02/03/2025
It is vital for the mental health and welfare of children to legalise every parent’s equal right to be a fully involved nurturing parent and not to be financially coerced into absent or minimised parenting.
This group supports the following legislative reforms:
1. Explicitly declare every parent's automatic right to provide an equal amount of care for their children, with half of the children's time, and equal authority to make decisions for their children. Any other arrangement to be possible by agreement of both parents only. Overwhelming academic support, linked below. This automatic right is not absolute, and can be removed if the parent is a proven risk to their child’s emotional or physical wellbeing.
2. Explicitly declare every parent's equal legal responsibility for meeting the financial cost of supporting their children.
3. Reform the Child Benefits System to share any child benefits between the parents.
4. Abolish Spousal Maintenance and reform the Child Maintenance Service so that it is unrelated to the level of parent earnings, and so that it assesses the overall financial dependency between the parents before enforcing any more.
Please see the below links to find the wealth of academic research supporting equal parenting legislation, and also be aware that the attempt to legislate for this has been rejected on a number of occasions, most recently in 2013/14, explained here: http://empathygap.uk/?p=2616.
RESEARCH:
“Sufficient evidence does not exist to support postponing the introduction of regular and frequent involvement, including overnights, of both parents with their babies and toddlers.”
Warshak, R. A. (2014). Social science and parenting plans for young children: A consensus report. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 20(1), 46–67.
https://doi.org/10.1037/law0000005
“Our assessment is that studies using more rigorous designs continue to find negative effects of father absence on offspring well-being.”
McLanahan, Tach and Schneider. (2013). The Causal Effects of Father Absence. Annual Review of Sociology, 39, 399-427.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24489431/
“Recent research does not support the idea that conflict—including high legal conflict—should rule out joint physical custody as the arrangement that best serves children’s interests.”
Nielsen, L. (2017). Re-examining the research on parental conflict, coparenting, and custody arrangements. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 23(2), 211–231.
https://doi.org/10.1037/law0000109
“Sole Parental Custody [SPC] often resulted in more emotional and behavioural problems for children and damaged or destroyed relationships with their father—an “experiment” that became codified in custody statues and that ran counter to the large body of research showing that children living in “fatherless” families had the worst outcomes.”
Nielsen, L. (2018). Preface to the Special Issue: Shared Physical Custody: Recent Research, Advances, and Applications. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 59(4), 237–246.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10502556.2018.1455303
