How to Speed Up the Family Court, win Child Custody hearing, end Child Support, and end Delays?

It's been less than a year that I've known you guys and what I've seen so far and learned attending these webinars -- if I would have had an inkling of what you guys are teaching back in the beginning -- observe your rights right from the start. Yeah. Do not give them up at all, no compromise. There's no reason to. It's all right here with what Sherry and Ron are saying.

Yes, so, you've got to get this resolved as quickly as possible. If I had known these techniques that I just brought to you guys in the last two webinars alone, I could have reduced the time that this was going on, and one of my children wouldn't have aged out. This is what people need to do to change what the system is doing to us and our families.

For your children. Yeah. Because your children will be very relieved if they find that you've got this fixed and they're no longer being used in the . . . well I want to thank everybody for coming tonight. This is called "What is the Voice of the Child." When we're addressing these issues about children, child support, alimony, missing time with your child, it seems that there is a different set of rules for people that are in divorce or people that have a relationship that has ended.

And so I made this little note that it's not that they shouldn't be handled individually, because a lot of people think that because we are giving them a set, a basic foundation and a general set of rules that we're saying that things still shouldn't be handled individually. They are handled individually. It's just that now the proper procedure and due process is being applied so that people aren't being disadvantaged improperly; and also so that people aren't being cost excessively unnecessarily.

So everyone should be following the same set of rules, and those rules should be applied equally even in divorce. I'm your host, Sherry Palmer with Fix Family Courts dot com. We are the author of a couple of books. I am also a parental rights strategist and a constitutional scholar. Ron Palmer, who you'll see in a little while. Hello Guys. They can't see you right now.

(laughing) I'm on the slide show. Ron Palmer, who is sitting beside me. He is also the author of the two books, a parental rights strategist, and constitutional scholar. He is also a business strategist. So what are we covering today? How to cut through the confusion regarding the child's voice. What is the real voice of the child constitutionally? I'm not saying at all that I'm speaking for your individual child.

What we're saying tonight is that we are speaking on behalf of children's rights constitutionally. And we are not lawyers, and we don't practice law. Remember that any of the information that you use. Just a quick Disclaimer. Is at your own risk. Please check it. Please make sure that it actually applies to your specific case. Only you have those details. If you need assistance or help on that, you can contact us at www.FixFamilyCourts.com or email one or the two of us, which I'll type into the chat later for the email addresses.

Okay, so we're talking about "What are the rights of the child constitutionally?" We're talking about also child support and alimony, and how those relate to all of this. Did you ever think this could happen? Because the first thing that we have to address is emotionally. Did you ever think because you hadn't done anything wrong that there was no way that you could lose your children?

Or did you ever think that a judge would ever entertain the other person's claims without ever proving them? We are going to go over claims of abuse. We are going to go over the difference between claims of abuse and also charges of abuse. And did you ever think that joint custody might mean that you still don't get any time, hardly any time with your children?

Many of you have that and yet they don't consider it termination. We're going to go over "Did you ever think your child's voice could be used against you?" and that also includes when you feel it's an advantage to have your child's voice heard. Okay. So, ultimately, by the time we're done with this presentation tonight, we will show you how to not let your child pay the price anymore in this process and this system.

So the voice of the child, what is it? Do you feel like it's being used against you? Do you feel like it isn't being heard? You're not able to protect your child? And I'm using singular, so if you have more than one child this applies of course. Do you feel like you cannot get anyone to protect your child in divorce? Do you feel attacked for trying to be with your child?

All of these things you might have as questions. So please let us finish the presentation because we might address your question. We might answer what it was that you wanted to know. What are some of the biases and prejudices regarding the voice of the child? We are going to cover this first because I think some of our biases and prejudices get in the way and it makes us interpret certain things as being the voice of the child when they're not.

Because sometimes our feelings or how we think life should be for the child we start to think that that is how a court system should view your child. Hopefully, that makes sense by the time I get done. But we tend to believe and the court's have passed policies that state the child's old enough to decide in divorce. Right? But when we really stop to think about this, why is that the case in divorce but not in marriage.

And that's not actually the question we're going to completely go into depth. I just want you to think about that -- that the child is old enough to decide in divorce but not in marriage. Which also leads, to many times I'm hearing children say, and I have actually, you know, I've heard children say, you know, you and Dad got divorced so now we're divorcing a parent.

Some children actually think that way. They think that's the way it's supposed to be. In divorce however, the state believes they can take over the decision making. They don't necessarily believe this in marriage. So there's a complete perspective shift when you go through divorce with you and with the state. And I call the court, the family court, the state, because that's really who they are.

Many times in divorce they're acting on behalf of one of the parents; whereas you'll find in criminal cases they're acting on behalf of the state. Even though there's a victim that they're representing. And you'll find that this shifts into that phase when parents are ordered to pay child support, because all of a sudden the state will step in now and say, they are representing the state.

That they are bringing an action on behalf of the state. We'll talk about that in a little while because it's important to understand these shifts. When you don't understand the shifts you get knocked balance in these situations. And you're already emotional. You're already feeling that you should only have to worry about your child and not have to worry about all this process.

Especially if you've hired an attorney. And you wonder why you're not feeling more protected. So the other bias that we get is that the child should be able to choose whether or not they want to be with one of the parents. We're trying to keep this general neutral because we're not biased towards mothers or fathers. But you could say either way the child should get to choose whether they want to be with their mom or want to be with their dad.

But in marriage I don't think that most of us felt that way. Maybe not as long as you were getting along. But in marriage you certainly couldn't go to the court. I know not in Texas, and ask them to give you the child over the other parent while they were married. They would tell you that you both have equal rights and that both of you can do what you want unless you get divorced.

Later, you know, probably in other presentations, we'll talk about that too. I think there's a lot of these divorces that, you know, I'm not talking about the ones that are real abuse and narcissism and all that. But I think other divorces sometimes inflame and possibly it could have been prevented if that had not been told that they couldn't get they're individual rights protected if they weren't in divorce.

So that's another topic for another day, but just something for you to put on the side to think about how that might actually contribute to more destruction of relationships and divorces. So the last one on this slide is the court can order evaluations and tests of the child and the parents in order to keep the child safe. Remember these are biases and prejudices.

We are not saying that this is actually the proper authority of the court in divorce. But that's what they feel. That as soon as the parents are in conflict that you can go to them and ask them to do evaluations and tests. Or they can order that on their own which many times we are calling sua sponte orders from the judge if the judge feels that it's harmful for the child to be around parents that don't agree then they automatically can order.

And some of them do this just as a routine now. They'll order psych evals. I think in California it's call a 730 evals for family studies. In Texas they call them home studies. In different states they are called different things. They'll order parenting coordinators, GALs, different child representatives. All sorts of people that come in between the decision making authority of you as the parent and the child.

Now sometimes, in the beginning, you may think wow, what a great idea, i don't want to deal with that jerk anyways. So I'd much prefer this other person gets involved and they'll see what a jerk the other person is and surely they will make them change. Or they will make sure I never have to deal with that issue again. And that's not generally what happens.

In fact, many times, as many of you know, that if you are dealing; and I don't like to say labels but this is the way that we identify with these things. If you do have someone that you're trying to get out of your life that has been a narcissist or is a narcissist or is displaying narcissism, you know then that many times they are skilled at manipulating other experts.

And sometimes they also have connections. And not just narcissist but let's say they happen to be in the law field themselves or in the police force. You know, somewhere where they all kind of interact with each other. Then you see that collusion, and that, you know, that that bias towards one side behavior going on, etc. So that's a very dangerous way to think and to let your rights to your child be controlled.

And if you thought you were going to get out of the control of a narcissist, the way to do it is not through another expert or even telling the states they need more training to identify narcissism because you're never going to find perfection in that and you're going to end up having that cost put onto YOU, the parent. Because the State is not taking on these costs with parents.

The State only takes on the cost when real criminal charges are being filed. Which is one of the issues that we bring up, is that, if you file real criminal charges. Like, if you have claims of abuse and you don't file them as charges and you just want to take them through the family court, what does it cost? It costs you. It costs you to pay the attorney.

It costs you to pay for the investigation, the discovery. And then you're dealing with a court that can be manipulated and biases and prejudices come into play. But when you put them into a different forum, which is criminal charges. Now I understand this system is not perfect either and they may refuse to take those charges. Then you're ending up in a situation where you're not necessarily paying to have the prosecution done, but you may end up being denied a prosecution, right?

Okay. So, we're going to cover some more of this. Let's go to the next slide. First, we gotta talk about what are the rights of the child? And, we have a page on Fix Family Courts. I'm going to pull that up. Ron calls it CRUBIS because it's child rights under the best interest standard. So, if you want to note this page down.

You put in what you see at the top, FixFamilyCourts.com/crubis/ This is the rights of children. This is a free page. Under the best interest of the child standard. And Ron wrote this up so that everyone can go to the same place and get the same definition. And, he talks a lot about second-class citizen. But we haven't talked a whole lot about second-class children.

And I know some of you may be highly against equal rights, or equal time for the children because of the abuse that you've been through. Or, even the abuse that the system's putting you through. You may feel that they're missing mental health issues and things like that with the other parent. Again, we're talking constitutionally. So while some of these things that we talk about may sound like they're not great or something that you may want to use -- research it a little further, because, I'm finding more and more parents that spend a lot of money trying to prove the other parent is a horrible parent and they still end up not having time with their children.

And, in fact, sometimes they end up being the one accused for alienation and other things, and the children end up even more time with the parent that you didn't want them with in the first place. So, I really implore you to consider this as an option. And through our research we found that it's actually the rights of the children to have access to both fit parents.

Which leads me to, if you're going to try to deprive a parent, the way to do it would be to prove them unfit. Now proving them unfit is very, very difficult so unless you really have charges that they are unfit. These would be charges that the State would bring against them. So, if they abandoned your child, they've committed child abuse, they've committed domestic violence against the child; those kinds of things the State prosecutes.

If you don't have the evidence, or if the State has denied your evidence, then you're probably going to be better off ensuring that your equal rights are protected. Okay. We can't make up for the system not being perfect, but we can give you this information. So the rights to association is bound up in the First Amendment, right? Not only you have First Amendment rights but your child has First Amendment rights.

These are fundamental liberty interests. So, if you read down a little further, down the page to this second arrow where it says "a federal appelate court has found that this right to familial association may not be denied to a father or his children . . . " (it was a father). Different cases are studied by different courts and so we just pull pieces from them to demonstrate your rights, so you can cite authority, okay?

So this one says "may not be denied to a father or his children just because that father was convicted of sex offense unrelated to the child, and protected this right at the strict scrutiny level. Now, that might at first make you flinch because you'll say, "Oh my gosh, he was convicted of a sex offense. But think about this for a minute. What if the sex offense was that he was 24 years old and he was dating his sweetheart when he was in high school when he was . . . Maybe he was dating a girl in junior high and now they are still dating and, you know, one of the parents get mad at him and he ends up

getting convicted for a sex offense. That could be one that they call it a child sex offense. Not necessarily to their child, but . . . So what I'm saying is not all offenses that sound offensive are as offensive as they may appear. Okay, so, kind of let yourself absorb these rights and not get too inflamed about what cases are being used about the rights.

So then the next thing is the court has ruled about creating second-class children through bastardy laws based on nothing more than through the child's, or actually I should say the parent's, marital status is an impermissible violation of equal protection. And we have that page up there on this website, same place, FixFamilyCourts.com/rights-made-simple, and there's some dashes in there. So, if you need that page, go to the main page of Fix Family Courts and click on the tab above that says equal protection -- oh right here -- click on equal protection, and it will take you to the bastardy law arguments, so you can use those.

And, by the way, you can cut and paste things from these, and put them into your motions and your pleadings, and help support some of your arguments. Ummm, go down to the next one. "The court has found that denying parental rights to a fit father because he was not married to the mother is an impermissible violation of equal protection. Now again, the reason this one's about the father is because mothers have almost automatic protection to their rights.

Mothers are not questioned as to whether or not they are the child's mother because it's a little difficult to deny who the mother is since we know who the child is born from. Whereas a father, if he's never been married to the mother, and even sometimes when they are married they're not sure, but if they've never been married there's a process they have to go through to establish paternity, which we are not going into tonight.

But that's why this case got brought before them, because this father was being denied those parental rights and he was the biological father. And so anyways, you can go through this page on your own and find out more of the child's rights, okay. And that will help you re-frame your perspective and highlight maybe where some of your own biases or prejudices might be getting in the way and costing you money in the family courts.

So it's not that you can't fight the cases, or fight in the court the way that you want to. If you want to beat up the other parent, you want to prove you're the better parent, you can. We're just saying that's an expensive route. We're trying to give you a less expensive route. And we're just saying that may not necessarily actually be protecting your child, but may actually be hurting you.

And hurting you could be hurting your child. It may also be hurting the other parent, and that may also be hurting the child. So the next slide. What if there is concern about harm to the child? We've kind of touched a little bit on abuse, right? Abuse and the way that it's handled in family courts though are different than the way abuse is handled if you were to bring a charge and you were still married to the parent; or you're married to the parent and somebody else brings a claim, correct?

So claims of abuse versus charges of abuse in family court is completely different. If somebody brings a claim of abuse against either of you parents while you're married, the court requires a very strict process in order for somebody to actually, let's. I don't know if they call it indicting you, but to actually bring charges against you. They make them do it in a certain limited amount of time.

Each state has their own fashioned rules and codes around this. And if the charges aren't enough -- the claims aren't enough to bring proper charges, they throw it out, right. Though sometimes, and we've heard this before, that child protective services will still try to keep their nose in there and they will try to get parents to do service plans, and things like that.

And a lot of times the parents do it -- a few months go by they're done and they are out of their life. But at times, when they do it, they've opened the door where they didn't have anything and now child protective services picks on something they didn't quite like and you could end up losing your children that way. So I'm not saying you don't ever lose them in marriage.

What I am saying is in divorce parents seem to open that door every single time. As soon as a claim of abuse is brought, so many times either one of you will say, "I have nothing to hide go ahead strip my life, look at anything you want because I'm a good person and I'm going to prove it to you. And that opens the door to excessive abuse of power, lots of costs and expense.

And, many times, when you're trying to do that -- maybe you're bringing the claims of abuse, and the other side is saying okay, "I'll go along with this. But they're applying it to you as well. So now you've got the same risks that are put on you. So even if you are a good parent; maybe now if you were dealing with a narcissIstic parent, maybe now they can twist it on you, right.

Remember that manipulation stuff? So think twice before you open this door and even make claims on the other side. Now I understand, you know, your priority is to keep your children safe. But your priority is also to make sure that you are also keeping yourself whole and that you don't get stripped of all of your resources. So you know it may be wise you find a way to get better evidence before you bring charges through family court so that you can actually get the proper authorities to take the charges.

Okay. Now, repeated abuse of claims. What happens if somebody makes a claim of abuse against you and they get thrown out or they're unfounded, or they say that it's totally not true and they're completely cleared; and then they bring a claim of abuse again. This happens many, many times and now you're being restricted from seeing your child, right. We're going to talk about that in another couple of slides about how you might be able to handle some repeated abuse claims.

We have many parents that we've talked to that are going through this and it is not good -- I can tell you right now, it is not the best idea to give in and open up your life to their inspection, okay. So we're going to give you some ideas on what is better choices and how those can help shut down the empowerment of those repeated abuse claims.

And harm to the child, how is it defined in divorce, in marriage, and constitutionally. And here's where I'm going to bring Ron over in a second. In divorce, we tend to, ourselves, and the court, tend to define harm to a child different than we define it in marriage. In marriage harm is defined under the child protection statutes, right, the statutes that the State is held to and child protective services before they can step in and remove your child from the home, before they can terminate your rights as a parent.

So harm to a child is under child abuse, child neglect. So you can't beat your child, you can't not feed them, you can't not clothe them, you have to provide them with basic needs; and you can't neglect them. But it has to fall under the definition of neglect. They don't get to make up a new one in marriage. But in divorce, they tend to lower those standards, and all of a sudden it becomes what one of the parents decides it is, and the state will buy into that and say, "Yeah, I think that is a better parent." So they don't actually ever say it's abuse but they kind of follow their path to power

that they should only have if they have a proper claim of abuse or an unfit parent. They invoke that power through complaints where they've lowered the standards. And you're not defending that standard. You're not fighting to have that standard maintained, and you're letting that standard get lowered. And, you're sometimes in fact agreeing to whatever process that they ask you to go through.

So, constitutionally Ron how is harm to the child defined? Well there's a concept that comes out of the First Amendment called clear and present danger. And that's been incorporated as far as harm to a child. The Supreme Court has used that terminology in terms of harm to a child. It has to be clear and present danger of harm to the child that changes the standard a little bit.

It gives you something a little more concrete to give it to -- the danger can't be vague, it can't be uncertain, it can't be unclear, and it can't be somewhere off in the future or in the past. It has to be clear and it has to be in the present, right now, or in the immediate future. So that starts to narrow things down a good bit.

There are other situations where this concept of harm is kind of vague and we're hoping to see more challenges against this concept so that we tighten this up. And here's something that I see a lot, I see parents being subjected to a mediator or some other person that they've, they appoint to speak for the child and then they decide that certain decisions the parent's making or feedback that they're getting from the child is that the parents are in such disagreement that they decide that that disagreement is harmful for the child.

Is that in the definition of harm to the child that a divorce or disagreement of the other parent is considered harm to the child? Certainly not, no, no Supreme Court has ever said anything like that; and it's clear that parents in marriage disagree all the time. They fight. Many families fight all the time. And the State doesn't come in and try to take their children from them.

So that's simply not appropriate, and beyond that, the best interest of the child standard does not give them authority to assign someone to basically remove your rights and grant them to some third party just out of the blue. That is, that's a misconception of what the best interest of the child standard is and how it's supposed to be applied. Right. Okay, so that gives you a basic definition and if you want to know more about how harm to the child is defined then shoot as an email at fixfamilycourts.com.

We will direct you to either sections in our book or we can direct you to anything that we've written on our website or elsewhere so you can get a better handle on that because they will insert people into the process, who will misinterpret harm. So you need those authorities to back you up to say, "No, that's incorrect that is not harm. Although it is a type of harm, it is not the kind of harm that the State can reach into." We've discussed in past webinars there's all different sorts of harms your child will go through.

They go through changes in their life every day, with friends, teachers, different disputes or disagreements at school. They go through harms when they, you know, start a new school year and they have to adjust to new teachers. You know, all of that could be considered harm. They go through harm if you develop a new relationship and that relationship causes some tension or, you know.

Those are all harms the State really can't step into, and the child has to learn to cope. And, in fact, you'll find studies showing (and we don't like to refer to studies for court use, but for your own personal comfort, you will find that they do say), children who learn to deal with diversity and different kind of stressors, they build tools and they're able to cope better in life as adults.

So let's move on to the next slide. What are some of the biases and prejudices regarding alimony and child support? First of all, you need to understand where your biases came from. Now, we're not going to read the whole thing about it, but if you want to read more about where I believe some of the root of it comes from, you can start on this Wikipedia page, it's about the protestant work ethic.

And this is where I think some of us, you know, start to develop -- first of all we developed our idea of duty and obligations to the family regarding the man from this work ethic. And that's -- in a lot of ways it was great for society. But our societies have changed a lot. We now have more equality with men and women.

And you may say but, the father or the mother agreed that i get to stay home and raise the child and now we're in divorce and that agreement should stay in place. Not so constitutionally. So I'm sorry if that upsets some, but constitutionally that would prohibit a person from getting a divorce and making different decisions. Now that's not saying they get to erase that they have a child or erase