The Changing Face of Family Law

For a long time, Family law has been very adult centric and has not focused on the child, with this comes tension between parents, which, in turn, affects the child’s mental health. 

 

In the early 1980’s Resolution began with the aim to change the way family law works, offering a more amicable solution for clients, resulting in children having a more positive outlook on the situation. Resolution has focused on specialist training and interdisciplinary working for family lawyers and has produced a wealth of amicable client focused lawyers. 

 

Resolution have also been backing the ‘no fault divorce campaign’, with the idea that it will bring less tension and conflict within a separation, thus providing better outcomes to the children of the relationship. Resolution have been successful with this campaign and the no fault divorce will be implemented at the end of 2021. 

 

In 2020 alone, there were almost 56,000 children applications made affecting roughly 100,000 children, some of these cases took up to 39 weeks to conclude giving an average of 11 weeks longer than the previous year. 

Over the years there has been many charities and campaigns who have tackled this conflict affecting children of separated parents. One of these is the Positive Parenting Alliance, its aim is to “start a wider conversation in society about separation with the hopes that, over time, there will be a change in culture and a reframing so that children’s needs come first when a relationship ends”. 

 

Hopefully, we will see a decrease in children affected by the conflict of separation with the help of the Positive Parenting Alliance campaign and Resolutions continued efforts to set out standards for lawyers to have a more amicable, child focused outlook.