Family conflict

Your Family Law supplement (19 August) included several contributions stressing the importance of defusing conflict between separated parents for the greater benefit of theirchildren. Families Need Fathers Scotland wholeheartedly supports this idea, and we always suggest fathers try to move on from the conflict and focus on their children.

The writers stressed the importance of cooperation in both the short term – reducing upset and anxiety – and the long term – in reinforcing children’s self-esteem, their performance at school and their ability to form good relationships of their own.

It is so obvious that “putting the interests of the children first” requires the parties to put their personal differences aside and that family lawyers have a key role in that de-escalation.

Unfortunately, that message has still to reach too many members of the profession who see their job as passing on undiluted the vitriol of their client and – as we have seen too often in incredible letters shown to us – adding some personal vilification of their own. The children are clearly not uppermost in the mind of these lawyers when taking to the 
dictating machine.

Ian Maxwell

Families Need Fathers

Broughton Place

Edinburgh