Join us on twitterChristmas can be a difficult time for single parent and blended families. Trying to come to an agreement on where children will be and when, let alone where Santa will deliver presents, can cause otherwise amicable arrangements to fall apart.
Divorce lawyers, Centrelink/Child Support Agency, counselling services and helplines all report a flurry of activity at Christmas – most of it distressing for all parties. It’s also a time when domestic violence increases along with all other stresses.
Tara Fass, Huffington Post, 28 October 2011
The bifurcated child — shuttling between the homes of his or her separated or divorced parents — is, by definition, caught in the middle. Imagine the child as a bird migrating from one place to another, essentially homeless until you provide a safe perch. How can you help this child glide in for a smoother landing?
Hello again everybody, and welcome back.
Our apologies for the website being down for so long. Hackers are the bane of our existence. Our various websites have all been hacked over the years, but I’m sure we’re not the only ones.
Being a very small community organisation, with few resources, it’s very damaging when we do get something like this happen. Unfortunately we don’t have an IT department to call on, so a big thank you to the people at Lumonata who fixed things for us and are currently working on updating it and getting information back up there.
In the meantime, keep your stories coming. We don’t always get back to you (and again, our apologies) but the stories are a great help in our work with government to get better policy and administration practices for single parents and their children.
In yet another update in my son’s Centrelink saga, he has just received a letter asking him to fill in a Rent Certificate for the third time. And this despite him providing them with a copy of his lease when he first applied for rent assistance.
This letter – or I should say letters, there were two of them – arrived three working days after he went in to see them because they got it wrong, again.
Marriage has been in the news a lot lately, with a release of a report into the benefits of marriage by the Australian Christian Lobby. This report, written by Professor Patrick Parkinson, found that parental marriage acts as a protective factor for children, improving their life outcomes.
Sole Parents’ Union has a number of concerns about the report. On reading the report in the Sydney Morning Herald we wrote a response which you can read in full in our news section.
Apart from the misrepresentation of previous research, Sole Parents’ Union would point out that marriages which don’t end in divorce would be expected to be better for children than those that do, after all people would usually stay together for a reason – they get along well so they have low levels conflict and therefore less reason to separate. As we pointed out in our letter, it is conflict rather than divorce per se that is the problem.
But where divorce leads to an end in the conflict then outcomes for children also improve. A good divorce really is better than a bad marriage.
Getting out of the city and listening to stories from other areas is always an interesting experience. It’s been a long drive from Sydney to Cairns, but well worth it. I’ve met some great people and seen some fabulous, innovative programs.
We’ll be able to take these stories (anonymously of course) straight to the politicians and bureaucrats to work on better policies and services for all sole parents.
I’ve been re-reading some of the research about shared care and where, how and for whom it works. And where, how and for whom it doesn’t work.
The Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW did a report on Shared Care Parenting Arrangements since the 2006 Family Law Reforms. This was reported extensively when it was released in 2010, particularly the finding that both parents and children like shared care, and it’s good for children.
But, like most things, that’s not the whole story.
The lament you often hear from non-residential parents is that they want to see their children more, while residential parents often say they want the other parent to see their children more.
If this is the case, you have to wonder why it doesn’t happen.
Is there really such a thing as a good divorce?
Divorce isn’t something that people do lightly. You don’t just wake up one morning and say to yourself “What will I do today? I know, I think I’ll get divorced.” Most people go through a long and agonising process of trying to make their relationship work before deciding that it’s a better option for everybody, kids included, if they split up.
When will government agencies like Centrelink learn how to communicate properly?
In the next instalment in my son’s Centrelink saga, he is now getting his youth allowance payment. After initially rejecting his claim, they’re now throwing money at him. With all the back pay, he received quite a large initial lump sum payment. More money than he’s ever seen in his life, and of course it’s burning a hole in his pocket.