Recent research into adoption has led to calls for adoption laws across the UK to be reviewed to allow for greater contact between adopted children and their birth families. The study was led was Brid Featherstone, who is Professor of Social Work at the University of Huddersfield, and was commissioned by the British Association of…
The Department for Work and Pensions has published an update on the work of the Child Support Agency. The Child Support Agency (CSA) was set up in 1993 and was responsible for two primary functions: To calculate how much child maintenance should be paid If necessary collect, enforce and transfer payments between parents. It defines…
The Department for Work and Pensions has published the results of a survey conducted among separated parents who had made contact with its Child Maintenance Options Service. Child Maintenance Options provides impartial information and support to help separated parents make decisions about their child maintenance arrangements. It very much promotes the use of family-based child…
When parents separate or divorce it is usually in the best interests of their children if the parents can agree to some form of co-parenting arrangement, where both parents continue to play an active role in their children’s lives. However, in the UK there is no real requirement for parents to work together to put…
The Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) recently issued a reminder of the ongoing issue of international parental child abduction and the support than can be available to those affected. International child abduction is when one parent takes or keeps their child outside the country in which the child usually lives, without the permission of the…
Australia has become the most recent country to allow same sex marriage, after its Senate and then House of Representatives passed the enabling legislation, reports the Daily Mail. Interestingly, however, in addition to allowing thousands of same sex couples to start planning their weddings, the new legislation also means that one couple who were already…
Many studies have been carried out to investigate the impact of marriage and divorce on health. One of the latest studies has looked at links between dementia and marriage, reports the British Medical Journal, and concluded that married people have a lower risk of developing the disease. The research, which was published online in the…
A recent decision by the High Court in Australia has cast doubt over the future of prenuptial agreements in that country, reports news.com.au. The case involved a couple, given the pseudonyms Mr Kennedy and Ms Thorne, who met online and subsequently married. At the time, Mr Kennedy was 67-years-old and a successful property developer in…
Mental health issues are making matters significantly worse for families going through divorce, new research has found. Divorce can already be one of the most difficult life experiences families can go through, but according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML), mental health issues of spouses and their children are increasingly making the process…
Children whose parents are divorced run an increased risk of divorce themselves compared to children whose parents remained married, and genetic factors are primarily to blame, new research has found. The study, by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and Lund University in Sweden, set out to answer the question “Why does divorce run in…
