Shared Parenting
Nothing stirs up passions more than the controversy generated when parents are at war over the custody of a child.
Ideally, parents who separate can and do maintain civil relationships, where the children traverse freely between two households, often times mum and dad becoming 'better' parents due to spending individual quality time with their children. Thankfully, there are plenty of success stories that illustrate that for many separation need not be a battlefield of destruction.
However this ideal is not attainable for all and the phenomenon of 'fatherlessness' has been raised as a major political and social issue.
Affection, money, power and revenge. All these aspects are covered in depth by the writers but scant mention is made of the most important aspect - how to properly determine the well being of the children emotionally and physically.Full article
Custody Rules Expose Children To War Zones
IN A finding that challenges the Howard government's changes to child custody laws, new research has found that children aged under 10 can be emotionally harmed by shared-parenting arrangements in many families. Where parents cannot co-operate and remain hostile towards each other, shared-parenting arrangements can result in a higher-than-normal rate of clinical anxiety in the children, the research found.
Law Reform by Frozen Chook
There are numerous references to the hope that a shared parenting law would alleviate the distress of non-custodial parents, the majority of whom are fathers. The fathers’ groups persistently claim that the Court is ‘biased’ against them. But their claims had (and have) no empirical support: the literature and the available studies show that the Family Court makes orders (in contested cases) in favour of fathers at twice the rate of those made by consent
Iemma calls for changes to co parenting laws
A harrowing account of a woman's struggle to escape her abusive husband has sparked calls from NSW Premier Morris Iemma for changes to co parenting laws for separated parents. Under a massive overhaul of family law by the Federal Government in March, judges must consider granting parents equal time with their children after a family break down.
But Mr Iemma said it appeared the new laws were not working because they ended up, in some cases, having a "perverse'' effect on the lives of women and children who had escaped abusive relationships.
Fathers Rights and Family Law
A long-standing goal of fathers’ rights groups is a rebuttable presumption of joint custody following family breakdown. This would mean that children would be required to reside with both separated parents for equal periods, unless there were good reasons to do otherwise. There are at least five problems with the proposed rebuttable presumption of joint residence. First, such a presumption of joint residence is unnecessary: there are no formal obstacles to parents sharing the care of children after separation and divorce. Family law already endorses the principle of shared parenting. Separating parents can make arrangements for shared residence, and small numbers do.
More divorced dads caring for kids
Divorced dads are increasingly becoming the primary carers of their children: in the first six months of this year, the number of fathers receiving child support payments from their former wives has doubled. Child Support Agency assistant general manager David Mole said new agency figures revealed separated fathers now played a much greater role in the lives of their children. More than 21 per cent of cases registered with the agency in the first six months of this year had a male receiving child support, double the rate across the total of all CSA cases. Increasingly, parents paying child support also have more contact with their children.
FORUM: 'THE OTHER SIDE OF FATHERS' RIGHTS CONTROVERSY
Just about everything the fathers' rights activist say and do is a self-serving sham. They talk about shared parenting but practice sole custody for fathers and near-termination of maternal contact and rights with their children. Mothers are forced into supervised visitation on frivolous grounds of "interfering" with the father's relationship with the children. They falsely complain about widespread court favouritism toward mothers but conceal the fact most of their activists have sole or joint custody and receive child support instead paying support. On a local radio program several years ago, area fathers made these complaints about courts biases against fathers -- but all these men claimed to be one of the lucky ones who got sole custody.
Australian Men's Experience of Non Resident Fathering
In a recent qualitative study, one hundred and thirty-five Australian nonresident fathers from varied educational and socio-economic backgrounds were interviewed and spoke of their post-separation parenting experiences. In their efforts to maintain strong relationships with children, they acknowledged the importance of interparental relationships. They identified work, former partners and the sole-residence arrangement as obstacles to their meaningful engagement with children and to their significant contribution to children's lives. They reflected on their own fathers' influence on their attitude to fathering and on what fathering meant to them. They recognised the impact of separation on their fathering, with the various stresses and parental satisfaction it has brought. They expressed strong views on child support and on what they perceive to be a biased legal system. Their voices, at times temperate, at times angry, deserve a hearing if we are to understand and encourage them to remain engaged with children.
Too Little Time
Families need the option of shared responsibility and equal parenting time before relationships break down, to ever hope to equitably have it after.
The HREOC stresses that “shared parenting after separation depends on whether shared parenting is in place prior to relationship breakdown”. Statistics ... reflect that “fathers are highly involved in day-to-day care of the children in only 5 to 10 per cent of families, and share the physical care equally in only 1 to 2 per cent of families”.
The marked discrepancy between what fathers are saying and actually doing requires some explanation. A policy research paper ... reveals what most of us already knew: “men find that it is difficult to fit family around the demands of work. Most men agreed they did not find enough time for their families”.
Presumptive Joint Custody: The Agenda Behind the FR Rhetoric
One of the main (if not THE main) tenets of the Father's Rights (FR) position is the modification of family law to include a rebuttable presumption of joint custody."Kids have", they argue, "two parents; they should have equal time with both." Although at first this may sound fair, in practice it is not. In MOST cases (i.e., cases for which any "presumption" must apply) one parent is the primary caregiver. To say that, post-divorce, both parents are now equally situated to care for and have custody of minor children is to disregard the material fact that most are not.
A rebuttable presumption of joint custody (residence) is dangerous and not supportable for a number of reasons:
Brown (et al, 1997) study has concluded that child protection has become ".... the core business of the court and that the court has become part of the child protection service and the wider child welfare system." (p.4). Their study found that 50% of cases at the mid point of proceedings within the Family Court are child abuse cases, and that most commonly there were multiple forms of abuse, including domestic violence. There is also strong evidence to show that where there are allegations of domestic violence and/or child abuse that the current system of family law is inadequate in its ability to protect children from violence.
What is Fair for Children of Abusive Men? by Jack C. Straton, Ph.D.
I will first critically examine the criterion at the base of all custody laws today, "What is in the best interests of the children?" I will the talk about children's choice in these matters. Then I will examine the actual effects of wife-battering on children, and develop an alternative paradigm for custody based on those effects. From this I will examine the question, "Is it ever appropriate to ever give a batterer custody of a child?" In the process, I am going to talk today about the effects of male power and control over children, not about parental power and control. I know that it is popular these days to de-gender family conflict, to talk about "spouse abuse" and "family violence" rather than "wife beating" and "rape." I know that we want a society in which men nurture children to the same extent that women do.
Shared custody deals on the rise but do not last
Nine months after landmark changes to the Family Law Act came into effect, more fathers are applying for shared care of their children, experts say, and more fathers are becoming the primary carer. But as-yet-unreleased research indicates shared care is an arrangement that may not last long. The data shows many couples revert over time to one parent being the main carer.
Using Child Development Research to Make Appropriate Custody and Access Decisions for Young Children
Articles by Michael Lamb and Joan Kelly, (also often cited in Australian Family Courts) when a custody evaluator wants to throw a baby or toddler into joint custody as if speculative agenda-driven hypotheses constitute research findings. No research whatsoever has established benefits to accrue to any child from any of the custody recommendations set forth here under the pretext that they are based on child development research.
Research findings such as Lamb's of such readily obvious facts such as that human beings can and do form multiple attachments are distorted and twisted into recommendations based on an unsupported assumption that children "should" form specific attachments to specific persons.
Findings about fathers from studies of loving, mutually interactive couples in intact marriages are irrationally applied to nonresident fathers, including never-married fathers, with unknown different characteristics who do not have any positive -- or even any family -- relationships with mothers and children.
Resch indicating that children suffer from disrupted attachments is misrepresented as support for the unsupported notion that existent or poor attachments "should" be developed, and in the assumptions that children are suffering from separation anxiety of broken secondary attachments when in the placement of their primary attachment figures.
Conflict between contact order and bail undertakings
The Court concluded that there was no necessary inconsistency between the Commonwealth legislative provisions under which the contact orders were made and the State legislative provisions under which the bail condition had been imposed, and that therefore constitutional invalidity did not arise. Malcolm CJ held that there is nothing in the Family Law Act which indicates that the power to make orders such as the contact orders can be exercised other than in conformity with the general law of the State, including the Bail Act.
Negotiating Child Residence and Contact Arrangements Against a Background of Domestic Violence
Empirical research has demonstrated that many women experience violence at the time of separation, to the extent that the term ‘separation assault’ has been coined to describe this phenomenon.3 Empirical research also suggests that women who have children may be particularly constrained in the options available to them to respond to that violence, and further that the requirement for ongoing interaction with their former partner in reaching decisions concerning children may render them vulnerable to further violence.
The myths about shared parenting
The Federal Government tables significant changes to the Family Law Act with a view to encouraging both parents after divorce to share parenting of their children. At the same time, the government announces that $400 million will be spent in setting up 65 family relationship centres across the country for the purpose of counselling couples with relationship problems and, if they decide to separate, to assist them to manage the aftermath in a sensible manner.
OTHER SUBJECT HEADINGS:
Fatherlessness
Unacceptable Risk
Shared Parenting
Child Support
Child Development
Contravention