Tragedy of Flood family murder-suicide in Co Wexford

No satisfactory explanations for murder-suicide

(This is the text of my article in The Evening Herald on 28th April)

The apparent murder-suicide of the Flood family at Clonroche has one thing in common with most other suicides.

This is that we have no satisfactory explanation as to why it happened and we are unlikely to get one.

When an individual commits suicide, the person's family may spend years seeking an explanation. But even suicide notes usually fail to give a satisfactory reason for such a drastic step.

In the case of murder-suicide, the mystery is even greater. Why would a man who, for some reason, has decided to take his life, bring his family with him? Why - if this is how it happened - did he do it in such a way that his children were left to die in a fire after their parents were dead? (Note: since this article appeared, there is reason to believe that the children were drugged before the fire began).

Gardaí have been unable to find anything at all in the background of the family to explain what happened.

A Garda source is quoted this morning as saying that there must be people who can throw light on the event. It may well be that today or this week we will find out more.

And yet a description of the events that lead up to a murder-suicide does not necessarily constitute a satisfactory explanation for it.

Studies of murder-suicides by researchers suggest, unsurprisingly, that stressful life events are often involved. These can include financial losses and marital discord.

But a great many people suffer financial losses and marital discord without killing themselves or anyone else - and we don't know whether such factors were present in the Flood family.

Depression is also a frequently found factor in murder-suicide, especially where a person kills his or her own children as well. There have been tragedies over the years in which a parent a depressed parent has taken this course of action.

But depression is one of the most common emotional problems and is something which almost all of us have experienced or will experience to an extent at least. Again, it rarely leads to tragedies of this kind.

Something additional is needed and it is thought that psychosis is often the ingredient that can turn a 'normal' depression into a murder-suicide.

Psychosis is a state of mind in which a person loses touch with reality. A person may hallucinate or hear voices telling them to act in a certain way.

Research suggests that more people hear imaginary voices than we think but that they know the voices have no independent reality and ignore them.

In psychosis, however, the person may believe the voices to be real and may obey whatever it is that they are telling him or her to do.

Paranoia, or an extreme and unrealistic level of jealousy, can also be behind murder-suicides insofar as experts have been able to deduce their causes.

Were any of these factors present in the Flood family? We may or may not find out.

Because of the devastation caused by these tragedies and because of their horrific nature, it is important that an attempt is made to establish causes.

This can best be done by a psychological post-mortem as it is called. A psychological post-mortem is carried out by interviewing everybody who might have information about the state of mind of the perpetrator in the period leading up to the event. It is quite separate to a Garda investigation or a physical post-mortem.

It is also of the greatest importance that people touched by this tragedy get psychological help, if they need it, in the future.

The death of the Flood family has left friends and relatives in shock. But when the shock wears off there will be people among them who will never be the same again.

These people need emotional support and may need it for years to come.

That is what is important now.

From lesbian mums to multiple dads - the concept of fatherhood gets more complicated by the week

With traditional families in decline, can fathers meet the new challenges of the role?

This is the text of my That's Men column published in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 22nd April, 2008. "That's Men - The best of the 'That's Men' column from The IrishTimes" is published by Veritas.

The concept of fatherhood grows more complex by the week.

The case of the lesbian couple who were successful in the High Court in fighting off a bid for guardianship and access rights by the child’s biological father provides one example – though not a common one – of this growing complexity.

Recent stories from Britain which featured single mothers with children by several fathers provide another.

In Ireland, the significant number of births outside marriage means that, in many cases, the men the mothers in question eventually marry will not be the biological fathers of at least some of the children in the family.

Divorce, too, means that the role of father becomes blurred when new families form.

Once upon a time, it was all so much simpler. A father was a man who was married to a woman who gave birth to their children and stayed home and minded them while the father supported the family.

When people stepped outside of that basic concept by getting pregnant outside marriage, matters were put to rights either by a hurried wedding or by shipping the mother off to a mother and baby home and the baby to an adoptive family. In this case, the father remained invisible and – to outward appearances at any rate – untouched by the whole thing.

Well, that has all changed and about time too. But are fathers up to the demands of these new roles (I will get back to the issue of same sex couples later)? I haven’t had to do it but it strikes me as a tough job to take on where a man marries, or lives with, a woman who has children from a previous marriage.

Well, that has all changed and about time too. But are fathers up to the demands of these new roles (I will get back to the issue of same sex couples later)? I haven’t had to do it but it strikes me as a tough job to take on where a man marries, or lives with, a woman who has children from a previous marriage.

On the one hand, the man is not the children’s father. On the other hand, he will inevitably find himself taking on some of the “care and control” aspects of a fathering role. If a young teenager who was meant to be home at nine o’clock doesn’t turn up until one in the morning, it would be a poor show indeed if he shrugged his shoulders and declared it was nothing to do with him. Similarly, if a child from the previous marriage was being bullied at school, it would be despicable of the mother’s new partner to wash his hands of the whole thing.

Suppose we are not talking about children from a previous marriage or from one previous relationship. Suppose, as in those British cases that have been in the news, there are several children with several fathers. Is any subsequent partner up to fathering all of these children? I know there are other fathers in the vicinity, so to speak, but the partner is “on site” and the one who faces the most immediate challenges. Frankly, I don’t think any partner is up to facing those challenges in this situation unless he is an extraordinary human being. Most of us are not extraordinary human beings. Most of us would fall down on that particular job.

In same-sex couples with a child born either through sperm donation or through surrogacy (in the case of men) the situation is either more or less difficult, depending on how you look at it. In the UK, as I understand it, if the child was conceived from sperm donated through a licensed clinic, then the biological parent has neither rights nor obligations. If the child was conceived through a private arrangement, the biological parent may have rights and responsibilities – a man could be forced to pay maintenance for the upkeep of the child, for instance.

In the same-sex couple, will one partner take on the role of father in an emotional and psychological sense? I expect that is how it will work out. I hope so – if I was a bold child I wouldn’t want to have two mothers angry with me at the same time (sorry, girls). Oh alright, for the sake of balance, two fathers either.

So, fathering has become as complicated as it could get and we have a lot of work to do to figure out how to handle it. A little courage on the part of policy makers would help. And so would a determination to deal with the world as it is and not as we think if ought to be.

Lesbian couple with child a family, Irish High Court rules

Ireland's High Court has ruled that a lesbian couple living together in a long-term committed relationship with a child can be regarded as a de facto family enjoying rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, says this report in The Irish Times.

The ruling, I suspect, will have wider implications than are inherent in the case itself. For instance, how will it affect the position of same-sex couples, whether gay or lesbian, who have children, in relation to tax, social welfare and employment benefits? I expect this will be working its way through the system for the next few years

The court denied guardianship and access rights to the child's biological father who had donated sperm to the mother, says the Irish Times report.

Mr Justice Hedigan said there was nothing in Irish law to suggest that a family of two women and a child "has any lesser right to be recognised as a de facto family than a family composed of a man and a woman unmarried to each other".

He said the rights of a man who acted as a sperm donor were at least no greater than those of an unmarried father. In considering his application for guardianship the child's welfare was the paramount consideration, the Irish Times report says.

He believed there existed such personal ties between the couple and the child as to give rise to family rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which do not conflict with Irish law.

For more details, see this report in The Irish Independent.

And here is the rest of it.

In this Sikh family, schizophrenia was no bar to being an affectionate father

When Sathnam Sanghera was growing up in Wolverhampton his father suffered from undiagnosed schizophrenia and spent hours and hours just watching TV during the day. He never brought his son fishing or showed him how to ride a bike.

But, writes Sathnam in his book If you don't know me by now (Viking, 2008) "The best offering a fathe can make his children is himself, and in this respct mine was fantastic. He was always around. He was there at breakfast and at teatime.....And he also walked me to school every day. Several times a day, in fact: he would be with me on the ten-minute walk from home to school in the morning; on the ten-minute walk back from school to home at lunchtime; on the ten-minute walk from home to school at the end of lunchtime; and on the ten-minute walk back from school at the end of the day."

When, at the age of seven, he started primary school, "I was old enough to make my own way. But when, on my first day at primary school, Dad appeared at the front door as usual - five minutes early, staring at his watch, repeatedly checking his pockets for his housekeys, as usual - I took his hand gratefully."

The full title of the book - about growing up in a Sikh family - is If you don't know me by now: a memoir of love, secrets and lies in Wolverhampton and it is published on 6th March.

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Grieving the death of a child - help from parents who have had the experience

Photo by ericadwoodson (Flickr)

If your child has died, the only person who can really understand your loss is someone who has experienced such a loss, according to Anam Cara, a new website set up by bereaved parents. The website is full of information of people going through this dreadful experience and has links to good, international websites.

"There are no solutions or answers to your grief or pain on this website, but there is a huge amount of understanding and empathy. Everyone copes with the loss of their child in different ways," it says.

"No matter how your child has died, through an accident or long term illness, at Anam Cara we respect that your grief is your own. It also does not matter how old your child was, they could have only been minutes on this earth or grown up to be adults with a family of their own. What matters is that they are your child and the bond between a parent and child is the strongest bond of all and the breaking of that bond the hardest grief to come to terms with and accept."

Anam Cara means "soul friend" in Irish.

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Bringing up teens - a tough call for separated Dads

Photo by .Tatiana. (Flickr)

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 22nd January, 2008:

Adolescence, to put it mildly, is a time when teenagers separate out from their parents.

Consider, then, the difficulties which non-resident fathers have in maintaining relationships with their teenage children.

Not only have the teens reached the stage where Dad is no longer perfect but Dad isn't there to give them the attention they want.

It is, of course, very easy to criticise fathers in this situation for not spending enough time with their teens.

But Dad probably has a job to do, complete with commuting and may have another household to go home to as well.

On top of this the teenagers themselves have to fit in study, drama, football, dancing and time out with their friends.

So co-ordinating the contact is not easy and takes an effort. It is especially difficult to do if the teens' mother and father are not on speaking terms.

A study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family gives some idea of how the sense of closeness between teenagers and a divorced father suffers in this situation.

I am assuming here that it is the mother who has custody of the children.

The research was derived from a national, long-term study of adolescents in the United States.

Young people were interviewed at the beginning and end of a five year period. Their parents were together at the start of the five years but, by the end, some had divorced.

At the start, 57 per cent of the young people said they were very close to their fathers.

By the end, this had fallen to 48 per cent where the parents were still together and to 25 per cent where they were divorced. Closeness to the mother was unaffected by the divorce.

Three things strike me as important about these figures.

The first is that closeness between father and teenagers suffered whether the parents were divorced or together - though to a greater extent, of course, where there had been a divorce. This, I expect, is part of the usual war of independence that goes on between adolescents and the old folks.

The second striking point is that, given the way the study was done, all the divorces had occurred relatively recently when the teenagers were interviewed the second time. At this stage emotions would still be very raw and the father's 'rating' could, perhaps, be expected to suffer as he is the absent parent.

The third point is that we do not know how long this absence of closeness might last. The storms of adolescence die down and are generally followed by a greater closeness between parents and 'children'.

There is no reason why this should not also occur where the parents are divorced.

Nevertheless, the findings underline the fact that separated fathers have to make a special effort to keep involved with teenage children.

For this they need to be able to cooperate with the mother. That is easier said than done. Parents who are still together often fight over how to handle their teenagers. Such fights, I suspect, are just as likely to occur when the parents are apart.

But unless they are able and willing to cooperate, the scene is set for major conflict.

Other research suggests that once teenagers become fairly independent, they may shuttle between parent and parent to get what they want.

If Mammy is being a pain in the neck, then a few days with Daddy seems like a good idea. If one parent won't shell out for tickets for Oxegen, then maybe the other one - alright, Daddy again - will.

This again points up the necessity for separated parents to talk to one another about these issues and to try to reach some sort of accommodation about them.

Parents living apart, whether married or unmarried, can get help with with reaching such an accommodation from the Family Mediation Service which is part of the Family Support Agency and has centres around the country.

Its website is at www.fsa.ie and the telephone number is (01) 611 4100. They're worth a call if you're living apart and fighting over the teens.

See also: Staying close to teens is harder for separated Dads.

Love and maintenance

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday 8th January 2008:

A poem by the late Detroit poet Robert Hayden brings home the importance of recognising a sort of love that that has little to do with romance but which deserves to be acknowledged and praised nevertheless. Called Those Winter Sundays it begins:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labour in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

The image of the father who gets up in bitter cold to light the fires for the family before they, too, arise is probably somewhat dated in the central heating era but the principle remains: that such acts can be, in their own way, acts of love.

They are also, very often, unacknowledged. Hayden talks of getting up in the now warm house and

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Note: Click here for the full poem.

A few weeks ago, on Sarah Carey's GUBU blog, I came across a poem by the British poet UA Fanthorpe which expresses the same idea. It begins:

"There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget the milkman, which remembers to plant bulbs;"

Note: Click here for the full poem.

(WD40, if you don't know, is a type of oil good for rust prevention and other purposes.)

And it's not all sweetness and light. Hayden was raised by foster parents who had a very troubled marriage and the effects stayed with him throughout his life. Indeed, in the poem mentioned above he talks about "the chronic angers of that house." Nevertheless, he recognised in later life the value of the practical things done for him by the foster father whom he often had reason to fear.

It seems to me that for people who have had a harsh upbringing there can sometimes be a kind of healing in this realisation. A parent might be unexpressive about love but might nevertheless build his or her life around the needs of the child or the other parent.

This realisation is also part of the Japanese Naikan meditation which I have mentioned before in this column. To do Naikan, you call to mind someone who was or is important to you even if - perhaps especially if - you have a big resentment against that person. You then ask yourself three questions and reflect on each in turn: What has this person given me, what have I given this person and what troubles have I caused this person?

You are encouraged to be very specific in your answers. Maybe all you can think of is that this person put food on the table, ironed your clothes and saw to it that you went to school. You may be full of justifiable anger towards them but there are, nevertheless, these things that they did for you. And there are, after all, parents who don't do even these things for their children.

All of this is a million miles removed from romantic love which involves doing things for the other person simply because they are romantic and without much regard to whether they are useful. A bouquet of roses hasn't got a lot of utility to it but it can get a guy out of trouble because it appeals to the romantic side of love. So if you want a flourishing relationship with your significant other, don't rely on the "love called maintenance" but throw a little romance into the mix as well.

But never underestimate the importance of the "love called maintenance" either. In some people it can simply be a sour expression of a resented duty. But in others, it can be as true an expression of love as the roses and the box of chocolates and the diamond ring, or maybe even truer. That it so often goes unappreciated and unacknowledged -as by Robert Hayden as a child - does nothing to alter this fact.

Staying close to teens is harder for separated Dads

While fathers are often criticised for having insufficient contact with their children following a separation, it seems to me that the logistics of holding down and job and living elsewhere can make it tough for separated fathers to keep the level of contact they - or most of them - would like. Both the children and the (usually) mother they are living with have their own routines around work, school and extra-curricular activities and navigating around these is difficult especially if the relationship between the parents is one of hostility.

Now a piece of research reported on Psych Central News shows that there is a particular danger of separated Dads finding themselves distanced from their teenage children unless they are able to make an extra effort to keep up contact. The US research, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that 48 per cent of teenagers questioned said they had a consistently close relationship with their father where the parents were still together. But if the parents were divorced that percentage fell to 25 per cent. Divorce did not significantly affect the relationship with the mother.

This suggests that separated men need to work extra hard on their relationship with their teenage children. As I mentioned above, that can be a very tall order indeed and it requires the cooperation of all concerned.

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Those Winter Mornings: Seeing the love in ordinary duties

Robert Hayden

Those Winter Sundays by Detroit poet Robert Hayden celebrates the many things done by fathers and, indeed, mothers, even in the most troubled marriages and which we fail to count as love until, perhaps, it is too late:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

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A career in alcoholism: man in Manhattan

“I am a career alcoholic.“ Tony, all smiles, energy and with a bottle of Bud in his hand, materialised beside me one evening in a bar in Manhattan where I had gone to shelter from a drizzle, have a drink and get a little peace.

Having established my name and country of origin, he told me about his career as an alcoholic. “It makes me feel good,” he declared. “What else matters?” I agreed. He was in that state of elation which, in some people, can turn ugly in a second if you put a different point of view.

He seemed in good shape for a guy who had made a career out of being an alcoholic. He was fifty years old, he told me. His hair was jet black, he was only a little overweight and he was light on his feet. Tony hopped around quite a lot as he talked and he sometimes danced in place to the music.

“Lose the hair,” he told me. “It will take ten years off your age.”

There was much that I couldn’t understand of what he said because he spoke so fast. For instance, I could not make sense of his explanation for why he, personally, knows global warming is real. “See this burn mark?” he said at one point, putting his hand to his forehead, as part of his explanation. There was nothing there but I said I had seen it anyhow.

Then he started talking about his ex-wife, “the evil one”, and how she had unsuccessfully tried to get his kids to say he had molested them.

“I am telling you this because you are elder,” he said. I am definitely going to lose the hair, I told myself.

He took out his wallet and showed me photographs of his kids. They were graduation photographs, three girls and a boy, all looking happy and proud of themselves.

He told me I was a good listener. Not bad, I suppose, when all you’re trying to do is avoid an argument.

Two young women, maybe in their twenties, came into the bar and sat down. Tony started to chat them up. The young women laughed it off but Tony’s attention had definitely turned in their direction.

I said goodbye and left. I expect he is still dancing in the bar in Manhattan, chatting women up, explaining global warming and showing pictures of his kids to other customers. I hope the career works out.

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Fathers and daughters in business together

John Flannery & Daughter, auctioneers in Charlestown, Co Mayo are among the few Irish firms I could find in a Google search which used "& Daughter" in its trading name. Despite changing attitudes the designation is still unusual. The issue is explored further in this item on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour which asks, Do fathers and daughters make good business partners?

Link:

BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Fathers and daughters in business together

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Indian Government makes neglect of parents a criminal offence

We're used to the concept of parents having a legal duty of care towards their children but the idea of a reciprocal legal duty is, so far as I know, unheard of. Now, the Indian government may be about to change all that by introducing a legal obligation on children to look after ageing parents, according to the Reuters India story below.

Link:

Govt makes neglect of parents a criminal offence | Top News | Reuters

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Keeping in touch with the kids: tips for fathers working away

(This is the text of my That's Men for You column, published in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 27th November 2007):

Advice from fathers.com

You’ll see them at the airports every day: the business travellers, all suited up, tapping away on their laptops or talking into their mobile phones. But they’re more than business travellers. Many are parents, fathers and mothers whose work means they spend more time in airports, planes and hotels than they do in their own homes.

It is doubtful if there are very many of them who particularly enjoy this aspect of their work. That’s especially so if they have children waiting for them back home.

Still, not everybody has the luxury of giving up a job that pays the mortgage in order to spend more time with the family and, indeed, not everybody wants to.

Keeping in touch
There’s a marvellous website called fathers.com which has advice for fathers in this situation. It also has advice for other kinds of fathers – divorced fathers, non-cohabiting fathers, adoptive fathers and so on.

The tips on fathers.com are as applicable to mothers who travel a lot on business as to fathers. Here’s a selection:

– Call the kids every day. Might seem obvious but if you don’t plan for it, the call might not get made until after the children are asleep. Even if you’re not travelling, you can always make a habit of calling the kids – or at least texting them – if your work runs into the evening.

– Tell the kids they’re welcome to call or text you any time they like on your mobile phone. If you’re not available, they can go to your voicemail. Expensive? Sure, but is it the most expensive thing you’re going to be doing this week?

– If you have small kids, leave handwritten notes for them before you go. Hide them where they can easily be found so the kids can hunt for them. This wouldn’t work with teenagers unless you attached money to the notes, which I do NOT recommend.

– Plan your business trips to be as short as they can reasonably be, to maximise your time with your family. I realise that in many workplaces there are macho idiots – male and female – who will sneer at this idea but you don’t have to give into this nonsense unless the macho idiot is a boss who might threaten your job in retaliation.

– If you’re away for a long time you might record a message to them on your digital recorder or on that souped-up mobile you conned the company into buying for you. Transfer the message to your laptop and email the recording to them.

– When you get home, talk about family matters before you talk about your trip. That way you’re emphasising that the family is where your priorities, and your heart, lie.

– Whether or not you travel a lot, ask yourself if you really have to spend all this time at work or if you’re putting in long hours because you want to? If you suspect you might be putting in more hours than you need to – after all, work can be more fun and exciting than being at home – then consider the concept of “emotional work.” This term refers to the effort people make to maintain relationships, especially their emotional side. It’s work in the sense that it often involves giving attention to people at times which you don’t really want to give them attention. But the concept can help you to plan to be at school events and so on which might otherwise never make it onto the to-do list.

– Consider delaying projects or seeking more family-friendly deadlines to give you more time with your kids. Of course, you don’t have to say this is what you’re up to – as a warrior in the corporate jungle I’m sure you are well able to come up with a line of bull to explain why you might want to push out deadlines.

Maybe not all of these suggestions are your cup of tea but pick one or two you could implement, try them out, and see what difference they make.

The website, as its name implies, is at www.fathers.com and if you’re a parent of either gender, it’s worth your time.

Watching her father shaving - from a poem by Nancy Gandhi

Photo by saintbob (Flickr)

Nancy Gandhi is a poet who lives in Chennai in India and whose blog Under the fire star is a treasure . Here is a stanza from one of her poems called Pretend. I love its affectionate portrayal of a child's view of her father:

Her father's shaving. He makes a foamy beard,
draws the razor in a lawnmower swath
to smooth skin.
"Shave me too, please!"
He removes the razor's two-sided blade,
squirts her face with shaving cream,
shows her her beard in the mirror.
She stands very still
while he shaves off the foam.
She wants to have a moustache
when she grows up.

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Court rules children's removal from State unlawful

Appeal in 'Mr G' case rejected

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by a mother of twins against a High Court judgment that found their removal from the State and retention in Britain without the consent of their father was unlawful.

In the "Mr G" case, the father brought a successful action against the mother, who took them to England in January.

Link:

ireland.com - Breaking News - Court rules children's removal from State unlawful

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How the Family Mediation Service helps separated Dads and Mums negotiate Christmas and other issues

Service also helps parents who have never lived together

(This is the text of my article on the Family Mediation Service which appeared in The Irish Times on 13th November 2007)

Christmas is more than a month away but for parents who don’t live together there is just a short time left to work out who will see the children and when, during what ought to be a joyful occasion.

What presents should be bought? Who should buy them? Should one parent buy an expensive present which the other parent has already told the children they cannot have? If the children are young enough for Santa to visit, who will be there when they open the presents, or will Santa have to visit twice?

Issues such as these can exceptionally emotional, difficult and painful at times like Christmas.

“I never saw my youngest child coming down the stairs to find her present,” said one father. “And I never had the opportunity to bring my children to my parents’ grave on Christmas Day.”

These are the sort of problems which the Family Mediation Service, part of the Family Support Agency, deals with all the time. The mediation service aims to help couples – married or unmarried – to settle issues between them when they are separating. These include the important issues of finance and property but also the important issue of the future relationship with the children.

The service also helps people who have never lived together to sort out parenting problems.

Parenting flashpoints
Potential flashpoints which parents living apart would do well to work out in mediation include communions, confirmations, holidays and even children’s parties, says Polly Phillimore, the service coordinator for the Family Mediation Service.

People working on separation or maintenance agreement may want to deal with these things later, but “later” could come sooner than they think and could find them unprepared.

In general, it is better to make agreements about such issues in the relatively calm atmosphere of a mediation session than on the other parent’s doorstep.

What works now?
The first step, says mediator and area-coordinator Sheila Healy, is often to “look at what’s working at the moment.” Who is involved right now with bringing the kids to school and getting them home? Who brings them to and from their extra-curricular activities? Seeing what contribution each parent can make to this in the future may allow the whole process to flow more smoothly.

Indeed, says Polly Phillimore, where parents make plans in this way, the children sometimes get to see more of both parents after the separation than they did before.

The same principle, of seeing what already works, can be helpful in looking at the issue of Christmas.

“It’s helpful for the parents to ask what are the family traditions?” says Sheila Healy. Do the children and the family always go to granny in the morning and then somewhere else in the evening? Do they always go to the graveyard at a particular time of the day?

“Can we build something around this?” asks Ms Healy.

“Families often have certain things they do that are key to their Christmas Day,” she says. “Perhaps all the family gets together in a particular house.” In such a situation might it be feasible for both parents to be there?

It can also help separated parents enormously if the grandparents can put to one side their feelings about one or other of the parents and can make them welcome at Christmastime.

On the question of Santa and presents, parents sometimes agree that both of them will be in the house when the children open their presents, says Sheila Healy.

Where there are two families and two sets of children involved parents may need to be aware of the potential for jealousy over presents between the two groups of children.

They need to work out issues such as how a parent will feel if the other parent’s new partner is there when presents are delivered. Again, these issues are better handled in the mediation room than on the doorstep.

Ray Kelly of Unmarried and Separated Fathers of Ireland talks of fathers who have no visitation rights on Christmas Day simply because the visitation days laid down in a court order don’t happen to include the day of the week on which it falls. If these matters can be sorted out in mediation, an enormous amount of conflict and pain can be avoided.

Always parents
The work which the family mediation service does in relation to children is based on the premise that the parents, even though apart, will always be parents.

The service was set up in 1986 and has over 14 offices around the country. Many of its offices have waiting lists and it may be difficult to get an appointment before Christmas at some of them – but issues concerning separation and parenting don’t vanish at Christmas.

There is more information on the family mediation service at www.fsa.ie and its headquarters telephone number is 01-6344320.

See Tips for making Christmas better for separated parents (below) for summary of points from this article.

Tips for making Christmas better for separated parents

Start early and see what worked before, mediators advise

• Parents need to talk to each other soon rather than later about Christmas arrangements.
• It can be helpful to look at what has worked for the family in the past. What is the usual Christmas routine? What “makes” Christmas for the children?
• Has there been a tradition in which the extended families meet on Christmas Day? Can this occasion be continued and can both parents be present?
• If there are small children, is it possible for both parents to be together when they are opening their presents from Santa?
• Parents may need to agree in advance on what presents will be given. It can create difficulties if one parent gives the children an expensive present to which the other parent has already said No.
• If there has been a tradition of visiting family graves, can a way of doing this be worked out for both families?
• Can grandparents or other members of extended families put their feelings about one of the parents to one side to facilitate them to be present, for a time at least, on Christmas Day?
• 8. If one parent is delivering Christmas presents will, or should, the other parent’s new partner be there? It may be wise to discuss this in advance or at least to be sensitive to the issue.

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Is abuse risk higher with non-biological live-in boyfriends?

US data suggests that the risk of child abuse grows when a man who is not the children's biological father moves in, says this story from Associated Press.

Link:

Newsvine - Abuse Risk Seen Worse As Families Change

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Irish kids today - good news, bad news

This is the text of my article in The Evening Herald on 14th November, 2007:

The good news from the latest research by Barnardos is that relationships between parents and children today are in good shape.

The bad news, in the just-published survey by the childcare organisation, is that we now have worries which did not exist – or not to the same extent – when today’s parents were children.

Eighty per cent of parents say their children have a better childhood than they had themselves and just over half believe their relationship with their children is better than the relationship they had with their own parents.

And in a technological age, relationships continue to be top priorities for parents and children. When children were asked what made for a happy childhood, they put ‘a loving family’ at the top of the list. So did their parents. For children, friends came second and a safe community third.

Parents have fears about the safety of children and about the dangers of alcohol and drugs. Bullying is a major concern for parents and children.

In a good example of technology as a double-edged sword, parents find mobile phones beneficial for keeping in touch with their kids but they worry about those unsupervised phone conversations teenagers have with other teenagers.

Nevertheless, and as every parent knows, technology is a big priority with children. Over half the children interviewed for the survey – and by extension probably over half the nation’s children – are using social networking websites such as Bebo. That’s an awful lot of children. In effect, these networking websites have become a vast, national – sometimes international – conversation, mainly involving children and teenagers.

Nothing wrong with that, in itself. But parents cannot be blamed for worrying whether the conversation is always safe and unexploitative. And who can guarantee that?

That said, this parent’s view is that sites such as Bebo offer teenagers unprecedented ways of maintaining and expanding friendships and that the pluses probably outweigh the minuses.

The issue of the time that parents get to spend with children produced interesting results. Essentially, people seem to think that other people are doing less well than they are themselves. For example, three quarters of parents surveyed believed they themselves were spending enough time with their children but that the rest of Irish parents were not. Some of this failure they put down to the demands of work. However, 80 per cent of children and young people believe parents and children are spending enough time with each other.

But is interaction between parents and children under threat from the phenomenon of televisions and DVD players in the bedroom? The survey found that three out of ten 5-9 year olds have a television in their bedrooms. One out of seven 1-4 year olds has a TV in the bedroom.

As Barnardo’s chief executive Fergus Finlay put it at the launch of the report yesterday, “There must be some ground for concern, though, in the finding that an extraordinary number of young children have televisions, and often DVD players, in their own rooms. A child who spends too much time alone is less likely to be a happy child, and less likely to be able to sustain relationships. The fact that a quarter of our children up to the age of nine are supplied with their own televisions is something we ought to be thinking about.”

Nevertheless, the overall picture appears to be a positive one. But, as Finlay reminds us we cannot either ignore the fact that one child in nine lives in poverty and that one in three finishes primary school unable to read or write. Children with a disability, as Finlay put it, are ignored and discriminated against. And as the economy and government spending tighten it is vital that these children in particular should not be forgotten.

Family law system 'shambolic' - report

A report published today has described the Irish family law system as shambolic and overcrowded. Dr Carol Coulter's report also said it was remarkable that the system worked at all.

RTÉ News: Family law system 'shambolic' - report

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