Shared Parenting

Shared Parenting

Shared Parents is when children are brought up by both parents playing an active role in all facets of upbringing, love and guidance, following a separation or a divorce. Their key focus should be based on the best interests of the child. Both parents take an active role and embrace the accountability and responsibility to work cooperatively and equitably to make joint decisions for the welfare and future of the child. There are many ribe the continued involvement of parents post separation or divorce.

The laws and institutions in Malaysia need to be reviewed and reformed to bring greater focus on the welfare and future of the child by prescribing Shared Parenting as the default starting point or position when it comes to separation or divorce. Many other countries have already moved in this direction and we need to collectively work to make this progressive reform a reality in Malaysia.

One definition from Famillies Need Fathers (FNF) revolves around the key objectives to be  ways to descachieved through Shared Parenting:

  1. That the children feel that they have two properly involved parents.
  2. That one parent is not able to dominate the lives of the children at the expense of the other or to control the other parent via the children.
  3. That the parents have broadly equal ‘moral authority’ in the eyes of the children and that the children have free access to both their parents if there are issues affecting them.
  4. That the children are able to share the lives of both their parents ‘in the round’ – for example not spending all ‘routine time’ with one parent and only ‘leisure time’ with the other.
  5. That the parents are in a position of legal and moral equality, and are considered in this light by the children as well as friends, neighbours, teachers etc as well as public authorities, this would apply to routine as well as major matters.
  6. That there is no part of the children’s lives, for example their school life or having friends, that one parent is excluded from by virtue of the allocation of parenting time or the law on separation/divorce and children.
  7. That the children are not by virtue of the allocation of parenting time excluded from any part of either parent’s life.
  8. That the children spend enough time with both parents to be able to negate any attempts at ‘parental alienation’.
  9. That the children do not develop stereotyped ideas from their parents about the roles of the sexes, for example that a father’s role is chiefly financial and a ‘giver of treats’, and that mothers have responsibility for everything else.