Taboo Trades
Taboo Trades
Crisis of Boys & Men w/ June Carbone
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Fatherhood, Family Law, and the Crisis of Boys and Men, with June Carbone
June Carbone joins Kim Krawiec, student co-host Damon Stefankiewicz, and members of UVA Law’s Taboo Trades seminar to discuss “Fatherhood, Family Law, and the Crisis of Boys and Men,” coauthored with Clare Huntington. Carbone argues that the difficulties facing boys and men—particularly those without college degrees—are rooted in economic precarity and policy choices, and that family law can compound these problems by excluding unmarried fathers from the support available to divorcing parents while subjecting lower-income families to punitive child-support and family-regulation systems. The conversation explores the authors’ proposal for voluntary, community-based family centers, along with difficult questions about safety, consent, funding, intimate partner violence, mandatory reporting, and how to promote engaged fatherhood without restoring patriarchal authority.
About the Guest
June Carbone is the Robina Chair in Law, Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. An expert in family law, assisted reproduction, property, law and medicine, and bioethics, she writes extensively about marriage, inequality, family structure, and the legal regulation of families.
About the Host
Kimberly D. Krawiec is the Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law and Glynn Family Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Her research examines taboo or contested exchanges, including organ donation, reproductive markets, and sex work, as well as the regulation of financial markets and business organizations. She is the host of Taboo Trades.
About the Student Co-Host
Damon Stefankiewicz is a second-year student at the University of Virginia School of Law and the student co-host of this episode.
Paper Discussed
- June Carbone and Clare Huntington, “Fatherhood, Family Law, and the Crisis of Boys and Men,” 124 Columbia Law Review 2153 (2024).
- Clare Huntington, the paper’s coauthor, is the Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. She does not appear in this episode.
Books and Articles Discussed or Referenced
- Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit, Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy(Simon & Schuster 2024).
- Clare Huntington, “Postmarital Family Law: A Legal Structure for Nonmarital Families,” 67 Stanford Law Review 167 (2015).
- Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (Brookings Institution Press 2022).
- Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (University of Chicago Press 2023).
- Tonya L. Brito, “The Child Support Debt Bubble,” 9 UC Irvine Law Review 953 (2019).
- Solangel Maldonado, “Deadbeat or Deadbroke: Redefining Child Support for Poor Fathers,” 39 UC Davis Law Review 991 (2006).
- Daniel L. Hatcher, Injustice, Inc.: How America’s Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor (University of California Press 2023).
My strong conclusion, more than my co authors, was that women are not the biggest victims of this economy. Blue collar men are.
Kim Krawiec:Hey. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Taboo Trades Podcast, a show about stuff we aren't supposed to sell, but do anyway. I'm your host, Kim Kravik. Welcome back to Taboo Trades. Today we're discussing fatherhood, family law, and the crisis of boys and an essay by June Carbone and Claire Huntington published in the Columbia law review in November 2024. June Carbone is the Robina Chair in Law Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. Her work focuses on family law and how economic inequality and social change reshape marriage, parenthood and family life. Her co author, Claire Huntington, is the Barbara Aronstein Black professor of Law at Columbia Law School and a leading scholar of family law, poverty law, and the legal treatment of non marital families. Professor Carbone joins us for today's conversation. The essay begins with the mounting difficulties facing boys and men in education, employment, health and social connection, problems that are especially pronounced among men without college degrees. Carbone and Huntington argue that these difficulties are rooted largely in economic restructuring and policy choices, but that their effects extend deeply into family life. Economic instability makes long term relationships harder to form and sustain, and unmarried fathers often become increasingly disconnected from their children. The author's central claim is that family law contributes to this isolation. Recent reforms that promote shared parenting and cooperative post divorce family largely benefit married parents who enter the court system. Lower income unmarried fathers, they argue, are more likely to encounter family law through punitive child support enforcement or the family regulation system. The essay asks how family law might move from isolation to inclusion through community based services and reforms to custody, child support and family regulation that support cooperative parenting and engaged fatherhood without restoring traditional patriarchal authority. Thanks for joining me today, Damon.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Yeah, it's really, really a pleasure to be here.
Kim Krawiec:Well, why don't we start by just having you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Damon Stefankiewicz:Of course. My name is Damon Stefankowicz. I am A2L here at the University of Virginia School of Law. I'm originally from New Jersey, so it's been fun kind of living in Charlottesville for the past year and just really excited to take this class and learn a lot about this topic in particular.
Kim Krawiec:Well, I am also very excited. I'm always excited and nervous when I start a new season because I don't know, it's just, it's every season's different, right? So first of all, why don't you tell us? I mean, you volunteered to host this episode, so what Was it about this paper or this topic that sort of piqued your interest?
Damon Stefankiewicz:Yes, of course. So I was actually interested in this topic for a pretty personal reason. I have three younger brothers, two of whom are still in high school, and they've grown up largely in a single parent household. So the paper's kind of discussion on parental involvement, or the lack of it, and how it can shape children and family structures really just was interesting to me. So I was especially interested in the idea of, like, how family law can make it harder for parents to remain involved or create structures to kind of keep them involved in children's lives. So it was just really interesting to me.
Kim Krawiec:You know, one of my favorite parts about doing this, these roundtables. I mean, in theory, it's for our listeners and for the audience, but I actually really enjoy it because I get to know you guys in a, like, in a different way. We talk a lot in this class, but we're talking usually about papers and issues and not always about ourselves. And so I really like this part of what we do. Okay, so let's talk now about what it is that you hope to get out of our discussion today with June. You have up some questions. Your classmates have some questions. We spent some time discussing the paper and the issues that it raised. What is it that you're hoping to direct at least some of the conversation to?
Damon Stefankiewicz:Of course, really what I'm kind of looking to learn is mainly about how family law can be used to keep fathers connected to their children, especially maybe even when the reasons for the distance occurs, maybe outside of the legal system itself. And I'm also interested in where the authors think that law itself can actually make a meaningful difference in these children's lives in particular. So those kind of two things I would say are really where I'm interested. And I know that my fellow classmates may be interested in other areas based on their questions, but it'd be really, I think, a great conversation, and I hope to learn a lot from it.
Kim Krawiec:Yeah, I think that we're all kind of interested in this general question, right? As lawyers, we want to think that law can correct a lot of things. We hope that's why we're doing this. Yet we're also.
June Carbone:You're.
Kim Krawiec:You're all mostly third years, I think, because. And by. By this time, you've also become realists about. Right.
June Carbone:About both the.
Kim Krawiec:The promise and the limitations of law. And so I'm sure that will be a topic for today. Damon, anything else that you hope to get out of the conversation?
Damon Stefankiewicz:Just some general enjoyment, but other than that, nothing really.
Kim Krawiec:Okay, great.
Speaker D:That.
Kim Krawiec:That sounds great. All right, let's join the others. June, thanks so much for joining us today. I wanted to ask you how you and Claire got interested in this topic. First of all, you both write a lot. And so let me say at the outset that I've not read everything that you two highly productive scholars have written, but I have read a lot that each of you have written separately. And I think of you as writing about women's issues. And I'm not suggesting this isn't a women's. A woman's issue. It is a family issue and therefore is everyone's issue. It's the lens in a different place than what I have come to associate with you. Can you. And maybe I have just missed some of your other papers on this topic because, again, you both write a lot and that, you know, inevitably. I'm sure I've missed some stuff.
June Carbone:No, that's. That may well be how we came to write this together. So Claire had written a piece some years ago called Postmarital Family Law, which suggests that unmarried men are left out of the advantages of a shift in the mainstream family law system toward greater inclusion of both parents. And I had objected strongly, politely but strongly to that piece. Uh, and I had just finished a piece, a book with Naomi Khan called Fear Shake, and Nancy Levitt as well, Fear Shake, Women in the Fight for Just Economy. And while we started thinking of women as losing here, there and everywhere, as I like to put it, my strong conclusion, more than my co authors, was that women are not the biggest victims of this economy. Blue collar men are. And so I had been thinking in these terms and ran into Claire at a conference and Richard Reeves work was getting a lot of attention on what is happening to men and boys. Claire very much wanted to write something about it. I said I did too, and we decided to do this together.
Kim Krawiec:It's such a great academic story, right, that out of the germ of a disagreement comes a. A better piece because you. You have to press each other to really come together on an idea. So that's. That's wonderful to hear. All right. I am now going to turn it over to the boss for today, which is Damon, and he'll take it from here.
Speaker E:Perfect.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you. So after reading the essay, I had one question. Where your account treats fatherhood as an achieved status that is primarily grounded in caregiving, yet the reforms focus largely on biological fathers. How should the centers that you advocate for weigh a child's established bond with the social father against a biological father's later request for greater involvement. When might reintegration do more harm than good?
June Carbone:Yes. This goes to one of the reasons that Claire and I didn't agree on in some of our earlier work. We don't take on the definition of parentage. In fact, I have another piece I'm working on now that does. And one of the questions is how should that. How should the law approach that question? But for these purposes, our answer is pretty simple. With family centers, it's whomever walks in the door, two people are together and one is a legal father and the other. And with a mother who accepts that person as the father of the children, we don't think the center needs to go check. Does he have standing to claim the title of father? A center can take the couple as it finds them. A court can't. But the courts operate quite differently. So that is one of the advantages of our proposal. But we didn't address that directly in this piece.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Understood. Thank you very much. I think I'm going to pass it to Linnea, who has another question.
June Carbone:Go ahead.
Speaker D:So much, Damon. Thank you. Hi, nice to meet you.
Kim Krawiec:June.
Speaker D:So you identify economic precarity as the main driver of declining marriage and paternal involvement. So if unstable jobs and incomes are the root problem, what can family law reform realistically accomplish? So are community centers a path for reintegration or mainly a more humane way to manage the symptoms? And what evidence would distinguish those two possibilities?
June Carbone:Yes, Let me give you my short answer than my long answer. My short answer is the way we conceived it in this piece is when I started looking at where family centers had been most successful. What they do is they take resources available on a number of different pockets and combine them. A big one in the United States is assistance with finding a new job. So when you look at the child support enforcement system, which I'm going to talk about later, there are pockets of money within that that help with getting a new job. And we see folding those kinds of resources into family centers as essential to their success. Now I'm going to give you a little peek at my long answer. So one of the projects I'm working on now, book length, and it is so early, I don't have a title for it yet, is a large. A book length piece on what's happened to the economy and an argument that precarity is the name of this economy, that we've destroyed the. We've destroyed the organization, man, lifetime employment unions, the kind of jobs that led to people without college degrees, having stable employment that could support a family. And I don't see those jobs as coming back. I think the counter move spurred on by AI has got to ask the question what are people going to do in the future? And when we start answering that question seriously, we have to look at modern monetary theory, which is an economic theory, talks about the government becoming the employer of the last resort as a countercyclical move. I think thinking about European style flex security, that where you have government playing a greater role in retooling I call it, you should have a go back to free card, go back to school free card, get laid off, get the opportunity to retool. I imagine community colleges as centers for training daycare workers and having free daycare, I imagine, or subsidized daycare. I imagine the recreation of community as something that helps the with what happens when you get laid off, but in the shorter term. All we were proposing in this piece is doing what family courts already do. So that when you look at the way in which precurity destabilizes families, much of it is that people, including people with college degrees who go through career reverses, behave badly. And the men in particular behave badly. There are studies following the financial crisis that indicate men who are laid off are less likely to help around the house than men who are working full time. That ads for refrigerator repair schools appeared on the Cartoon Network. That job destabilization contributes to family destabilization in ways that are particularly linked to male behavior. Women tend to invest more in the family when they are laid off, but disruptions for women also contribute to relationship deterioration. Now, when you look at the divorce system, what you find that a lot of a family court does is it has counseling services, it has domestic violence prevention services, it has provisions for orders for family court custodial orders that minimize the contact between parents if conflict is high, but the ability to get through reverses, particularly in men's social standing. Although this affects women, the psychology is somewhat different. That is a critical component of what family court custodial services tries to address. And those resources are just not there for people who don't marry. And they're not there partly because they're not in family court, but partly because they find family court hostile even if they end up in court. So that part of things is something we recognize address in the family law system. I mean, mental illness is an issue, and services that help provide referrals to the right mental illness specialist is part of family court. It's not part of services for people who end up there. And we think family courts where they work provide a comprehensive set of services. And so you would take buckets of resources that are now in other places and put them into these family centers.
Kim Krawiec:June, I just want to jump in here for a clarification, perhaps for listeners who have not read the paper, because you discussed this in the paper, but in your at the beginning of your response to Linnea, you said in places where family centers have been most successful, what are those places? Are we referring to within the U.S. outside of the U.S. what is the model that you're kind of looking at when you say that?
June Carbone:Okay, first, they've been most systematically successful in Australia. There are some places in Europe that do some similar kinds of things. But family centers in Australia, which were designed to increase father involvement are available before a breakup. So again, you don't have to divorce to be eligible for the services. You can say, you know, we're fighting, we want help, and you can go in and there's a comprehensive set of services. The literature, again, it's not a transformation in Australia, but it has been part of the reinforcement of two parents who stay involved even if the adult relationship breaks up. So that's the model we used most comprehensively. Within the US There have been, as in Minneapolis, small scale studies where you've gotten some independent funding for pilot projects. They show some success, but the funding has not been consistent enough to say much. They generally, you know, try it in the fold. The place that's more comprehensive in the US Is where you see family center type activities. Instead of the child protective system, the family policing system, as it is now called on the left, child protective services more conventionally. And where that has been replaced by family services that are available before the family is in crisis, you see success. It costs less than intervention. That takes kids away, more likely to keep children with families and helps with things that might, you know, spiral into problems. That's not been designed to keep fathers involved. But as we say in the paper, child protective services is awful. They often take children away from mothers who are struggling and don't even think about including the fathers. And in some states, fathers who have not paid child support are ineligible for reunification services. And that whole system is a mess, but it spends a lot of taxpayer dollars without mostly accomplishing things many of us view as counterproductive. Great.
Kim Krawiec:Thank you. Back to you, Damon.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you, Linnea. I'm going to pass it over to Zahania, who will ask you her question.
Speaker D:Hi, June.
June Carbone:Thank you again for being here. Today my question is that this essay shows that childhood disadvantage affects boys educational outcomes more than girls. But it also notes that researchers have not identified a settled causal mechanism. Which explanations, whether it be school discipline, parental investment, peer norms, developmental differences, or something else, do you find most persuasive? And how should that uncertainty affect the reforms you would prioritize? So first, let me say in looking at literature, I did not find identification of the causal mechanisms persuasive. There are a number of different ones out there and they vary. In addition, a lot of the discussion of this is highly politicized. So for example, the idea of a male role model in the home is something that again, very important in some circumstances. But then you see counterexamples. I'll give you a simple example. Widows do just as well as married couples in raising kids, but single mothers don't. And that suggests it's not mere father presence that's going on. The part that's in the paper where I did a deep dive and was really struck by was the school setting. And so, and, and I would add that this corresponds with my own experiences out in California where I sent my kids to all kinds of schools in California. And my youngest son, who had some learning issues, was in special ed for, for a while. And he was the star of special ed because he didn't have any behavioral issues. And I got to to get to know some of the special ed teachers quite well. And one of the things they said to me, especially in Palo Alto, this is the home of Stanford, one of the wealthiest school districts in the country. And I met a special ed teacher from Palo Alto, the school district next to where my kids went. And she said to me, you know, especially when we look at black boys, a lot of them shouldn't be in special ed. They don't have learning issues, they have behavior issues. And what I saw in the literature that reflected that was the following teachers, when a father comes in and says this kid is getting a whooping, think, oh, problems taken care of, I don't have crackdown myself. When they meet with a single mother they view as overwhelmed, they think nothing's going to happen at home. When they deal with college educated parents who are furious that the teacher is cracking down on their kid, they figure the more I crack down, the more they're going to go to the principal. If you have a parent who seems again, overwhelmed, apologetic, lower income parents are more likely to say the teacher's right, then the teacher feels she has to take control of things. And this tends to accelerate Bias. So when you look at the racial dynamic of racial differences in school discipline, there's no question that black boys disproportionately are the subject of school discipline and that that contributes, I think, a variety of kinds of racial bias, but also a perception of black boys as older than they are or larger, you know, physically taller or more dangerous. Now put those together and what I see is a system where teachers are quicker with children who have less powerful parents to steer them into various disciplinary outcomes, you know, into special ed, into a suspension, into the principal's office. And the discipline itself has negative consequences that tend to isolate the child and increase the alienation from the school system. And in looking at this literature, and it fits with the more general critique of gender, what you find when you look at studies of adults, children, both girls and boys, who break the rules in early childhood earn more as adults. Our study of gender and the workplace is that modern America, think ge, Wells, Fargo, Walmart, valorize those who break the rules and get away with it. And our thesis in our book is that women lose because they are perceived as less willing to break the rules. They are in fact less willing to break the rules and they are punished more severely when they do break the rules. So they're less likely to get away with it in ways that will implicate the boss. When you ask what boys break the rules and get away with it? It's boys who have parents who run interference for them and deflect what might be discipline with really negative consequences for the boys. So that I think is a part, a description of what's in the literature on the school system that when I was going through is not in any comprehensive way in the existing literature. But my composite analysis of the, of the studies that we relied on for this piece suggests that that's a big factor. And I would add there's a separate literature on urban gangs that suggest that for boys who are growing up in circumstances where, you know, they're not getting a lot of nurturance at home, that gangs are a counter socialization. And being part of a gang gives you a group where you feel you belong. It's an increase in status, it's a reinforcement of the break the rules behavior. And it's something that's different for boys than girls. And again, what you see are the kind of boys who in an upper middle class community are more likely to become corporate executives, are also more likely to be gang members in low income neighborhoods. It is that the assertion of dominance, risk taking, which are valorized in certain corporate settings also tend to correspond with more law breaking. And if the response is elevation and status of the boy in the group, group of boys, or crack down in a way that alienates from mainstream institutions, this exacerbates all the problems that are part of development. So almost all of the tough on crime stuff has counterproductive effects on boys. Whereas the more effective crime control things kind of things being done in Baltimore right now, which has had a massive drop in crime, are identify the place where the most arrests are occurring, move in in a preemptive way, create more activities that get kids off the streets, intervene at earlier stages. But that's like what I was describing with community centers. Community centers that take, say, anti crime resources, put them in buckets with active community involvement have more effect than crackdowns that occur after wrongdoing has already occurred or after a single mother is in trouble or after the family has fallen apart. Thank you. I did not think about it that way and that was very interesting. Thank you so much.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you very much, Sahanya. I'm going to pass it over to Jake.
Speaker E:Thanks, Damon. Hi, June. It's nice to meet you and thank you for being here. So when I was reading the article, I really liked kind of the discussion of how fathers can be like incentivized and persuaded to engage with the centers that the article proposes. It kind of left me wondering though whether there might be kind of a similar need for. For like persuasion or incentivization for mothers to engage with the centers in kind of a similar way. I remember reading in the article that there's kind of a variety of reasons why divorced or unmarried mothers might be hesitant to allow fathers in some circumstances to access access to their children. There might be serious issues like substance abuse or domestic violence. There's other reasons, like not wanting to complicate a potential new romantic relationship. And the article mentions that mothers sometimes use children as a source of leverage to ensure that the father pays child support. I'd imagine that in a lot of those situations it's kind of like a no other options situation. But knowing these things, I. I kind of wonder if a lot of mothers might be hesitant to engage with the centers, maybe for fear of being pressured into a custody arrangement they don't want or losing some bargaining leverage vis a vis the father. And I think that that might be an especially significant issue if fathers are kind of. If some fathers kind of use the process that the centers have to lay the groundwork for going to court in the future. So I guess my Question is, how could the centers reassure mothers that engagement would be in the mother's best interest?
June Carbone:This is an issue that Claire and I spent an enormous amount of time on in the paper or outside the paper? Coming to a conclusion. So Claire's suggestions in this earlier paper that I disagreed with were to increase the custodial rights and the ease of obtaining custodial rights for unmarried fathers. And I had objected for exactly the reasons you laid out. And we both like the idea of these centers because of voluntary involvement. Now, one reason we didn't spend more time thinking about this is Clara's mantra is the women want the men involved. Well, the truth is the women want the men involved. If they behave, that is, if you do surveys of low income women and unmarried women in general who at least start off with the romantic partner, they would prefer to have the men more involved. And they get fed up with the men. And so women initiate the majority of breakups. Something like two thirds of all divorces are initiated by women. That was true before. No fault divorce. It is true now. One suspects that the number is higher in the context of low income communities. But our thesis in going through this is if you can get through the things that cause the breakup. In other words, and you know, I say this in friends too. I have friends who have divorced who I think if they could only have gotten through that period in their lives, they're really well suited for each other. Other people can't imagine why they were ever together in the first place. Those are two different groups of people. So if you're talking about couples who have difficulties or are simply at their wit's end, he got laid off. They can't pay the bills. They're fighting all the time. Both the men and the women may like a community based service. And by the way, a little footnote on the model for these things. If you talk to effective religious groups, the Mormon churches, good example, they have lots of community based couples counseling. Orthodox Judaism does too. And that counseling is often help in getting a job. So if you see the entry point is he's been laid off, he's sitting around, he's getting drunk, he's not pleasant to be with. If you see the center as a place that helps you get a job that's attractive to both men and women. If the issue is mental illness, and you often have people who are decent enough partners and then go through a stretch where they're really crazy, I mean, I can tell you why a doctor friend who's going through that with a wife who's been diagnosed is bipolar. If you can get help, that stabilizes the behavior of the partner. That's often something both of the moment and now there. One of the things that Claire and I again talked about is, okay, so as you go to one of these centers and you reach an agreement, the couple have separated, they reach an agreement, they have what looks like a custody schedule, should it be legally enforceable in court? And I, Claire was out in saying, yes, I was unwilling to do that in this piece, again for the reasons you suggest. When you look at the literature on going to court, what you find is that if you're looking at low income men, something like fewer than 10% have custodial orders at all. Whereas the percentage of men going through divorce who end up with custodial orders is increasing and now quite high. Even among custody men going through divorce, as opposed to unmarried men, the likelihood of having a custodial order increases with income until you reach a certain point. And then they largely have custodial orders if they want them. So low income men don't go to court and use it as a point of leverage, because when you look at the most marginalized group of men, they want to say at court, the odds that there is an arrest warrant out or a bench warrant for things like a speeding ticket they didn't pay or a past child support payment that's not paid is large. And they have negative experiences and difficulty negotiating. The system. Where you see the courts being used as leverage in ways that are hostile to women with less agency are men who are somewhat better off and abusive. And so what we did in this piece is to try to say we're going to make this voluntary, we're going to make it community based, and we're not going to make it something that is an appendage of family court, so you can go enforce it. Because we were concerned about exactly the issues you're talking about. By the way, the place where women are the biggest problems in terms of blocking male participation is where they have new partners. And one of the racial differences you get is black women are less likely to have racial partner new partners than white women. White women with a college, with a high school degree, but not a college degree, have the largest number of partners, live in partners of any group in the country, and particularly if they're white, black women have fewer partners and the expectation of continued father involvement is higher. So that the community norms are somewhat different by race and they're changing for whites, for blacks. These have been the patterns for the last half century.
Speaker E:That's really interesting. Thank you for your answer.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you very much, Jake. Now passing it over to Kate.
Speaker D:Hi, June, it's very nice to meet you. Throughout the essay it mentions multiple times that these centers are supposed to feel separate from the state and outside of the state's legal system, but they would also be state funded and therefore inevitably monitored to a certain extent to ensure transparency and accountability to the taxpayers. So what information should these centers collect and share and how would you preserve the participant privacy while still providing this public accountability for outcomes and spending?
June Carbone:Yes, I think that's a huge issue. And as I said, I am working on this new project and I do think in it I view economic procurity as something that is, that starts with automation and starts with the change in the workforce more generally where at the height of the industrial era. So I like to say this, the family wage began not as a result of unionization, but as a result of Henry ford's efforts in 1914. In 1913, Ford Motor Company had 377% turnover and Henry Ford adopted the family wage, where he doubled the starting salary for Ford Motor Company workers in 1914. And the model he adopted was so successful, all the other auto companies adopted it. And unions fought more for job stability than for higher wages in the 50s, the high point of unionization. And that laid the foundation for what was a much more stable middle class. And that's, I think that's gone. And I think it's gone not just because the political will to enforce it is gone, which is also true, but because employers there are large employers are churning the skills they want. If these are routine skills, they're moving toward automation and AI. If these are more complex skills, 50% of tech workers leave the industry within 10 years. Tech skills, which have been in demand until recently, are outmoded and need retooling or the ability to move into management. And so you don't have job stability even in the higher reaches of the economy. Now, once you accept that as a permanent feature of the new economy, I think we have to address the question where are jobs going to come from future? And the demand for things that involve services. And services are healthcare, education, judo instructors, lawn care guys. It's close to unlimited, but the ability to pay for it isn't. And the problem with public funding is going to be corruption. Now, I want to emphasize the corruption in the public sector is arguably less than the corruption in the public sector. It's just that the political valiance of corruption in the public sector Discredits the programs. And so I do think that's a huge issue right now. Community centers. I mean, you know, the whole issue about the Somalis in Minnesota, which you know, is not just the Somalis, but is a more general problem with money having been available for NGOs without adequate safeguards. Yeah, you get corruption. You do. Anytime you have those kinds of involvements, you get less corruption with public employees. And the question then becomes, could you have community centers that counter that? That's way beyond the scope of the article. It's something I'm thinking a lot about because if you want to increase jobs, entrepreneurship is another area where the increase in demand is large. But you need financing.
Kim Krawiec:So.
June Carbone:So to start a lawn service company, you need to be able to get loans, reacquire the equipment, et cetera, build up your flying phase. So that whole question I think is huge and frankly, it's outside the scope of this paper. It's a very good question. In the community centers that exist, and by the way, they also exist in New York City without a lot of studies on their affected. New York City is one place that has tried to do something like this. I don't see a lot of corruption again, I see more corruption where you have government money that goes to NGOs, less corruption where the government sets up directly these kind of community based organizations. But you know, the question of what corruption? You know, in the military and prisons we have all of these private players. Now there's massive corruption in all of this, but it doesn't get the same political attention. You know, I've, I'm currently angry at my state AG who is announcing that he brought an$11 million recovery against some of the people involved in the Medicaid fraud that has been getting all the publicity.$11 million is nothing. United Healthcare is engaged in defrauding the government at several multiples of $11 million. State AG's offices don't have the resources to take on United Healthcare. And so I think this is an issue and I would like and I. But I have not done a deep dive on where you see the greatest degree of corruption.
Speaker D:Thank you very much. That's very interesting.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you very much. Over to Tyler.
Speaker D:Thank you so much, Damon. My question is kind of related to Kate's in that it touches on funding. So it's clear from your article that the current family family regulation system does not meet the needs of many families, especially those involving unmarried parents. I definitely see merit in the idea of creating these proposed community based centers, but worry that Creating a whole new division could place additional burdens on a system that's already strained. The funding model for the proposed system largely relies on reallocating funds. The community based centers would serve a population that is currently not serviced by the court based system at all. Do you think reallocation of funds is a sufficient means to meet the expanded demand for services or as an offset that still requires new additional funding? How do you avoid overburdening the system and minimize the risk of spreading it too thin? My main concern is the quality of the services declining as the size of the population that's served increases.
June Carbone:Right. So let me give you three answers. First, there are some motivated community groups. So I mentioned the Mormon community because I have, and I've had lots of discussions with Brad Wilcox who likes to point out that if both parents attend church regularly, that reduces the risk of divorce. One of the reasons is the services built into churches. Now if you then instead of focusing on churches, ask what about community groups? There are some community groups quite motivated to provide services. And if you have this mix of, you know, people who are motivated already with some degree of funding and support, I don't think this has to be super expensive. But in the states where you don't have enough money for public school teachers to begin with much more basic level of services, you're not going to get adequate funding. And so whereas in New York City, New York City has services like this, they're not particularly well funded and not as effective as the services in Australia which are more comprehensive, but they do exist in some places in the US if you had a broader movement toward the idea that you need community based solutions to employment procurity, I think you would see a more comprehensive move toward greater funding. That's political. That's not a short term answer.
Speaker D:Thank you.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you very much. Tyler. Passing it over to Angelica.
June Carbone:Hi, it's nice to meet you. Tune. You mentioned before the Australia's family relationship relationship centres in the essay particularly mentions that proposed to community based centers must address family violence. However, when reading this I noticed in footnote 398 it cites research finding that only 10% of participants with a documented history of family violence were actually screened out at these centers and 40% with a history of violence never actually disclosed it. Supporting the fact that the Australian centers quote, have been criticized for failure to adequately screen for intimate partner violence. Now, given that lower income American families, which is our target population here, potentially also have high rates of intimate partner violence, what specifically could the US centers do differently in intake or screening to avoid replicating this failure rate rather than
Speaker D:just adopting the Australian's model structures along
June Carbone:with its documented screening gap. First that you read footnotes. I'm impressed. This is one of the areas that Claire and I spent a lot of time on. So Claire's work, I mean one of the criticisms of her earlier piece has been does it take, including criticisms by me, does it take domestic violence seriously enough? And on the other hand, the fact that violence is pervasive in low income communities and more likely by women as well as men is a problem because. And the current literature on domestic violence emphasizes the ability to distinguish between low level pervasive violence, shoving for example, versus coercive command and control kind of violence and the ability to screen for it. So every time I see my doctor, she asks me, am I safe at home? I want you to know I just had my 47th wedding anniversary. I feel very safe at home. But this is part of the screen, the pervasive screening. I don't think it's all that effective. And so our model depends on voluntary participation. So with, even with men who have been accused of violence, what you have within the context, it's very hard for me to answer this quickly because there is a different body of research that deals with divorce. And part of what that literature finds, I mean this is the ineffectiveness of screening, is that the modern system of divorce is so committed to due parent involvement that even in cases where there is credible allegation of violence, there is still an emphasis on shared custody. And the way the mainstream divorce system has dealt with it is by trying to minimize parent contact. So the ideal in the divorce system are things like mom gets the kids, you know, Monday through Thursday, dad gets the kids Thursday night through Monday morning. And the drop offs take place at school. Dad picks up the kids from school on Thursday, drops them off Monday morning, He doesn't ever have to see or talk to mom. And to the extent that they need to talk to each other, you have a parenting coordinator as specified as part of the parenting plan. That coordinator, paid for by the parents, is the one who receives phone calls from both and arranges for the parents to talk to each other if that's unavoidable. That is what's taking place in the family law system that exists currently to minimize violence while keeping both parents involved. Where the violence does not involve the children directly. There are criticisms that system over emphasizes keeping fathers involved even in the face of credible threats of violence. In low income communities, as I said, violence is more common. But the background level of violence is so high that merely the existence of some violence at some times, even if credibly established, should not be disqualifying for continued criminal involvement because it's so common. And so one of the reasons we make this voluntary and emphasize the voluntary participation of mothers is that if the mother comes in and says, I'm terrified of that guy, there can be no voluntary agreement unless her fears are addressed. And so we see the protection in the system we're proposing as voluntary participation. Thank you so much.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you very much. Now over to Mia.
Speaker D:Hi June. On the topic of Screening Systems, Part 4C of your essay describes a screening system to identify the cases that involve serious allegations that threaten child well being given examples of cases that should be treated differently than the current regulation system would treat. Such cases include the mother agrees separation from her partner is unnecessary and when the mother wants to separate from the father but agrees children should have ongoing contact with the father. In both scenarios, it seems that it's the mother's preference being taken into account. So my question is how do you envision intervention rules that can tell the difference between a mother who's making a free informed choice to stay involved with the father and the mother whose stated preference is itself shaped by coercive control without just defaulting to always believe her
June Carbone:or always remove him? Yeah, and the problem here is, I mean if you read the literature, especially on the family policing system, you also have children being denied contact with fathers where the mother wants that involvement. And that within the criminal system or the system that involves mandatory reporting has been driven by the idea that the state needs to intervene because we can't trust the mothers to tell the difference. I think one reason I felt very strongly about this not resulting in mandatory customers custodial orders that could be enforced at court was to provide protection from that. And, and again, if you look at the, there are a series of tools that for people who are attentive to domestic violence. So I've already mentioned one of the things I see in the mainstream family law system is keeping the party separate from each other so they don't have contact, even if father has contact with children. And I see that as an important kind of thing. The other thing is counsel. Now I am actually pretty skeptical about anger management, especially among low income folks. Not because you can't work with low income folks, but if you're talking about a community in which there are high levels of violence to begin with and then you have a middle class anger management model, I don't Think it's that well attuned. On the other hand, if you look at community groups, they are used to dealing with the threat of violence, again, because it's pervasive. So to keep the couple involved, you have to address it. But there should be cases where the answer is end of involvement. If you look at women who don't have child support orders, 16% say they just don't want contact with the father and they're willing to forego any kind of support report. A larger number that say, we've already worked it out.
Speaker D:Thank you.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you, Mia. Now over to Joseph. Hi, June. Thanks for being here.
June Carbone:In the paper, you and Claire suggest
Damon Stefankiewicz:possible exceptions to mandatory reporting laws so that families can seek help without automatically triggering state surveillance.
June Carbone:So where should the reporting line be drawn?
Damon Stefankiewicz:You've sort of talked about this a
June Carbone:little bit with the, with the screening system. But once abuse has already been discovered, where should that line be drawn and what information should stay confidential? What should still require a report? And why is that boundary better for children than the current rule of mandatory reporting? Yeah, and I must say I view the privacy issues today. I'm terrified by them in a way I wasn't when we wrote the article. That much has changed on the mandatory reporting. I mean, almost everybody in this space, I mean, family law professors who write about these issues agree it's gone too far. And, and this is a footnote. I am working with people who are involved in the pediatric child abuse space where you have, you know, you take your kid to the emergency room. This is a four month old baby, they do X rays, they find hairline fractures, they report you for child abuse without investigating whether there might be other explanations. This is a mandatory reporting system and it is utterly destructive. So I think, you know, the line I would draw is Tarasov. There is a famous case where you have somebody who is telling a psychiatrist that he is going to kill somebody and the psychiatrist doesn't report it because of confidentiality and ends up being found liable when his patient then murders the person he was threatening in the therapy sessions. That's about where I draw the line. Where you have credible threats of fairly not imminent violence, but violence occurring, people are aware of it. That's where the duty to warn is where I would draw the line. But the mandatory reporting now is such that it makes it almost impossible to deal with the fact that counseling of violence that has not yet been reported. So, yeah, the two systems that are utterly pernicious in breaking up families are the mandatory reporting and draconian Punitive child support enforcement. By the way, there's a huge literature on this. Our paper touches the surface on mandatory reporting.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Over to Liz.
Speaker D:Hi June. Thank you for all of your insightful answers this far. I'm going to shift our discussion from safety to my question about child support. The article advocates that child support should become more negotiable and less punitive. So how should the system distinguish inability to pay from unwillingness to pay? What enforcement mechanisms would preserve stability for the children and receiving parents without recreating the sanctions that drive fathers away from? My main concern is that the proposed less formal system of child support agreements will equate to less protections and less stability for the children and the parents when the other parent fails to meet the terms of the child support agreement.
June Carbone:The first thing is you've got to get rid of the state initiating system. I mean, I don't know anybody who has good things to say about it. And I have spent some time in the research for this article and on other things I'm doing, doing a deep dive on things. And the best. Well, I won't say that there is really powerful work done by Tanya Brito and Sal Angel Maldonado about the destructiveness of the system. But the part that has influenced me is by Daniel Hatcher, Baltimore. And what he shows is that so the child support enforcement system arose back. In fact, I litigated some of the early cases back circa 1980 and over the course of the 70s, 80s and 90s, it complemented the attack on welfare benefits. But in 1996 we got rid of the FDC program, but we doubled down on child support force. And when you look at how the system operates and look at Hatcher's work, it's that there is a huge amount of federal funding in the background. It creates incentives for the creation of child support. Specific courts of NGOs who do the enforcement, all of it is incentivized by how much money they collect. And Clarence Thomas in a dissent in a Supreme Court case said, but of course we should put the screws to these guys. The people who say they can't pay if you threaten them with jail, come up with money they say they don't have and they do, but they do it by borrowing it from somebody or taking the money they're using to feed their current kids as opposed to their former kid, you know, the kids from the last relationship to get out of jail. That system is counterproductive in almost every way and it undermines father involvement. It reduces the amount fathers contribute to their children. It is driven by political concerns and it should be abolished. In my opinion that is the part that is driven by the desire to reimburse the public fisc. You're talking about fathers who even if they fully supported their kids, could not keep them from government benefits. And what happened with the abolition of AFDC is that when we then had Medicaid expansion and Medicaid in general, if you're getting Medicaid benefits, then the state will go after the father for reimbursement of the state to collect value of Medicaid benefits. That's outrageous. It's just absolutely outrageous. Fathers going through the divorce system are not subject to child support because you know, because their families have state subsidized employer provided health care. This is a system that puts the screws to poor men. The vast majority of the arrears in that system are low income men who can't afford to pay. So the part that reimburses state coffers is like is a system that redistributes upward. We have fewer benefits for low income families and we put the screws to low income men to support the state, not their families. That system is outrageous. If you got rid of that part, the part that reimburses state coffers, then you could have, then what you would end up doing is giving greater power to women to negotiate. So the second thing about this child support system that's different from the divorce system, the divorce system now, and you know, I have my misgivings about it, but basically the more custodial time a father gets, the lower the amount of child support he owes. In most states, low income men don't have access to that. They may have the kid 50% of the time. They don't get a reduction in state initiated child support actions. When you look at the low income mothers who are dealing with the fathers and I, I want to emphasize this, I don't view this as oh, you don't get to see the kids unless you pay. What I see is that the mothers and fathers who are on semi good terms, the father has to contribute some or he doesn't see the kid. And if the father is abusive, the mother or you know, has a new second family and is supporting them and not giving anything to the first family, he doesn't get to see the kids. But it's not quid pro quo. It's not entirely transactional. It's the fathers who want to see their kids know they have to be on the mother's good side. And that means contributing when they can afford to. Those relationships tend to be constructive. Fathers contribute more if there are no child support orders and they see their kids more if there are no if they stay out of court. And so we want the community centers to reinforce that model of good feelings. But getting rid of the state initiated child support actions is essential, though providing some assistance for mothers who are getting no child support. I'm entirely in favor of it.
Speaker D:Thank you.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you very much. And for our closing question, it will go to Virginia.
Speaker D:Hi June, thanks for being here. My question is kind of on the same thread of this relationship between mothers and fathers. Your comparison point in the paper leads back to 1970, when there was higher male unemployment, high marriage rates, and a high rate of fathers being the breadwinners of families. That world also kind of depended on women's limited options under patriarchal values during the time and family law in the following decades spent years taking that apart. How do you separate a decline in male well being from the loss of a structural advantage? I guess phrased differently, what part of what men have lost were they entitled to keep? Here I know the goal is not to reestablish these patriarchal values, but what status are men entitled to in this modern version when the anxiety that they're feeling is derived from a feeling of inadequacy that's based on these already like prior social values.
June Carbone:So I, I'm smiling because I, I, I love the question. I've spent my entire career writing about it. Uh, the synopsis of what I wrote, written about at great length, is the women's movement as a capitalist plot. I remember I lived through a lot of this. We felt back in the 70s when I was a student, that we were exercising agency, that this was a fight for women's rights, et cetera. By the 90s, my conclusion was the new family form. And I have other pieces coming out on this is the cornerstone. Modern marriage is egalitarian relationships by two people who can both leave. They stay together because they've deferred marriage until the point of emotional maturity and some degree of financial cushion. Middle income families who stay together trade off, but they both contribute in different ways. And this requires a higher degree of emotional maturity, relationship trust, reciprocity, mutual respect. And this is beyond the reach of a good part of the population. So if you see that, and I want to emphasize I'm going to be a little more political, but there is a vast right wing conspiracy that says economics cannot explain culture. We have an economist, Melissa Carney who just wrote a book saying economics cannot explain culture, but all of your economics explains the decline in marriage. I think it's bs. I think you have two huge changes. I think the greater autonomy of women is one of them. I think you have an upper middle class adjustment that affects most of you in the room that says, hey, you don't get married at all unless you find the right guy and the right guy respects you. The place where you have unequal relationships that survive is above 250,000 a year as the break point where families can get a buy on one income. I mean, as a more generic matter in comprehensive studies. So when I look at this, what I say is there's a new upper class model. It is an adjustment to women's greater autonomy. It requires two people who contribute. When I look at my friends, especially the women who don't marry, but some of the men who don't marry too, they're with somebody they don't view as an equal partner. If they feel that way, they don't get married. And so yes, you're right. But what you then have to add in is if you look, and I've been looking at these statistics for the last 30 years, blue collar men are worse off than they were in 1979. Men without a college degree, their income has either flattened or declined. Once you adjust for the value of the dollar precarity in employment, I.e. the number of job changes. What you found by studies done in the mid-90s is it had not increased for college grads, it had increased substantially for non college grads. When you look at how men are successful, I mean, like my father was a carpenter. The low point in my parents marriage was when my father wasn't making much money, which tended to be because of an economic downturn. There are going to be tensions getting through those tensions. My parents had a very strong. Marriage is still difficult for most couples. And so yes, unless we are committed to addressing the changes created by the economy, you're not going to get higher levels of marriage or relationship stability outside of marriage. Economics does explain a large part of what has happened. We have no concerted effort to fund or to study in ways that affect policymakers the intersection between economics and family. I'm hoping with the renewed attention to fertility, there will be greater exploration of those concepts.
Speaker D:Thank you.
Kim Krawiec:Thanks so much, June, for doing this and thank you Damon, for being our fearless leader today. Either one of you, we're out of questions, but. But if either one of you have some closing thoughts, you can offer them.
Speaker D:All right.
June Carbone:Well, thank you. I want to say, these are great questions. You certainly. When Claire and I started the project, one of our issues was the question you were asking, which is, what could family law say about it? Claire was more convinced than I that family law has something to say about it. But at the end, we both agree. I mean, whatever differences we started with, we came together on what's in the paper.
Kim Krawiec:Great.
June Carbone:Thank you very much.
Kim Krawiec:Thank you, June.
Damon Stefankiewicz:Thank you very much.
June Carbone:Bye. Bye.
