Jen McIntosh: Child Abuse by stealth – flawed research and ideology contaminating family law

Mis-represented, poorly structured, open to observer bias, inaccurate, agenda driven, pseudo-science. These are some of the apt descriptions of the recently released guidelines on shared parenting recommendations for toddlers, which attempt to contradict volumes of research, dating back decades,  from hundreds of independent researchers, all who have found quite the opposite.

I would encourage all to treat these guidelines as policy statements from an ultra-left leaning political party, rather than well-researched recommendations, given that it has all the hallmarks of a well-meaning, but recklessly determined, and ultimately unsubstantiated piece of political folly.

Jen McIntosh, a self-confessed anti-shared care Zealot

The main protagonist behind these guidelines, Dr. Jennifer McIntosh, is adourned with an esteemed salutation, but don’t be fooled into concluding that this woman is an impartial researcher, or a researcher who is promoting the welfare of children, for she is doing none of the above.

Jen McIntosh is  a lobbyist first, and a social researcher last, given the pseudo-science she frequently promotes as the foundation of her anti-shared parenting campaigning.

These new guidelines, when placed in a real world environment and combined with previous research from Jen McIntosh, will effectively end fatherly contact with children from toddlers to teenagers, if the current 2011 family violence amendments have not already done so.

McIntosh it must be said has an extensive history of anti-shared care campaigning.  She has in fact been on the record opposing shared care long before any of her pseudo science appeared to ‘conveniently’ support her campaigning.

When Science becomes contaminated by Ideology

This woman is a self-confessed anti-shared care zealot, and has used her doctorate to pass ‘bias opinion’ as some form of reliable research. She has colluded with other well-noted father-haters in the past, including previous Family Court Judge, Richard Chisholm, to release results of research that she has conducted, that has been so poorly structured and open to observer bias that it would even shame a year 10 high school student.

There is in fact nothing in her current studies that empirically confirms the conclusion that overnight stays (especially considering that the toddler is asleep) is more distressing to a toddler than day time separation from a primary carer, or is more distressing than forcing a toddler into long daycare, which is exactly what happens in most cases when fathers are excluded from care.

McIntosh seems to rely on her entrenched subjective beliefs, conjecture and selective interpretation of what can in many cases be benign or otherwise normal behaviours.

McIntosh’s significantly flawed ‘cautionary notes’ research would even shame a 10th grader

These guidelines follow the same pattern as her previous report entitled “Cautionary notes on the shared care of children in conflicted relationships“, where she contrasted the stress experienced by children in recently separated, shared parenting arrangements, to the stress experienced by (..wait for it) children in intact (non-separated) families.

The fact that she concluded that shared parenting children experienced more stress than children of an intact family should be a no-brainer, given that their family had just separated, but to conclude on this basis that shared parenting was therefore bad for children was just plain incorrect, if not, in my opinion, remarkably dis-honest.

All McIntosh proved was that divorce was stressful, and any credible researcher would not have tried to use a slight of hand to fool the reader into believing that shared parenting was the significant stressor in these case studies.

What McIntosh failed to explain is why she didn’t choose to contrast the stress experienced by children in recently separated, shared parenting families, with the stress experienced by children in separated, ‘sole-custody’ arrangements. This would have been the appropriate comparison of subjects to make, but appallingly, this was not done. It would be no stretch to say that if she had used the appropriate research subjects, her conclusion may in fact have been the polar opposite of what she finally found.

If she had used proper research practices, one would have presumed that the latter group of children living in sole custody arrangements would have experienced higher, if not significantly higher,  stress levels than those children in shared parenting arrangements, thereby concluding that shared parenting, even in conflicting relationships, was in many cases less stressful than the alternatives.

But of course, this was not the narrative that McIntosh wanted to convey, was it?

So as with this latest report, why let the facts, or in fact a child’s best interests, get in the way of a political victory, especially when you have a receptive, left-leaning government in office.

Isn’t that correct Jen?

In response to the following article

Ingrid Epstein