Does "listen to the child" mean that the child should choose between the parents when they separate?
All over the Western world there is a demand to listen to the child, with reference to Article 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and with reference to the best interests of the child as the paramount principle for all decisions concerning children. Listening to the child does not imply that the child should take over decisions regarding what is in his or her best interests. A child does not have the life references or the neurological brain maturity to understand the long-term consequences of choosing one parent over the other.
Child psychiatrist Dr. Kirk Weir, a consultant to the National Health Service for 35 years, studied contact-resistant children in England and Wales, where deciding the "child’s wishes and feelings" is a statutory duty under the Children Act 1989.
Dr. Weir described being caught off guard by the intensity of hatred some children expressed toward a parent they had once loved, and how insisting on a contact visit — which he initially hesitated to do — often led to a different outcome than the child’s stated wishes predicted. In one documented case, two young children who had refused contact with their father for two and a half years, and who withdrew in fear at the start of a supervised visit, were within about fifteen minutes playing, smiling, and talking about happy memories with him.
Across 58 contact-resistant children Dr. Weir evaluated this way, 34 went on to have a good or reasonable contact visit with the parent they had refused to see, while 24 remained resistant. The study also found very high rates of successful reunion among younger children — 100 percent for children under 5, and 40 percent at the first visit for children over 8 — leading Weir to conclude that children’s stated wishes not to have contact were often extremely unreliable.
Sources: Weir, K. (2011). Intractable Contact Disputes — The Extreme Unreliability of Children’s Ascertainable Wishes and Feelings. Family Court Journal 2(1).
