The Well Being of Children Following Parental Separation and Divorce Research Consortium

The Well Being of Children Following Parental Separation and Divorce Research Consortium is made up of fifteen members from the areas of research, policy development and service provision, and is funded by the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY). The project began in January 2009 and is expected to finish in October 2009. The goal of the funding body, ARACY, is to promote the health and well being of children and youth through the development of multi-disciplinary research. The scheme under which the consortium is funded aims to create research consortiums in order that they develop new research initiatives in areas affecting children and youth.  

The Collaboration

Parental separation and divorce has been shown to produce both short term and long term disadvantages for many children. The disadvantages suffered have been shown to be serious ones, to be spread across many areas of the children's functioning, to be detrimental to their well being during childhood and importantly to extend to later adult life amounting to a form of social exclusion (Rodgers and Prior, 1998). While the Commonwealth government has given some recent attention to this issue with the introduction of the new family law legislation, the Family Law Amendment (Shared Parental Responsibility) Act of 2006, the focus of the legislation and its related supporting services has been more on the parents than on the children.

This collaboration is taking a priority focus directly on the children and will seek to hear their own voices. It will set up research agenda taking a comprehensive and an across systems view of the children's needs. The collaboration's multi-disciplinary professional team will be used as a platform that will span out from the research domain into the domains of policy development, service provision and education.