Don’s Family Law Blog

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Reported in The Australian today are statistics released by the Family Court that fathers who litigate over children’s “custody” are more likely to succeed than by settling with the mother.

This is not an outcome attributable to the recent amendments to the Act.  It has ever been thus.  These cases that run to trial are generally those where serious issues relating to a  father or mother’s parenting ability arise.  It is unsurprising that fathers’ success rate is higher.

A regular contributor to the blog, Adam Cooper, has some interesting thoughts on TV viewing and family reports:

There’s a television show on ABC which should be compulsory viewing for most Federal Magistrates and some Family Court judges. It’s called Bringing up Baby. Now, I must say the compulsion has nothing to do with the program’s value (and the less said about that topic the better), nor because there exists on the family law grapevine news of a major increase in judicial fecundity (even with $60,000 worth of new crockery in which to enhance the necessary pre-conjugal wooing). It’s because the show reveals how diverse, even polemically so, the views and opinions of child-experts, psychologists, social workers and the like truly are. Is it possible such diversity filters down into the musings of our family report writers?

The show’s main protagonists pit the techniques of “experts” Truby King against Benjamin Spock, amongst others. King thought that children should be seen, and not heard. Actually, not seen either, particularly by their fathers. King though that the best child rearing involved highly ritualised feeding and sleeping times, techniques which had worked so well with the baby cows King had researched in his early days as a Scottish vet. Once duly fed and slept, and of course taken outside for a spot of sun, the child should pretty much raise itself. I think it’s nonsense, but who am I to argue against the hundreds, if not thousands, of parents who used this method to raise social misfits.

Spock, on the other hand, prefers a more gentle and hands-on approach. Literally. Like his better-known Vulcan cousin, played skilfully by Leonard Nimoy in the Star Trek documentary series, Spock believed you could best communicate (cf. mind-meld) with a child by the merest touch. And why stop at a merest touch? Have the child sleep with you…until 2 years old. As soon as the child cries, go to it, comfort it, communicate with it. Never mind that you might be teaching the child to behave in a selfish, self-centred way. It’s far more important that we raise….yes, generation X and Y. Hmmm.

The message their Honours should obtain from the show is that despite the best efforts of our universities, degrees in child psychology, social work, even psychiatry are little more than ham-fisted attempts to cobble together ideas which may, not will, assist in explaining human cognition and behaviour. And it should also show that one person’s understanding or appreciation of those ideas, even if that person may happily be classed as an expert, differs vastly from another’s. So whilst I, for one, welcome the contribution of our colleagues that write family reports, and appreciate the often difficult task they undertake, perhaps it is time they should be relieved of the deified status those I have recommended Bringing up Baby seem to hold them in. Perhaps it is time to read family reports as evidence, and not gospel. Perhaps it is time to consider children as children, and not porcelain dolls. And perhaps it is also time to treat dysfunctional parents as exactly that.

Adam Cooper

It was reported today in The Australian that $60,000 was spent on crockery for Federal Magistrates, equating to about $1,000 per Federal Magistrate.

I know that some of the Federal Magistrates can be a little fragile at times.  Could this explain the need for copious amounts of  ‘extras’?

In Kennon v. Spry [2008] HCA 56, the High Court grappled with a number of questions involving discretionary family trusts for the purpose of property settlement pursuant to section 79 of the Family Law Act 1975.  My colleague Adam Cooper provides an analysis of the High Court decision.  Read here.