Photos by Alan Lessig / The Detroit News Scott Matelic, with wife Melissa and children Taylor and Devin, holds a picture of Amanda, 7, Matelic’s daughter from a previous relationship. He says he’s had no success getting the Friend of the Court to enforce his visits with Amanda.

Failed visitation policy harms kids

Ineffective agencies won't enforce court-ordered time with children

By Gary Heinlein and Kim Kozlowski / The Detroit News

    MELVINDALE — When Scott Matelic broke up with his former girlfriend, a judge ordered that their daughter would live with her mother and that Scott would have parenting time every Wednesday evening and every other weekend.

    That seemed simple enough. But Matelic and his wife, Melissa, say they have worn out their patience and drained their bank account fighting to get the Friend of the Court to enforce the arrangement.

    They say the mother, Dawn Raymond, often changes the schedule on short notice, effectively depriving Scott and his now-7-year-old daughter of their time together.

    But according to Raymond, it is Matelic who has failed to live up to the order. He skips visits, she said, and won’t cooperate when she has to work late. She said she wants the Friend of the Court to act on her three-month-old request for more child support.

    Their disagreement is one of more than 100,000 often nasty such fights reported in Michigan every year, and the number is rising. Children land right between sparring, emotionally wrought parents.

    The county-run arm of the judiciary charged with protecting them — the Friend of the Court — lacks the staff to respond promptly to all the complaints. As a result, thousands of Michigan kids and parents are denied court-sanctioned time together.

    Protecting parenting time, also known as visitation, is particularly sensitive for fathers, who in most cases are the noncustodial parent. And as they have come under rising pressure from state and federal governments to ante up child-support payments, dads have been emboldened to fight for their parenting rights.

    Many of them find the battle frustrating, however. Philosophy and policy dictate that Friend of the Court caseworkers try to resolve disputes through mediation and discussion, rather than through enforcement action. Most often it takes weeks or months for a caseworker to get to an individual’s complaint because the system is jammed.

    As with child-support cases, the number of parenting-time cases is huge and growing. The News found that in Michigan there are more than 700,000 judges’ orders spelling out parenting-time arrangements between divorcing couples. County Friend of the Court offices have fewer than 500 caseworkers overseeing those orders.

    What it means is that Friend of the Court workers assigned to deal with parenting-time issues have workloads comparable to those assigned to child-support cases. Based on a Detroit News survey of Michigan’s 83 counties, the parenting-time caseload statewide averages more than 1,500 parenting-time orders per worker. That calculation doesn’t include divorce and paternity cases on which judges haven’t yet issued orders, but which Friend of the Court caseworkers nonetheless are assigned to investigate for making recommendations.

    By comparison, The News earlier found that the child-support caseload averages 2,200 per worker.

Complaints soar

    Complaints about problems with parenting-time arrangements hit 132,000 in 1999, the most-recent year for which records are available. That was up 47 percent from the number for 1997, when the state first started keeping tabs.

    Because many Friend of the Court offices don’t keep records of all the complaints they receive, those figures may understate the size of the problem.

    The ramifications are hard to measure but nonetheless are far-reaching because of the importance of the parent-child relationship — to both parent and child, said William D. Brooks, a Kalamazoo psychologist who helped shape Michigan’s parenting-time guidelines.

    Children who don’t spend enough time with their noncustodial parent may become alienated and develop “some unrealistic notions on how that (parent) doesn’t love them or wouldn’t come to their rescue,” Brooks said.

    Those notions can lead to excessive dependence on the custodial parent, a poor self-image, depression and feelings of abandonment, he said, and such feelings can harm future relationships.

    As this became more widely understood in the past two decades, fathers and groups representing them began pushing harder to ensure that they could continue in a parenting role even after a divorce or a break with a child’s mother.

    As a result, it has become far more common for judges to award joint legal custody, meaning divorced parents must share decisions about the child’s religion, education and health care, regardless of which parent gets physical custody.

Women win custody

    Still, women end up with custody of the children in the large majority of Michigan divorces — nearly three-fourths of all cases, according to federal statistics.

    Some of those with knowledge of the system and the issues see that as evidence that divorce laws are stacked in favor of women. One such critic is Tim Kovach, an Ann Arbor family-law attorney who said he has represented mostly women in divorce proceedings over the past 16 years.

    “This epidemic of allowing women carte blanche physical custody creates a society where men are seen as nothing more than a weekly paycheck and an every-other-weekend parent. And that’s sending a bad message to our children,” Kovach declared.

    Dads’ groups assert that trying to get parenting-time orders enforced can take so long it financially wrecks the fathers, and is so contentious that many give up hope of seeing their kids again.

    “It will take at least six months to get a case in front of a judge or referee in Wayne or Oakland County,” said Janet Frederick Wilson, a family law attorney who often represents parents in visitation disputes. Those who can’t afford lawyers and must rely solely on the Friend of the Court can expect an even longer wait, she said.

    Wilson said the usual result of such a hearing is about two years of court-ordered mediation and counseling run through the local Friend of the Court. Ultimately, most cases still have to be resolved by a judge or a referee, she said, because the parents can’t come to terms.

    Susan Borovich, an attorney who heads the Michigan Friend of the Court Association, argued that, far from being ineffective, Friend of the Court specialists work hard to settle visitation disagreements because doing so is in the best interests of the kids.

    “The parenting-time issue is very important to us,” said Borovich, who works in the St. Clair County Friend of the Court office at Port Huron. “Our goal is to try to get the parents to resolve the issue between themselves. What we find is that if we get them to agree to a solution, it will stick.”

    Michigan law does provide for judges to order make-up parenting time, or to jail or fine custodial moms or dads who refuse to follow the terms of parenting-time orders. But county records, which are often sketchy, provide little evidence of enforcement activity.

    State records for 1999 show only 550 make-up parenting-time orders. For the same year, the records also indicate only 693 requests by Friend of the Court offices for judges to order violating parents into court.

    According to the 1999 state records, referees recommended enforcement activity by judges fewer than 3,000 times over violations of custody or parenting-time orders. By contrast, for the same year in cases involving nonpayment of child support, there were 24,000 recommendations for judicial enforcement measures.

    Many counties didn’t report visitation- and custody-enforcement actions to the state. None of them keep a separate account of arrests for violations of visitation orders, but most officials agree that arrests are rare.

    In any case, there are problematic differences between child-support and parenting-time cases. “Child support is more a black-and-white order: either they paid or they didn’t pay,” said Tim Cole, management analyst with the Friend of the Court Bureau in the State Court Administrator’s Office. “When you try to enforce a (parenting time) order, it’s more of an abstract issue.”

Frustration grows

    The case of the Matelics and Raymond illustrates the point. The Matelics are asking the Friend of the Court to revise the parenting time order so Amanda can spend the summers with them — an arrangement they believe would be simpler and more enforceable.

    “I have no decisions when it comes to her life,” Matelic said. “I have no idea what’s even going on in her life.” Even so, he said, he regularly pays $67 a week in child support.

    Raymond, who lives in Lincoln Park, said the current arrangement should suffice. “The gist is, yes, there have been problems, but if he’d show up and pick up Amanda when he’s supposed to, there’d be no problem,” she said.

    All three are frustrated with the time it takes to hash out such issues through Wayne County’s Friend of the Court.

    “It seems like we never move forward,” Melissa Matelic said. “We just get tired from being in the process.”

    Added Raymond: “It’s a tough situation and my daughter’s the one being hurt.”

You can reach Gary Heinlein at (517) 371-3660, or gheinlein@detnews.com.