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From garage to unicorn – Employment law lessons for scaling tech teams
Catherine Bourne
There is a wealth of information available to separating families when they make the transition from a two parent family to being single parents and sharing the care of their children, but what happens when time moves on and separated parents start to settle into their new lives? As the months and years go by, new partners and new children may come into the picture or a parent may feel that they want to move on and start a new life. The effect of separation can often mean creating two houses out of one and families may well feel that an area which was perfect for them as a family is now not what they need as a single parent. It may be that the affordability of housing, difficulty getting into schools or lack of support network in the area pushes the parent with care to consider a move.
Four years ago, a headline in the Times read “Divorce tourists take over the courts”. In contrast, last month’s headline in the Guardian, “Court takes stand against divorce tourism” suggests that divorce tourism is being curtailed by family Judges.
I recently attended the conference "Surrogacy in the 21st Century: Rethinking assumptions, reforming law" organised by Dr Kirsty Horsey from the University of Kent. She has been part of a working group on surrogacy law reform, who published a report last November 2015 which sparked the ideas for the conference.
In the Oxford Dictionary, ‘domicile’ is defined as “the country that a person treats as their permanent home, or lives in and has a substantial connection with”. However, the law in this area is far from straightforward, and as our customs and values change at an ever increasing pace within modern society, the question is to what extent the law is able to keep up.
If you have recently separated and are considering how you and your former partner will raise your children, you will no doubt have looked online and come across a wealth of information on the benefits of “co-parenting”. Co-parenting is, in its simplest definition, sharing the duties of raising a child. In reality, this usually means that the following dynamics exist between the parents: co-operation, communication, compromise and consistency, along with a strong ethos that the child’s needs should be placed before the parents’. Effective co-parenting is usually not immediate and it can take many years of hard work to create. However, many are willing to put in this effort as co-parenting is clearly portrayed as the “gold standard” of post-separation parenting.
But is co-parenting achievable in every situation?
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