England’s most senior family court judge this week slammed well-educated parents who use their children as ammunition in divorce cases.
In his speech to the pressure group Families Need Fathers, Sir Nicholas Wall, who is President of the Family Division, said: ‘Separating parents who are unable to resolve issues between themselves rarely act reasonably.
People think that post-separation parenting is easy.
‘In fact, it is exceedingly difficult, and as a rule of thumb my experience is that the more intelligent the parent, the more intractable the dispute.
‘Parents often find it difficult to understand that children both love and have a loyalty to both parents.
‘There is nothing worse, for most children, than for their parents to denigrate each other.
‘To use the trite phrase, each parent represents 50 per cent of the child’s gene pool. If a child’s mother makes it clear to the child that his or her father is worthless – and vice versa – the child’s sense of self-worth can be irredeemably damaged.
‘Parents simply do not realise the damage they do to their children by the battles they wage over them. A child is not a piece of property which can be parcelled up and moved around at will.’
Of the 136,026 couples that currently divorce annually, 20,000 will go to court to resolve child access disputes for their offspring who are under 16.
This news in itself is not so unusual but it was rather startling to get a text from my Husband alerting me to the articles on the main pages of most newspapers and suggesting that we were either ill-educated or exceptional.
And yet, I guess in some ways we are. Because so few of our friends have managed to maintain such a civil arrangement with regards to children and finances post-separation.
But then how many of them endured the same decade of silent Cold War with an invisible Iron Curtain separating our emotions from our situation?
I feel for parents who have trouble with this post divorce, but I don’t really cut them much slack. No matter who the couple is, divorce was always a possibility, and people shouldn’t be having children if they don’t think they have the capacity to responsibly guide them through that experience.
I would not make a good emotional educator for a child, and thus, I don’t have children, but it astonishes me how many reasonable and well educated (to steal the line) people don’t do that simple math.
I have nothing but respect for people who manage to put their children first during a divorce, and nothing but contempt for those who fail to.
Great work Joanna, it sounds like you and your husband are a great example to be followed.
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