April 2018

• Author: Robert E. Emery,Barbara A. Babb
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12333

EDITORIAL NOTE

APRIL 2018

This April issue of Family Court Review is a twofer. The volume is a special issue guest edited

by Kathleen Bergman and Mark Cummings on how parent, family, and community conflict affect

children’s development. The volume also includes a special feature guest edited by Barbara Stark

on how the administration of President Donald Trump is affecting children’s rights. The guest edi-

tors offer their own, detailed comments on the articles that appear in the sections under their

respective auspices. Because of this, we provide only a brief introduction to both the special issue

and the special feature. Further, in order to accommodate our abundance of exceptional scholar-

ship, we are not including law student Notes in this issue, having planned for this by publishing

four Notes in the January 2018 issue. We expect to resume publication of the Notes in the July

2018 issue.

Bergman and Cummings’ special issue should be of interest to the readers of FCR not only

because of the specific, innovative articles found here but also for the tradition of research that these

articles represent. Cummings, Bergman, and their colleagues are leaders among academic researchers

who study conflict and its effects rigorously and who use a variety of innovative, technical methods.

Their work, as represented by the articles that appear in this volume, provides basic research support

for why family court professionals rightly are concerned with parental and family conflict and its

effects on children. The academic work also helps to extend the practitioner’s focus, for example, by

documenting how, when, and why conflict can have constructive effects on children rather than its

more typical destructive effects. Two examples are when conflict is resolved and when constructive

explanations are offered as reasons for the conflict. Finally, academic research sometimes challenges

received clinical wisdom. As examples, one article in this issue points to the importance of names –

calling a dispute “high conflict” rather than “abusive” (when it may be both); another documents

that the normative effect of denigrating your co-parent is not alienation but distancing your children

from you.

Bergman and Cummings marry the “ivory tower” of research to the “real world” of family

courts. We honor that union.

For her special feature, Barbara Stark has convened an impressive group of law professors, all

of whom are experts in the area of children’s rights, both to comment and to write longer articles

about the impact of the Trump administration on “children’s human rights to health, education, an

adequate standard of living, and quality childcare,” among other issues. For this special feature,

five scholars contribute short pieces, or comments, that highlight troubling and compelling con-

cerns for children as a result of certain of the Trump administration’s policies and priorities, such

as their actions regarding immigration. In the three longer articles, our experts write about child-

ren’s right to food, their rights to participate in the child welfare process, and the value of human

rights education for children.

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 56 No. 2, April 2018 205–206

V

C2018 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts