Penelope Leach’s ‘Family Breakdown’

Marriage Foundation’s Chairman, Sir Paul Coleridge, contributed a Foreword to Penelope Leach’s new book ‘Family Breakdown’, in which he says: “This book should be

Marriage Foundation’s Chairman, Sir Paul Coleridge, contributed a Foreword to Penelope Leach’s new book ‘Family Breakdown’, in which he says: “This book should be obligatory reading for anyone even contemplating the ending of a relationship where children are involved.” Details of how to buy copies of the book can be found here.  See also Joanna Moorhead’s article in The Guardian here.

 

More details of the book:

Family Breakdown: Helping children hang on to both their parents

Fewer than half of today’s children will celebrate their sixteenth birthdays with their parents still together. Divorce has become commonplace. But commonplace does not mean unimportant, especially when children are involved. All too often, children are seen as weapons in a marital war rather than as its victims.

Having families split up with mothers and fathers living separately from each other is always deeply disruptive, almost always sad and sometimes tragic for children of all ages from birth to adulthood. This fact is such a hard truth that it is usually offered well-diluted with reassurances about children being ‘resilient’ and quickly ‘getting over it’. But the message is vital and the reassurances are false. Children are no more likely than parents themselves to ‘get over’ parental separation in the sense of forgetting about it or it ceasing to be important to them.

The message of this book, however, is that we can do better by children whose families break up. I do not suggest that parents should stay together ‘for the sake of the children’. A miserable partnership is unlikely to make for good parenting. But parents who divorce can do so better from the child’s point of view than is usual right now, and everyone involved with them, from family court judges, solicitors and social workers to organisations and individuals offering advice and support can help them do so.

As a family breaks up, the needs of the children should be the priority, and thanks to new research into child development, especially attachment science and emotional and social development, we know far more than earlier generations about what those needs are. I hope this book will help parents to face up to the enormity of the change their separation is bringing upon their children and offer ways in which they can choose to handle it so as to soften the impact on them.

Parents divorce each other, not their children. We can – and must – establish that the end of partnership is not the end of parenthood. Divorce may never be ideal for a child, but we can make it better.

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