INTRODUCTION - even Toddlers Need Fathers

According to Baroness Hale before she was made Deputy President of the Supreme Court, 

"The father has a point of view which he wishes to advocate. His Honour Judge Milligan described it as a political point of view, but it is not political in a party-political sense. There are many people who might call it political in the gender political-sense for there are many ways in which that word can be used. He has the view that the courts and the law have been too respectful of the relationship between mothers and their children to the detriment of the importance of the relationship between fathers and their children. He argues that one of the purposes of the Children Act 1989 was to redress the balance: to promote a more equal sharing of responsibility for children between mothers and fathers and to promote the maintenance a good relationship as possible between children and each of their parents should, unhappily, their parents not be living together. The father is correct that that was one of the principles behind the Children Act 1989, in which I take a certain amount of pride" (4 February 2003).

However although any father might expect the new 'Family Court' which was introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014 to be impartial and objective there is a psychological theory popular amongst judges and magistrates called the 'Tender Years' doctrine that discriminates in favour of mothers.

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Notwithstanding the comment made about the author by the Deputy President of the Supreme Court, His Honour Judge Milligan also said in his family proceedings in the Southampton County Court,

"The father is suffering from, in my judgment, some form of mental block over these proceedings. He has a view as to how often he should be seeing his son. He takes that view from his own point of view. I do not accept his suggestion that in that regard he sees these matters from the child's point of view. The father is entitled to a fair share of seeing his son, especially when young, and like many fathers in other cases coming before these courts he has taken a view as to what he considers to be the appropriate amount of contact and has gone through the literature seeking support for such a view and where the literature is against him he dismisses it, as he does, for instance, the guidelines that he says the District Judge relied upon but is quite unable to satisfy me to that effect. Much harm is done where a man believes that he is acting for the best all round but he in fact is promoting his own view of the case. That, in my judgment, is what is happening here. Mr Miller has a fixed view of what ought to be happening. He is disinclined to consider any alternative view" (7 March 1999).

Baroness Butler-Sloss, a former President of the Family Division now sitting in the House of Lords, gave an interview in 2014 in which she described how the 'Tender Years' doctrine operates in private family law;

"I would like to see I must say, mothers who flout contact orders required to do all sorts of things that don’t actually send her inside. I can see absolutely no reason why she shouldn’t do community service. I should like to see her

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penalised in all sorts of inconvenient ways as long as it doesn’t have any impact on her care of the child. So as long as the child is over 5 or goes to a child minder, then there is no reason why she shouldn’t be required to go and clean the streets, whatever it may be. I would make her do something really unpleasant so that she understands the consequences of this. But to send her to prison is counter productive, because the child will not want to know the man who has sent his mother to prison, particularly when she comes about it" (22 May 2014).

According to Dr John Bowlby's book 'Maternal Care and Mental Health' (1952) it is wrong to take a small child from his or her mother and Case Laws mean judges, like His Honour Judge Milligan, can use this argument to avoid making Shared Parenting orders and allow fathers only limited access to their children post separation.