The charity Families Need Fathers has succeeded in making child contact arrangements an issue of men’s civil rights - and the Conservative Party has decided that dividing children equally between divorced parents is a vote-winning policy. Research tells a different story. A new study from Oxford University suggests that whether parents are together or separated, it is the quality of family relationships that makes the difference to children, not the quantity of time spent with one or other parent. Other studies have found that after parents separate, children who have regular contact with their fathers do better than those who have none, but most of these studies fail to account for the quality of the father and child’s relationship before separation. Involved fathers (and mothers) are good for children. Whether it is good for children to regularly move between two homes is less obvious.
