Forty years of research on child well-being has firmly established that, when parents are living apart, it is almost always best for children to spend equal time with each of their parents, assuming both are fit. (Some of the best of this research is highlighted on NPO’s website.) Despite this, in most states, legislators have been slow to enact laws that will protect children’s interests by ensuring both parents share equally in raising them.

If legislators won’t listen to the science, maybe they’ll listen to the people!

The shared parenting movement and National Parents Organization, in particular, have lost a valued fighter. On October 14, Bruce Rogers lost his more than two-year battle with glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer.

National Parents Organization is proud to collaborate with 17 other organizations in the U.S. and abroad to challenge some very bad research on parental alienation that is, unfortunately, being cited in efforts to question the reality of parental alienation. The flawed research in question was paid for by your tax dollars!

In 2015 Joan Meier, Professor of Clinical Law at George Washington Law School, and four collaborators, received a grant of more than $500,000 from the National Institute of Justice, which is part of the Department of Justice, to do research premised on the presumption that parental alienation is a “pseudo-scientific theory” that is used to suggest that “when mothers allege that a child is not safe with the father, they are doing so illegitimately, to alienate the child from the father.”

Those familiar with parental alienation and aware of the more than 1,000 books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles on the topic, know that parental alienation is a well-researched phenomenon that is not gender-based in the way that Meier suggests. This research was done, in fact, by highly respected scientists, including psychologists and psychiatrists. Many know, as well, from painful personal experience how damaging parental alienation can be to the children and targeted parents—fathers and mothers—who are the victims of it.

National Parents Organization is collaborating with the Parental Alienation Study Group (PASG) to call for the retraction of badly flawed research denying the scientific research on parental alienation.

Parental alienation is a serious form of psychological abuse that causes enormous harm to the children and parents victimized by it. More than 1,000 books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles have been published on the topic and there is increasing scientific recognition of the existence, causes, and effects of parental alienation. It has been the subject of documentary films, such as Erasing Family, produced and directed by Ginger Gentile.

On July 27, by a voice vote, the Senate took action to address a long-standing problem in the child support system. Senate Bill 503 PARENTS Act of 2021, sponsored by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) and co-sponsored by Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) expands the use of federal incentive payments to states to:

develop, implement, and evaluate procedures for establishing a parenting time agreement when establishing an initial or modified child support order or a medical support order (including procedures for carrying out a parenting time agreement made prior to the establishment or modification of any such order).

National Parents Organization is proud to announce the formation of the NPO Advisory Council. NPO employs a research-based approach to activism to reform the norms of separated parenting so that no child is deprived of a full relationship with both parents simply because the parents are not living together.

‘Research-based activism’ has two elements and our Advisory Council reflects both of these. In addition to world-leading researchers on child well-being, parental alienation, domestic violence, and child support, the Advisory Council also includes noted individuals to guide NPO to be more effective in its advocacy.

National Parents Organization wishes all fathers, everywhere, a happy Father’s Day. And we extend our sympathy to those fathers for whom this is a sad day because they have been wrongly excluded from their children’s lives.

Last year I wrote about the history of Father’s Day in the United States. It’s a longer and more interesting history than I’d realized before I started reading up on it. This year, I wanted to say a few words about Father’s Day around the world.

Well, not on your sleeve exactly. But you can wear your support for NPO and shared parenting on your t-shirt, or tank top, or your hoodie. You can display it on a coffee mug, a tote, or a pin.

NPO is proud to announce the opening of its merchandise store on TeePublic featuring these and many other items displaying the NPO logo or declaration of support for shared parenting. Of course you can purchase items that say ‘I Support Shared Parenting’. But you can also purchase merchandise with declarations of support for shared parenting that identify your relation to it: ‘Moms Support Shared Parenting’, ‘Dads Support Shared Parenting’, ‘Grandparents Support Shared Parenting’, and so forth.

It can be hard for those who aren’t scientists to separate good scientific research from bad research or even from pseudoscientific writing. This is true in the area of research on parental alienation as much as, and maybe more than, in other areas.

That is unfortunate because severe alienating behaviors are child abuse, a form of coercive control that is extremely damaging to children and to the targeted parent. This makes it all the more important to separate sound from shoddy research.