New laws to share looking after children
New shared parenting laws which came into effect last year view a shared parenting plan as a preferred method of recording parental agreements.
The figures show that increasing numbers of men are now applying to become the primary carer of their children after relationships end. Also, non-custodial parents who pay child support are spending more time looking after their children.
With the shared parenting concept comes a change in terminology. A child now ‘lives with’ rather than ‘resides’ with one parent, and ‘spends time’ rather than has ‘contact’ with the other. For many years in the past one parent had ‘custody’ and the other had ‘access’.
As part of its new approach to family law, and in response to widespread relationship breakdown in Australia, the government has established a network of family relationship centres. Parents are encouraged to use the centres to voluntarily enter into parenting plans that address allocation of parental responsibility, where a child will live, and how the child will communicate and spend time with the other parent.
These parenting plans are not legally binding, but as one federal magistrate has observed, people will still need legal advice before going to a family relationship centre, while they are receiving its services, and afterwards.
In many cases legal precedent is used as a reference point to determine a settlement range for a particular type of dispute. This is so despite one of the underlying principles and claimed attractions of mediation being that parties may reach a creative resolution suitable to their own particular case.
The live-with parent may genuinely struggle emotionally with the idea of a child’s right to have as much time as practicable with the other parent, but a positive change observed since the introduction of shared parenting laws is the reduction of attempts to impose conditions on the other parent’s arrangements.