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The recent release of Davis Guggenheim’s film Waiting for Superman has contributed to a flurry of discussion over how to fix failing American schools. I’ve read quite a bit on thoughts regarding school reform and find that there is a striking absence of discussion of American family policies and the abusive family law courts as major contributors to poor student performance. Yet studies show that divorce has a major negative impact on student performance.

(from More Studies Show Divorce Hurts Kids’ Education)

Adverse impact of divorce upon education has skyrocketed as divorce has been more common. Divorces in 1920 caused a 3.6 month loss of education, but since 1970 they have blown up to about a year in lost education. This timeframe roughly corresponds with the rise of “no fault divorce” in Western nations.

Multiple divorces had an even worse impact on high school graduation rates. While students who parents stay together average a 78.4% rate of graduation from high school by age 20, one divorce drops the graduation rate to 60%, about the same as for children whose mother or father died. Divorce and remarriage did not significantly change the graduation rates for children versus divorce with no remarriage. But with divorce-remarriage-divorce (two divorces), the graduation rate drops further to only about 40%, half of that for children whose parents remained married.

Parties as diverse as social scientists, economists, and national security experts point out that America’s under-performing educational system is a threat to the future of the nation. The United States has long maintained the economic and military superiority over its adversaries that lead to a secure and prosperous nation in large part due to the educational opportunities available to American children. Universal K-12 education means every child is supposed to have access to the knowledge and skills needed to get a start in life. American universities attract the best and brightest students from around the world. The inventiveness of these students is immense. They often become scientists, entrepreneurs, and other major contributors to the advancement of knowledge and wealth of the nation.

America’s academic performance has been on a steady downward slope for decades. This decline parallels the destruction of families via no-fault divorce that has made divorce far more common as well as the laws and court behaviors that create conflict and place children into traumatic and contentious custody battles. Often these children are stripped of most or all contact with one of their parents due to wrongful sole custody decisions and the courts enabling and encouraging parental alienation child abuse. The two phenomena of poor school performance and poor family life are directly related. While parents do make their own share of mistakes, failed government policies are the glue that binds together these interconnected disasters into a destructive spiral.
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Rob’s recent comment pointing out the Ben Vonderheide case in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania made me curious. After all, it’s not often that you see the government actually prosecute somebody for making malicious false reports to the police to terrorize a father and block access to a child. On the surface, it looks like the government got it right in this case. Dig deeper, however, and you find that Ben Vonderheide is a poster case for government-backed terrorism against a parent who has been repeatedly abused by the government. The government is now using his son, Quinta Xavier Vonderheide, as a pawn in its vindictive battle to hide its crimes against the state’s children and families and attack those who attempt to expose them.

Alienating Ex Convicted of Lying to Police Gets Sole Custody

Quinta’s mother is Vonderheide’s ex-girlfriend Wendy Flanders. She has systematically alienated her son from his father and engaged in access blocking, denigration, defamation, and false police reports to destroy the child’s relationship with his father. She is unable to accept that their son should have time with both his parents and is willing to break the law, scheme, manipulate, and conspire to ensure that he will never see his father again. As is typical, family law courts reward such behaviors unless a parent can afford to bring contempt of court charges against the abuser.

She even attempted to change his name to Quinta Xavier Flanders, a common stunt for alienating parents who alter their children’s names to remove all mention of the hated ex.

This is nothing new for Flanders as she is a serial parental alienator. She has engaged in this child abuse not only involving Quinta, but also regarding her daughter Bryna Elizabeth Flanders-Harris and that girl’s father John Harris. In that case, she used false allegations of child sexual abuse among other methods. There are also reports that she attempted similar family terrorism against another previous ex, a Mr. Caruso who is no longer alive to defend himself and his child Emily from the sociopathic Flanders.
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Although they may seem strange bedfellows, former Governor of Alaska and US VP candidate Sarah Palin (Republican) and smallfry pandering child abuse proponent Jim Beall (Democrat – California Legislature) may have more in common than meets the eye. Both appear to have attitudes towards fathers that suggests they regard denying them contact with their children via access blocking and false accusations. They believe these should be tactics vicious women can legally use without regard for their children. Both think that this form of emotional child abuse known as parental alienation should be ignored and not considered in child custody decisions. Yet child psychologists consider parental alienation of great harm to children.

Palin Family: Serial Parental Alienators?

Sarah Palin and her family have been accused of alienating her daughter Bristol’s child Tripp Johnston from his father, Levi Johnston. Levi Johnston and his sister Mercede claim that the Palin family blocks his attempts to see Tripp. He is contemplating legal action against them to regain time with his son. While detractors point to Johnston being a high-school dropout with a variety of family and personal problems, it looks very likely that the Palin family really does have a problem with parental alienation against ex-relatives they want kicked out of the family and are willing to go so far as using defamation campaigns and frivolous restraining orders to accomplish their despicable goals.

(from Bristol Palin’s Bitter Split!)

“Levi tries to visit Tripp every single day, but Bristol makes it nearly impossible. She tells him he can’t take the baby to our house because she doesn’t want him around ‘white trash’!” Bristol won’t even allow him to watch the baby for a few hours — unless he’s babysitting!

The worst part, Mercede continues, is that the former vice presidential candidate supports Bristol’s treatment of Levi, 19. “I used to love Sarah,” Mercede says sadly. “But I’ve lost lots of respect for her.”

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US VP Joe Biden is well known to our readers as the proud anti-father architect of the Violence Against Women Act, one of the single biggest blows against the US Constitution and equal rights in the history of America. It makes it easy for women to falsely claim abuse with no evidence, eliminates many due process rights for men, and encourages the government to provide no assistance to abused men and their children.

Biden, a father himself, was all so happy to sell the means to send other fathers into family law hell for votes from the extreme feminists who backed this legislation.

But besides being a pandering politician, Biden is apparently so stupid he recently thought it was perfectly OK for him to blabber the secrets of a bunker built to protect the VP.
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What do President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and California Assembly Member Jim Beall have in common?

The first thing that may come to mind for many is that they are all Democrats. But that’s not nearly so important as that they are all politicians who curry favor with victim feminists and other women voters by engaging in father-bashing and supporting pro-child-abuse and pro-male-abuse legislation. Unfortunately for American families, especially children and their fathers, these politicians are all too happy to berate fathers. They encourage the abuse of children and their fathers in exchange for votes from the pro-child-abuse lobby consisting of disreputable organizations such as National Organization of Women (NOW) and the misleadingly named California Protective Parents Association. Such organizations are mostly comprised of feminists gone insane, but a vote is a vote for these politicians.
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