Marital breakdowns, long fend­ed off by staunch Catholicism and community cohesion, are finally sweeping through Malta, but this article is neither a moral lament nor nostalgia for some kind of imagi­nary past. It is about the future.

Statistically, in the past few years the annual number of separating couples has become equal to a third of the number of annual marriages (official separations include couples that would have never been married, so saying that a third of marriages are failing wouldn’t be strictly correct).

So a large and growing number of children are growing up in separated families, and we are failing many of those children because of our traditionalism. We are putting them in outdated care arrangements that enhance emotional instability and raise the risk of maladjustment and mental issues in adolescence. The typical care arrangement imposed by our Family Courts has been discredited in science.

This article is about the future because although it has long been established that children of separated families run a greater risk of maladjustment, underperformance in education and other life achievements, and emotional problems later in life, a spate of recent studies have shown that these risks can be virtually eliminated if care arrangements are handled well.

The cumulative body of research of the past two decades has resoundingly turned the earlier theories on their head: we now know that the optimal post-separation deals for children are shared care arrangements in which each parent ideally plays an equal part.

Shared parenting is defined as equally-involved, all-spectrum-parenting; the child doesn’t necessarily have to spend 50 per cent of the time with each parent, but the minimum number of nights spent with the parent who has the least time with the child has to be 35 per cent of nights (this threshold of nightly cycles is important to engender emotionally-in­volved all-spectrum parenting).

Yet Maltese Family Courts and even some social workers and psychologists, remain adherent to the outdated idea that children ought to have a sense of one home for emotional stability, and that moving or living in between two households engenders stress.

This concept, as well as belief in the primary attachment theory (also now scientifi­cally discredited - modern children attach to the two involved parents simultaneously), leads magistrates to impose care arrangements in which the child ‘resides’ with one of the parents, usually the mother, and has ‘access’ to the other parent. (This is normally a night or two a week – less than the minimum of 35 per cent of nights identified by science, which works out at five nights every two weeks – and another afternoon or two on weekdays).

The typical care arrangement imposed by our Family Courts has been discredited in science

These care arrangements are now known to undermine children’s wellbeing. Several large-scale studies have demonstrated that children in shared care suffer less from the ill-effects of psychological stress than children in primary care (as Family Courts in Malta tend to decree). In some studies, in which children were put through a range of tests, children in shared care tested as well as their counterparts in intact families – children in sole care performed worse in each and every study.

The science in favour of shared parenting for children over four years old is now incontrovertible, all things being equal (the capability and willingness to parent of each parent, the absence of substance abuse or mental health issues affecting one of the parents, the quality of the relationship between child and parents individually, and so on). But ambivalence still reigns in the case of children aged three and younger.

One school of thought maintains that children aged three and younger manifest behavioural complications if they over­night in two places, and that these children should sleep in one household (usually with the mother) and see the other parent frequently (ideally daily, because of their short memory spans). Yet some studies have found no behavioural issues in very young children who overnighted in the two households.

I would suggest that, given the uncertainty, it would be best to tread with caution when it comes to care arrangements of children under three.

Overall, not only the Maltese Family Courts but society as a whole is behind the scientific curve. Women are still primarily identified with child rearing, men with making money and being a handyman about the house. And when families break up these roles tend to be carried over to the new arrangement – to the detriment of the child, given the benefits of shared parenting – although men also find themselves taking on some wider roles in child caring.

These roles are changing as society evolves, especially given women’s greater involvement in work and the feminist precepts seeping into society. And these evolutions are reflected in the care arrangements of couples who settle their separa­tion amicably, without resorting to litigation, many of whom agree on an arrangement that hovers on the threshold (35 per cent of nights) of shared parenting.

Indeed, most couples settle out of court, especially the more educated career-minded parents. The tragedy is the couples who end up in lengthy litigation and complex piques in which the children are damag­ed, first by the battles of their parents and then again by the erroneous care arrangements imposed by the court.

Other more advanced countries in the West have been changing these dynamics by enshrining the concept of shared paren­ting in law and setting up multi-disciplinary bodies or agencies that cajole couples into agreeing the terms of their separation, especially the shared care arrangement for children, without going to court.

In Malta, couples are obliged to nego­tiate directly in court-appointed mediation. But this is deficient because the mediator does not have the time to delve deeply enough into the complexity of the problems, and because of the involvement of lawyers (some unscrupulous lawyers goad their clients into escalating the court battle with vague promises of winnings, something pique-minded couples are susceptible to). And even those couples inclined to settle amicably get the advice during the court-mediation that primary care is best for children.

Putting shared parenting in law would not only serve to compel change in the legal system but also serve to catalyse social change towards the shared parenting ideal. It would encourage involvement in all-spectrum-parenting by the two parents, before and after separation, something that promotes children’s development more fully.

I am spearheading a campaign to institute these reforms in Malta.

If you are interested in assisting the Campaign for Shared Parenting, or in reaching out to explore ways of contributing, contact Victor Borg on sharedparenting@victorborg.com. More info can be found at www.facebook.com/ sharedparentingmalta.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.