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Changing Landscapes of Family Life: Discussion
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Participant 1
How will your research outcome help people?
Professor Carol Smart
We feed back to mediation services, such as the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (CAFCASS) and NGOs. We researched children's responses and have produced a book containing their thoughts and feelings, which allows children to access other children feeling similar emotions.
Participant 2
Did you look at the role of step-parents in situations where one parent is totally absent or dead?
Professor Carol Smart
When an emotional space existed, step-parents do fill this role. Children do become emotionally attached to parents' partners.
Participant 3
Children's visions of their own parenthood alter continually. My children initially said that they would never have children themselves; now they say they will have child minders.
Professor Carol Smart
We have not analysed that research yet. Children often remark that they will not emulate their parents' mistakes. They do not wish to make their children endure what they have.
Participant 4
I did similar research in New Zealand ten years ago. What kind of relationships are grown-ups, affected by divorce in childhood, developing for themselves as adults?
Professor Carol Smart
We have not got that data.
Participant 2
How do you collate this data from all small-scale studies to create an overview of the whole question?
Professor Carol Smart
It is a methodological and financial challenge and I hope it can be achieved soon.
Participant 5
I was talking with a head teacher and he thought that children today were far more comfortable with the idea and process of divorce. It is more acceptable and less painful.
Professor Carol Smart
That depends on area. It is probably true of London, or other urban environments. However, in a school in a rural area divorce is scarce. Possibly only one child in a school year will have divorced parents.
Participant 6
I have three sons. There is a stigma attached to children having no contact with a parent. The loss of a masculine figure has been devastating. In their eyes, it is vital that no one in their school is aware that their father has no interest in seeing them, as it devalues them as young men. It is unusual for children to have absolutely no contact. It is an issue of rejection and becomes a tool for bullying.
Participant 5
A schoolboy of 12 years at my school used to have both his parents turn up with their respective parents and it was too much for him. He could cope with them individually.
Professor Carol Smart
Teachers often plan to have parents and partners come to the school play on different evenings and other such arrangements.
Participant 7
What if there is no income involved? Do you have pre-divorce policies to help with the post-divorce scenario?
Professor Carol Smart
I am interested in what procedures women are going to develop in response to the new relationship patterns emerging. These considerations will feedback into how people conduct their lives. People do not wish their children to always be in childcare. Grandparents are often migrating to avoid the responsibilities placed on them by the divorce of parents.
Beatrix Campbell, Social Historian (Chair)
Our sense of what a family is has been transformed. There have been significant constitutional and economic shifts in our lifetime yet these have not exploded the popular myth of a family unit 'golden age'. Children, improvising strategies to respond to divorce, are the key to cultural revolution.
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