ABSTRACT
Working with children whose parents are engaged in contact or residence disputes leaves us feeling as if we are right at the heart of all the diverse and frequently contradictory societal, cultural and personal narratives of family life and parenthood, and indeed of childhood itself. Intense emotional processes are activated in relation to loss and to the terror of loss, to the different entitlements of fathers and mothers, and around what parents owe children and what children owe parents. Despite the fact that divorce and separation are now so common as to be conceptualised in terms of ‘family life cycle’ narratives (McGoldrick and Carter 1989; Robinson 1991) the intensity of individual feelings of abandonment or of outrage at the disruption of hopes and dreams for permanence or security seems to be as raw as ever for parents and children alike. Parents’ fear of loss of their child/ children can propel them into vicious fights with each other over residence and contact. While we have written elsewhere about the dynamics of such conflicts between the adults (Blow and Daniel 2002), our focus here is on the impact of these fights on the children.
