Equal Parenting
In contrast to the lenient treatment of mothers who disobey court contact orders, there appears no hesitation by courts to punish fathers who breach other types of court orders affecting their family. For instance, the case of Mark, reported in the Daily Mail of 25 June 2007. Repeatedly denied access to his three children by the mother after his divorce, Mark was jailed for standing outside his house to wave to them after a court order demanding that he severe all ‘contact’ with them. It took ten years and 133 court hearings before they were eventually re-united with him.
The 1989 Children Act
Although the Children Act 1989 has many sensible provisions to protect the wellbeing of children, its central premise of dividing separating parents on family breakdown into ‘resident’ and ‘contact’, with their consequent unequal legal status, can aggravate and escalate family conflict when parents are faced with a ‘win or lose’ situation in adversarial family proceedings.
The perception also, amongst mothers generally, that they are bound to come off best in any family court decisions, is likely to encourage more of them to try this route if they are at all dissatisfied with their relationship.
Both these aspects could be reduced if the 1989 Act was amended to state clearly that the ‘default’ position following parental separation was of ‘equal parenting’, providing there were no aggravating factors to prevent this. Equal parenting in this context means equal legal status for both parents and not necessarily equal time sharing, which certainly might not be practicable for many parents or indeed their children.
The beneficial effect of this would be twofold. First, fewer cases would be contested and reach the family courts, since there would be a disincentive to many parents, especially mothers, to resort to family courts for trivial or specious reasons. Second, in those contested cases still reaching the courts, the courts would by law have to reconcile the best interests of the child with equal (or shared) parenting ‘as the norm’. Both these effects must be of benefit to children, and both would reduce the huge existing cost of family breakdown to society.
