the fact. She should be facing as much criticism over that as she is with the Oravida conflict on interest scandal.
Now that we have identified a certain group of people, Suzanne Snively, Brenda Pilott, Jackie Blue, Jan Logie working as a group, we need to be keeping an eye on them – they’ve got a work in progress.
Following that may not be of particular importance to the media, but it is to us.
I think we need to not only be posting, but as often as possible updating those posts with any new information that comes to hand, keeping them current.
Once again it would be good to see a few other authors contributing, even if it is only stories from their community.
It all adds up and would make this a better resource and source of understanding.
Comment by Downunder — Fri 11th April 2014 @ 2:30 pm
Downunder, Your wish is my command
Hear is another pro mothers getting rid of their children’s Dads. Yet more anti family = anti dads = anti children article
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11243616
Children ‘no less happy in single-parent homes’ – study
By Jochan Embley
2:25 PM Thursday Apr 24, 2014
if you punch up articles like this on some sites it comes up with similar articles and you will be stunned how feminist-anti-male-hate propaganda is out there. You would think that as women have male children they would not see males as disposable, but it seems to make little difference to the majority of females. Sad.
Comment by Sane in an insane world — Fri 25th April 2014 @ 3:42 pm
#2, Yes, I noticed that article. Thanks for bringing attention to it. The scientific basis of this ‘research’ was ridiculous. They asked 7yo children “How often do you feel happy?” and apparently 36% ‘said’ they were happy ‘all the time’ while 64% ‘reported’ being happy ‘sometimes or never’, regardless of their family status.
Firstly, the children did not ‘say’ or ‘report’ such things; the two responses were clearly given to them to choose between.
Secondly, few 7yo children are developmentally capable of accurately estimating time-based proportions. Their responses may have been based on how they had felt that day or over the few days before but will have had little relationship to how often they had felt happy over any longer period. Did the researchers make any effort to assess the reliability or validity of the data? They could easily have chosen a smaller random sample of the children to estimate the correlation between the children’s binary choices to this question and some more robust measurement of how often they felt happy, for example, by getting that small sample to keep records over some time of how happy they felt each day, with their parents and teachers also keeping daily records of how happy the children appeared to be. If these researchers had done so they would almost certainly have found that the children’s responses to their question were poorly correlated with their actual proportion of happy time. The children’s binary choice would then have been quite meaningless. So the researchers probably didn’t.
Thirdly, making this one fairly worthless measurement with 7yo children does not justify a claim that ‘children are no less happy in single-parent homes’. What about 8yo children and 9yo children, or adolescents who may show the results of years of inadequate single parenting?
Fourthly, there is no mention that the 7yo children’s binary choices were significantly correlated with all the other factors that these ‘researchers’ claimed were the true cause of children’s happiness. Surely, if a much higher proportion of children with (for example) ‘high quality relationships’ in the home reported being ‘always happy’ then the researchers would have highlighted this proportion.
Fifth, any child’s claim that (s)he is always happy is almost certainly incorrect because all children will sometimes feel unhappy. This demonstrates how worthless these data are.
Finally, the outlandish conclusions these researchers made on the basis of their poor measurement strongly suggest it was advocacy research; their mission was to whitewash family separation and to support feminist propaganda that says it’s no problem for children if you kick their father out. As the article states, there is a great deal of much better research measuring bad consequences for children when they lose the identity and security of their family unit, but these arrogant ‘researchers’ claim their pathetic data disprove all that.
Sadly, mainstream media give undue publicity to anything that seems to support feminist ideology, and journalists seem incapable of critical thinking about researchers’ methodology and claims.
Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Fri 25th April 2014 @ 7:25 pm
The reporters did present both sides of the research debate. The conventional wisdom side was covered at the end, but only very briefly:
I think that the public are now becoming pretty aware of the pros and the cons of single parenting. Of course, the number of adults who sleep a night in a household isn’t a very good proxy for the amounts and qualities of time that the children spend with parents and parent type figures.
The Herald article also totally ignores the issues of custodial parent driven alienation, which is probably the single biggest determinant of stresses around the children and likely more critical to children’s outcomes, than the number of parent figures who sleep each night in the same household as the children. Maybe this isn’t seen as an issue by a woman who has already driven the father completely away – blissful in her ignorance of the children’s feelings and welfare? (Ditto familycaught$ blissful in their ignorance of children’s reality?)
The Thinkstock picture of a woman with a smiling child only serves to support the almost irrelevant thesis of the article. It ignores the 15% solo father households and the generally happier and more secure condition of their children.
My own contacts with adults suggest that the public is increasingly aware of the realities around solo parents and uncomfortable at the undue amount of Government support that solo parents, women in particular, get.
I hope that the public are waking up to the fact that the DPB is disproportionately attractive to parents who in all probability will have the weakest parenting skills. This is due to the fairly high correlation between mental health and work skills to income earning capability. This is a recipe for a huge multi-generational disaster.
Comment by MurrayBacon — Sat 26th April 2014 @ 9:20 am
#3 NoMa’s comments are based around the development and capabilities of the particular group of children, 7 year olds. This analysis, carried out at the relevant level of the children involved is an excellent example, for parents and for s133 report writing psychologists.
Why do parents and s133 report writers focus too much on adult issues and fail to spend enough time on analysis at the children’s level? This lack in s133 report writers, tends to leave them looking more like custodial parent’ advocates, which isn’t the reason that Parliament made funding available for them.
What are the evil, hidden, silent forces manipulating the s133 report writers and taking them away from doing the job laid out by Parliament? I suggest it is manipulation of the s133 report writers, by the judges controlling the lists of approved psychologists, against the public (children’s) interests. I suspect that this is in breach of the Public Finance Act?
Judith Collin’s ostensible reforms haven’t addressed this manipulation in any way. As a result, professionalism in familycaught$ cannot be expected to improve.
An opportunity wasted. I suggest that this could be her epitaph. Even now, with commentators from many sides making constructive suggestions, she hasn’t been able to rise to the challenges in front of her. After some hiss and spitting at the start, she is going out without a whimper. Phill Goff Minister of Justice style, well, Labour style maybe?
Comment by MurrayBacon — Sat 26th April 2014 @ 3:30 pm
Your website rocks! Sooooo many people getting ripped by the system! It’s heartbreaking, including my myself and husband. Peter done….whateva! U egg!
Comment by Debbie Broughton — Thu 1st May 2014 @ 8:54 pm