ABSTRACT
Greater attention is paid to ways of protecting and encouraging non-married fathers’ links to their children following any form of parental separation. Legal links between unmarried fathers and their children have been strengthened by the inclusion of fathers’ names on a child’s birth certificate, and legal responsibilities that go alongside this have been enacted. Where a mother subsequently objects to a father wishing to make contact by legal means, using the umbrella of parental “rights to contact”, often following a long absence, the family situation might be felt by the courts to require assessment. In the context, the author comes to work with fathers seeking further contact and mothers who were ambivalent or doubtful about any value that a father could bring to their children’s lives. A father’s own life circumstances might have changed since he conceived his child, leading him now to acknowledge his wish for active paternity and the determined quest to establish such a possibility.
