YOU ask the question whether the Child Support Agency is fit for purpose. The answer is, no.

The problem is not chasing around after absent parents (which is not always the father) but with both parents still having equal rights after divorce.

More often than not, the mother will find a new partner and use him to help cause difficulties over access/contact with the natural father. Dad then thinks, if he can not have proper time with his own flesh and blood, why bother paying towards his expartner’s new lifestyle?

Men are much more emotional and affected by break-ups than women believe.

If the divorce, or separation, also means losing their home, perhaps having paid the mortgage. It is a double whammy.

The knock-on effect is that the children do suffer. They need both parents to be there for them, even if at different addresses.

From what I have witnessed, when say the grandparents have divorced, so will their own children. And so will the next generation.

My divorce was in 1988, and my sons are strangers to me. And yet, I never was unfaithful.

I wrote many years ago along the lines, that a divorce should not be absolute until the youngest child has reached 18. Parents can have decree nisi, allowing them to have new partners, but not remarry. The same would apply, when there is no marriage.

Who knows, perhaps on those terms many couples would actually return to each other, having had time apart.

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