British Conservatives and Joint Custody

Robert Franklin published in the online men’s journal Men’s News Daily (http://mensnewsdaily.com) an article titled “British Tories Favor Shared Parenting After Breakup” (http://mensnewsdaily.com/glennsacks/2009/10/13/british-tories-favor-shared-parenting-after-breakup/), on the support of British conservatives of public policies that favor joint custody.

Tim Loughton, UK Shadow Children's Minister, said at a meeting hosted by the charity consortium Kids in the Middle, that his party (the Conservative and Unionist Party, “Tories”) preferred a system that presumed shared parenting following divorce, even if the couples could not reach an agreement and needed mediation to do so. Loughton said:

"At the moment we have got an incredibly adversarial system when parents split up. It is crazy we have so many acrimonious cases. (…) From the start of the process there should be a default mechanism for shared responsibility unless there is a welfare reason not to."

His comments come as a reaction to the growing concerns in British society over the adverse impact of conflict between parents on children. Several issues compound these concerns:

-The generalized rejection to the current adversarial nature of divorce processes.

- The growing acceptance of a presumption of equally shared parenting for custody awards.

- The understanding of the importance of mediation in divorce processes.

-The generalized idea that both parents should be involved in their children’s education.

Even though there is no concrete law project in favor of joint custody in the United Kingdom, the fact that the powerful Tory Party favors joint custody should be considered a milestone in the attainment of one. This should be read as a sign of the profound transformations that family relations and gender roles are undergoing in many countries around the world, transformations that in the end will bring healthier families, happier children, and stronger communities.

I would like to finish this post quoting the last paragraph of the article, on which, after mentioning all the possible barriers against the concretion of a pro-joint custody law in the United Kingdom, says:

“But those are all things to be dealt with, to be fought over when the time comes. Final victory never comes; movement toward greater father-child bonds is always a work in progress. It is now and always will be a process of becoming.”

Signe Wilkinson, Fatherlessness, and Schools

Signe Wilkinson (born in 1959 in Texas) is an editorial cartoonist best known for her work at The Washington Post and the Philadelphia Daily News. She was the first female cartoonist to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. She was served as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists from 1994-1995.

In one of her cartoons, published last September 29th (http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=4273), on which she depicts a classroom where every student chair has been labeled with one of the causes of American school system failure, and the most prominent has been labeled with the word “Dadless”. The fact that such a mainstream voice points out fatherlessness as one of the factors of the current school system debacle (right now, the US schools’ performance compares to those of third world countries) is an achievement in itself, but that that voice points in as the most relevant, is a true accomplishment.

We teachers know (I was an elementary school teacher for nineteen years) that schools are microcosms of the communities and societies where they stand. It is true that fatherlessness is one of the main social sources of student failure at schools, it is also true that fatherlessness is one of the sources of failure in life for so many children who have been risen without their fathers.

Very recently, the Sundance Channel aired a five episodes series titled “Brick City,” on the current struggle to revitalize the once extremely vital, now extremely violent city of Newark. In one of the most telling scenes, a teacher, in a classroom full of high school boys, asked them to raise their hand if they had little or no contact with their fathers; the vast majority raised their hands.

There is an admonition in this: If we want our societies to fail, the only thing that we have to do is to remove fathers from the lives of their children. But if what we want is give our world a chance to succeed and survive, let us allow that fathers to be an integral part of the lives of their children.

We, the believers in joint custody, have already chosen what we want.