Sunday 7 September 2008

Keeping It In The Family

Three cheers for the new laws imposing penalties such as community service on those parents (mostly, it must be said, mothers) who fail to comply with contact orders. They would only be “criminalised” by their own transgression of the law. They should consider the childcare needs of their offspring by not so transgressing, just as they do by not committing, say, burglary, or arson, or murder.

Let us build on this foundation by enacting a legal presumption of equal parenting, by restoring the tax allowance to fathers for so long as Child Benefit is being paid to mothers, by allowing paternity leave to be taken at any time in the first 18 years of the child’s life (asserting paternal authority, and requiring paternal responsibility, at key points in childhood and adolescence), by restoring the requirement that the providers of fertility treatment take into account the child’s need for a father, and, indeed, by providing for poorer mothers of small children to be paid to stay at home with them rather than paid to hand them over into the care of strangers.

And let us open up the family courts.

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