The difficulty here is that children are people not houses. New research from a longitudinal study by Carol Smart of the Care, Values and the Future of Welfare (Cava) research programme at the University of Leeds asked children what it actually feels like to be shared. Smart observes: "Even where children had good relationships with both their parents, and where they felt that shared residence was 'a good thing', there were costs for them. They looked forward to a time when they could stop living like nomads." Research by Liz Trinder at the University of East Anglia confirms this view. She found that, even in the most harmonious post-divorce families, the children tended to refer to one place as "home" and speak of visiting the other parent. Both researchers found that children are happiest where it is clear that their needs, rather than the needs of their parents, take priority. "If they realised that each parent wanted 50% of them because they could not tolerate the idea that the other parent had more, they did not feel loved so much as like a possession to be fought over," explains Smart ... Both pieces of research re-enforce the fact that it is the relationship between the parents which is a key to the children's happiness, and this is the problem with the current demands. According to Trinder's research, using the law to settle custody disputes usually makes matters worse for all concerned. Smart feels that the law can have a useful role in clarifying matters in family disputes, but she is clear that "cutting children in half" is not the answer.

Dubbed "Fathers Court," Spence said the program would focus on getting fathers who aren't paying child support to do so. A committee, which includes Spence, prosecutors and other lawyers, has been studying the idea for the last few months. "For years we have tried to collect child support payments from the parents -- usually the father -- without ever addressing the root causes of why child support is often difficult to collect," said Spence, who announced his bid for circuit court judge Thursday. Spence, who serves as presiding judge over family court, said he would like to get a "Fathers Court" started in Kane County early next year. It would be offered as an alternative to jail time for fathers found in contempt of court for failing to pay child support. Noting that many fathers who do not pay did not have a father-figure in their own lives, Spence said the program would have classes to help fathers understand the importance of their role. The program, modeled after a similar one in Kansas City, also would include job training and weekly meetings with a judge to discuss their progress in making child support payments or finding a job.

The pastors of the Heber Springs Ministerial Alliance have decided to address the issue of divorce in Cleburne County by committing to a Community Marriage Covenant ... By signing this pledge, a pastor states that he will support some minimum requirements for performing a wedding to help marriages start out healthy. Every couple to be married must complete the following. A 4-6 month engagement period, a marriage inventory, premarital counseling by a pastor or a family counselor, pastoral counseling in a spiritual context, use an Arkansas Covenant Marriage license, meetings with a mentor couple until their first anniversary ... The Heber Springs Alliance is also committing to hosting two to four teaching events per year to help families remain strong, said Powell. These events will cover such topics as engagement, marriage enrichment, step-families, and healing troubled marriages. Judy Graham has volunteered to be the coordinator for these events as well as helping pastors find the materials they need to assist couples in their churches. The Alliance will also host an event soon to train pastors and mentor couples in how to assist engaged couples in the process of how to create strong marriages.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has opposed the concept of a joint custody presumption in family break-ups, indicating that if fathers want to spend more time with their children they should do so before the break-up rather than after. "The commission contends that considering men's parenting role after separation is too late," says the body's submission to the parliamentary inquiry into whether the Family Court should be asked to make 50/50 parenting arrangements the norm.

Following an initiative by the Lok Adalat and family court, the city-based Legal Aids Services has brought together psychologists, retired judges and medical experts for the first time in the city to offer premarital counselling to prospectve brides and grooms ... The judiciary was alarmed at the sharp rise in divorce cases in the last few years and decided that the best way to stop Bengal going the Western way in broken marriages was to get young people to understand what marriage meant, for them as individuals and for the society. �We want to reduce the number of broken marriages and the maladies that are cropping up in marriages now,� said Justice D.K. Basu, the president of LAS and secretary general of the Association of Retired Judges of Supreme Court and High Courts of India. �There are instances of couples applying for divorce within seven days of marriage. According to our experience, people are seeking divorce on grounds that could be amicably sorted out. It appears something is seriously wrong with the way people are thinking,� said Basu.

Iowa is one of 37 states with laws banning same-sex marriages. The latest Iowa Poll, sponsored by The Des Moines Register, shows 65 percent of the state's adults want to keep the Iowa ban in effect. Just 23 percent favor having the state legalize marriage for gay and lesbian couples. On the other hand, 49 percent of Iowans believe gay and lesbian couples should have the same legal rights as heterosexual couples. They outnumber the 38 percent who are opposed.

Mrs. Feminist
Ninety percent of married women choose to take their husband's name. But don't call them traditional.

According to Harvard economist Claudia Goldin -- who extrapolated from and "normalized" figures derived from Times wedding announcements, Harvard alumni records, and Massachusetts birth records -- the percentage of 30-something college-educated women keeping their names actually dropped from 27 percent to 19 percent between 1990 and 2000.

The much more likely outcome in this country would be the spread of a crazy-quilt of differing systems of "marriage-lite" across the country: California might have a domestic partnership law that grants virtually all the rights of marriage to registered couples; Michigan could have one that treats partners as married for inheritance purposes but not tax purposes, while Oregon did the reverse. Some states might require domestic partners to do some affirmative act: sign a book, buy a license, etc. Other states might just treat any couple that lives together for two years or three or five as if it had registered. Still other states might do both. And then there would be the question of federal rights: immigration, Social Security, federal tax law, and so on, just to make the whole problem more complicated. It is highly unlikely that these proliferating domestic partnerships would be offered to same-sex couples alone. That might even be unconstitutional, a deprivation of equal protection, but certainly it would be politically impossible. Every American city and state that offers domestic-partnership benefits offers them equally to heterosexuals and homosexuals. The result of a national trend toward same-sex marriage would be that the young people of the country would be presented with 50 different buffets, each of them offering two or more varieties of quasi-marital relationships. In such a world, the very concept of marriage would vanish. It would become impossible to tell young people "Don't have children outside of marriage," because they would not even know--until it was too late--whether they were "inside" a marriage or not. The rich and the smart would protect themselves of course. They could hire lawyers to draft personal contracts, itemizing and detailing their responsibilities to each other and to their children. The non-rich and the non-smart would stumble into trouble, and their children would begin life even more severely disadvantaged than they already are. You need a very strange definition of progress to regard such an outcome as a progressive reform.

In a 20 minute speech at New York Pride Agenda`s annual fundraising dinner Clinton warned that Republicans would attempt to use the proposed Marriage Amendment to the Constitution to "try to drive wedges between Americans.� She noted that the push for the amendment represents the first time an attempt is being made to amend the Constitution to specifically deny rights to any group of individuals. In a speech frequently interrupted by applause, Clinton warned gays not to discount the efforts of Senator Frist and others who are supporting the amendment. Then, in a departure from her prepared remarks, she said of those who like to use wedge issues like the marriage amendment, �They have led our country miserably! They deserve to be turned out of office and they�re going to look for anyway to stay in power!�

Administration officials predicted a higher rate of divorce would follow due to the simplified divorce procedures. Before the new rule, a couple were required to wait at least one month to get their divorce application approved, as the employers of both parties, or the community committee, attempted to mediate between the two during the month. If the efforts failed, the marriage authority would approve their divorce application. The mediation, an attempt to remedy the marriage, has evoked complaints, however, because it usually makes the divorce taboo public. "Even before we get divorced, everybody around knows about our marriage problem and that makes both of us distressed," said a man who managed to get divorced in the past holiday week. He and his ex-wife had applied for divorce earlier this year, but felt forced to put off the plan under pressure from friends and relatives who rushed to persuade them to drop the idea. "We don't want such a private issue to become a public topic," he said. Taking advantage of the new marriage law, he was divorced in 20 minutes in a private and friendly way.

The facts are clear and worth reporting, but there's legitimate controversy about what they mean. There are three key facts: 1) Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than parents of sons; 2) in multichild families, parents of daughters are more likely to try for another child than parents of sons; 3) divorced mothers of daughters are less likely to remarry than divorced mothers of sons.

I originally said that all three facts point to a parental preference for boys. Several readers pointed out that the third fact�that divorced mothers of daughters are less likely to remarry�admits a better explanation: Mothers don't want to expose their daughters to a potentially predatory stepfather. Excellent point. So, I now think the evidence on remarriages is ambiguous regarding whether second husbands prefer boy stepchildren.

THE SHARE OF CHILDREN 5 AND YOUNGER LIVING WITH SINGLE MOTHERS DECLINED FROM 21.0 PERCENT IN 1997 TO 17.3 PERCENT IN 2002.
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THE SHARE OF YOUNG CHILDREN LIVING WITH MARRIED PARENTS INCREASED 2.5 PERCENTAGE POINTS BETWEEN 1997 AND 2002.
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THE SHARE LIVING WITH UNMARRIED PARENTS INCREASED 1.2 PERCENTAGE POINTS.

[text against video of toy race car track]

You sent him to camp...
...he came home after 3 days.
You sent him to college...
...he came home after 6 years.
You sent him to Europe...
...he came home with a fiancee.
You sent him on his honeymoon...
...you haven't cleaned out his room yet.

�You can�t predict. You can prepare.�

Heterosexual marriage provisions are far from the only outdated laws involving relationships that are on a collision course with the Charter of Rights, says the president of the Law Commission of Canada. A long-standing obsession with conjugality has left the law vulnerable to attacks from those whose relationships do not fit conventional models, LCC president Nathalie Des Rosiers said. "Courts will react if governments do not take the lead in presenting policy that reflects where society is going," Ms. Des Rosiers said in an interview. "Much of our law is based on old notions of who takes care of who. But our society is full of people who are recreating their support networks."

"So-called family-friendly policies give incentives for people to go to work," Gilbert says. "They are actually market-friendly policies," he continues, so they do not necessarily encourage having children. He explains that in some countries, while parents may be paid to stay home for a year with a new child, those parents had to have been working previous to staying home. In most cases, childcare is subsidized, sending parents back to work a short time after a child is born. "Because these policies are market-friendly, they have devalued caring for children," Gilbert says. "So people think - why have kids?"

Certainly, there are scores of reasons to encourage marriage. Social research suggests that it is one of the republic's great stabilizers. Living with two happily married parents is the best shot a kid has for a successful launch in life. Marriage attaches fathers to children and protects adolescents from the scourges of addiction, suicide, teen pregnancy, and crime. Matrimony also offers families a layer of economic protection in an era when demands for individual competence and educational achievement have never been greater; when even members of the middle-class face slippery job security, diminishing benefits, and bidding wars for houses in the ever-dwindling number of good school districts.

Dear Carolyn: I am wary of dating guys whose parents are divorced. My parents and most of my friends' parents are happily married. I think people whose parents are divorced may have a different sense of marriage � i.e., that it doesn't have to be for a lifetime. I think it does. I basically have no idea how to deal with someone whose parents are divorced.

I read with interest the report, Govt Mulls Over Pre-Marital Course for Non-Muslim Couples. The Government is considering this move because of the increasing divorce rates among non-Muslim couples. Since implementing pre-marriage courses for Muslim couples, the divorce rate among them has gone down.