Contact and Contact Centres

Making sure your children are happy is the most important consideration. You may have divorced or separated but in most cases your children and your ex partner will want to be actively involved in each others lives.

This can often be difficult for both you , your partner and the children but with time can lead to a healthy relationship between parents and children.

However not all divorces end with children seeing their parents and this can be for a number of reasons each individual to the situation but nevertheless hurtful.

We would encourage parents however much they may have problems with the ex, to seek help for the sake of the children to see their father/mother even if only for short periods as the presumption in Case law is that the children have a right to know both parents unless it would not be in their bests interests to do so.

In cases where there has been domestic violence or child abuse then the presumption will decrease with the severity of the allegations.

Many parents who have difficulty with contact resort to the courts to sort out their differences even long after the divorce has finished and keep coming back time after time on small issues which in an ideal world they should sort out themselves.

A common feature of contact is the contact centres all over the Country where absent parents see their children under loose supervision of the centre staff often for only a few hours at a time.

The Contact centre can only ever be a stop gap between starting contact again and unsupervised contact and with limited resources do an excellent job of facilitating contact where it would otherwise not be allowed or feasible.

Most Contact centres provide areas for play as well as nappy changing and feeding although it is advisable to bring a change of clothes and food for younger children.

They are supervised to the extent that someone is available if there are problems but they do not watch over contact on a one to one basis.

The National Association of child Contact Centres are the governing body.



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Information on this page is current and last updated: 12/03/2008

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