Archive for Parents
Put limits on custody complaints, group urges
Posted by: | CommentsCanadian law must be changed to make it far more difficult for disgruntled parents to file disciplinary charges against psychologists, psychiatrists and other health professionals who do assessments in child-custody cases, says a group of leading lawyers and therapists.
The complaints submitted to professional bodies by the losing side in custody battles are turning experts off the important work, the group says in a discussion paper. The result is a “major social and legal problem,” it says.
The group urges changing the rules so disciplinary bodies can only consider complaints from such parents if they have been first approved by the judge in the case or by the other, winning parent, or have been screened to weed out frivolous grievances
“The family law justice system is seriously undermined every time a vexatious complaint is made by a parent to the college,” said the paper signed by 11 psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers and social workers. “It feels like a professional sucker punch and has no correlation to the skill, experience and savvy of the assessor.”
Earlier this year, the Ontario Medical Association’s board directed its staff to work with other professionals to push for changes to protect members against such complaints.
A parents-rights organization, however, says people embroiled in emotional disputes often feel the assessor is biased against one side, and need some recourse to question their professionalism.
Kris Titus of the Canadian Equal Parenting Council said she has heard from parents about psychologists or others who will spend a whole day with one parent in their home, and an hour in a “sterile” office environment with the other.
“When you’re dealing with children, where every decision made is essentially going to affect someone’s entire future, there has to be strict regulation of assessors,” Ms. Titus said. “There are some assessors we have heard multiple complaints about.”
The report suggests three options, based partly on legislation in a handful of U.S. states.
- -Require that a judge approve any disciplinary complaint, ensuring that it is more than merely an attack on the assessor’s conclusions.
- -Require that the complaint be approved by both parents, again making it less likely the grievance will be just another appeal by the losing party.
- -Set up a vetting process within regulatory bodies that would throw out vexatious complaints before they are formally investigated.
Despite abuse complaints, accused kidnapper allowed to see son
Posted by: | CommentsState child welfare records reveal a history of abuse complaints against a father charged with kidnapping his 3-year-old son, yet he still was allowed court-supervised visitation that ultimately led to the boy’s abduction from a Cocoa park.
Department of Children and Families officials said they investigated complaints against 35-year-old Paul Martikainen of Palm Bay over the past year, and the latest confirmed he had abused his son, Luke Finch. That investigation was closed Nov. 25, three days before Martikainen fled with Luke on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico.
Florida family law dictates that judges allow both parents to be in their child’s life unless there’s clear evidence it is detrimental to the child, he said, adding: “The appropriate thing to do would be to get the report, go to the court and say, ‘In light of this, it’s detrimental.’ ”
He compared the case to other parental abductions.
“People need to understand this is a typical child custody battle between two former spouses,” DerOvanesian said. “My understanding is that the ex-wife (Christa Finch) has made allegations about abuse to children and family services and these have been investigated and unfounded. It’s just back and forth all the time. These are fairly typical custody situations.”
Mother charged in case of boy who hid in oven
Posted by: | CommentsThe mother of an 11-year-old boy who hid in an oven to escape alleged abuse by his father has been charged in the incident, in part because she pulled the boy back into the apartment after he had escaped, according to court documents.
Debra D. Chatman of Minneapolis has been charged in Hennepin County District Court with endangerment of a child, a felony, and malicious punishment of a child, a gross misdemeanor.
According to the complaint, William T. Hurley beat the boy with his firsts and an extension cord. Chatman admitted she initially punished the boy by striking him with a belt, then Hurley burned him with an iron, the complaint said. Chatman said she heard the boy scream, “He’s burning me.”
Chatman said the boy ran out of the apartment, so she grabbed him and dragged him back in, the complaint said. Hurley allegedly started punching the boy again, and the boy ran to hide in the oven and grabbed on to something in there. Chatman said she turned on the oven to cause the boy to “release his hold,” the complaint said.
When the boy got out of the oven, Hurley “continued to assault him,” the complaint said.
Hurley was charged last week with malicious punishment of a child.
According to the charges against Hurley filed in Hennepin County District Court, police arrived at an apartment on the 2000 block of Elliott Avenue on a child abuse call. The boy told officers that Hurley was upset with him for being in his mother’s bedroom. Hurley punched him and threatened to kill him for hiding under a bed, the charges allege.
Officers saw marks and burns on the boy’s body, and, as they spoke to him, Hurley said he had ‘whooped’ [the boy] and “that he would get another,” the complaint said. Hurley had to be restrained by police, the complaint said.
Military flooded with flu complaints
Posted by: | CommentsThe Defense Ministry is facing a deluge of complaints from angry parents and girlfriends after it decided last week to cancel all leave until the H1N1 flu virus subsides here.
As the nation raised its flu alert to the highest “Red” level on Oct. 4, the ministry also halted the mandatory training for reserve forces and ordered almost 660,000 enlisted soldiers to stay at their barracks.
Meeting visitors, going and sleeping off-base are not allowed in principle, although the first and last regular vacations are still permitted. Individual decisions are to be made flexibly by commanding officers, ministry officials said. It was the first time in Korea that such a confinement measure has affected the entire army.
Since the announcement, the ministry’s online bulletin board, which had less than 10 comments a day previously, has been filled with more than 200 petitions related to the confinement decision.
Introducing himself as a father of two sons, both of whom are in the service now, Kim Hong-bae wrote that the measure had already demoralized young soldiers.
Military officials say soldiers inoculated with the flu vaccine will be able to take vacations from January. However, those due to end their military service around that time would not be included, they said.
Yoon Hae-jin, a student studying in the United States, fears that she will not be able to see her boyfriend during the winter vacation.
“I plan to visit him halfway across the world. The confinement measure seems too harsh for young soldiers. Please consider the feelings of their parents and girlfriends,” she said.
Some people questioned the effectiveness of the somewhat extreme measure.
Despite the growing complaints, the ministry has not yet issued an official reaction.
“In order to protect soldiers from the new flu, the suspension measure was unavoidable. Their vacations are not denied but postponed,” said an official of the Defense Ministry.
“Each military unit is developing other programs to boost the morale of soldiers. We hope the public will be understanding for the time being.”
As of yesterday, the nation’s death toll from the disease was 49. No fatality case has occurred in the army, while some 1,500 soldiers with mild symptoms have recovered.
After-school programs
Posted by: | CommentsI signed my son up for an after-school program that he’ll likely enter this fall when he’s in grade one. That’s if we’re lucky. He was two when I called he inquire, apologizing for calling so far in advance. I wasn’t early at all. In fact, my son would be the 10th person on the list for a program that only accepts a handful of new kids a year.
It’s the minority of parents who strike gold with a daycare that can take their one-year-old all the way through to school’s start and then take care of their child from 3 to 6 p.m. when mom and dad make it home from work. This leaves parents with a patch-work of informal, unlicensed after-school care, privately-hired babysitters or nannies (for those affluent enough), neighbours, playdates or maybe no supervision at all.
Where do your kids go after school?
Smoking with kids in the car — not a no-brainer?
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s interesting to see the heated debate happening around Rob Ferguson’s story about the ban on smoking in cars when children are present.
Setting aside for the moment whether or not it’s realistic to police smoking in cars, I wouldn’t have thought the ban would illicit such concern — not just for civil liberties, I get that — but that this is further proof children are taking over the world? Really?
Ya, sure, we’re clogging the aisles at Shoppers’ Drug Mart with our giant strollers, and our snot-nosed children are climbing the walls at Starbucks when you’re trying to enjoy your no-foam. But I don’t think that the government intervening to encourage people not to blow second-hand cigarette smoke into the faces of children when they’re in an enclosed space no bigger than six cubic metres is really terribly good evidence that the short people are taking over.
It would be nice to think that parents know better than to smoke in their cars with kids, but sadly, not all people do. Addiction sucks. It makes people do dumb things. Even people who are otherwise working hard to provide for and care for their children.
Commenter Larry Perlman makes the point that these type of bans are symbolic. Making them is not about how realistic the bans will be to enforce. It’s about subtly shaping what is considered socially acceptable. It was once perfectly legal to ride in a car without a seatbelt as well. Hell, I remember fighting with my brother over who got to stand “on the hump” for a better view over the front bench seat (all the better for rocketing oneself through the front windshield should a collision occur).
For the record, we did have car seats for some parts of our childhood — I can actually remember being embarrassed by the “babyishness” of mine, so my parents must have been generally fairly cautious for the time. The point is that back then most people let their kids be without a car seat or seatbelt at least some of the time, partly because it wasn’t illegal. The ban on smoking with children in the car will likely have at least some of that same effect.
Smoking on playgrounds
Posted by: | CommentsToday we have a story on the City of Toronto’s extension of the smoking bylaws to include a ban on smoking on children’s playgrounds.
It will now be prohibited to smoke within nine metres of playgrounds, wading pools and splash pads.
My colleague expressed surprise that this ban wasn’t already in place. Wasn’t this obvious, she asked? Sadly, I guess it is not, and when you consider the tenor of the comments, you get a glimpse at the kind of uproar that this causes among people who are fixated with the city’s “useless bylaws,” and with having their freedoms infringed upon.
It’s the same sort of debate we saw last week when the ban on smoking in cars when kids are present came into effect.
I think most parents will certainly agree that it’s best to protect children from second-hand smoke. My father died two months ago today from metastasized lung cancer. He never smoked a day in his life. We don’t know for sure how he got the disease, but in the kitchen where he grew up the air was nearly blue from both his parents’ cigarette smoke.
Maybe better to fall on the paternalistic side if it can save some otherwise perfectly healthy people from succumbing to second-hand smoke?
I think so.
First octuplets, now an old woman’s twins
Posted by: | CommentsHot on the heels of a California woman, Nadya Suleman, having octuplets after receiving fertility treatment comes news that a Calgary woman, Ranjit Hayer, used in-vitro fertilization to have twins at the age of 60.
And the ethical debate over who should or should not be allowed to have babies was revved up even higher, raising some important access to care issues.
Her own obstetrician, Dr. Colin Birch, voiced doubts, telling the CBC that he couldn’t reconcile himself with the idea of a 60-year-old woman getting in-vitro fertilization.
“It’s going against nature. It’s going against so many different things. The nature and the body has said that unfortunately you’ve made it to 60 and haven’t had children. Unfortunately, there is some reason for that,” Birch said.
“Sixty is not an optimal time to be gestating an offspring, not to mention lactating and caring for an offspring,” said Juliet Guichon, who teaches bioethics at University of Calgary faculty of medicine.
While much of the debate has focused on the women in the two cases, ethicists are also starting to question why their doctorswent along, at least in the case of the octuplets.
Patients have a right to ask for treatments, and doctors have a responsibility to listen to them, the ethicists say — but doctors also have a responsibility to say no when the circumstance demand. How they decide such things and navigate the tricky waters of the doctor-patient relationship is why more and more hospitals are hiring professional ethicists.
A 2005 study by Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics ranked doctor-patient disputes over treatment plans the top ethical challenge facing medicine today, ranking above such issues as waiting lists and doctor shortages.
“Thirty years ago, the issue was when patients could say no (to a doctor). Now it’s when can a doctor so no (to a patient),” says Jonathan Breslin, co-author of the report.
It would seem, at least, that the Calgary doctors did refuse to treat Hayer, saying she was too old to start a family.
Hayer, however, went to India to get fertility treatment, and that introduces an entirely new element to the debate — the inability to set standards for care at home when patients are a plane ride away from getting any treatment they want, even if it’s unethical or illegal at home.
Ethicists, from what I have seen, however, agree agreed that the Calgary doctors had an ethical responsibility to care for Hayer once she became pregnant — which they did.