Systemic Approaches to Safeguarding Children’s Rights Through Parental Separation and Divorce: Opening Spaces for Childhood to Continue

Abstract

This chapter is about some of the different ways that systemic practitioners can and should play a part in the promotion and protection of children’s wellbeing as they go through one of the most challenging transitions in family life, namely the separation and divorce of their parents. An explicit assumption of the chapter is that the work of systemic practitioners in this arena of family transition must be oriented not only towards the amelioration of children’s psychological and relational suffering but, more importantly, towards the protection and promotion of the human rights that are theirs by virtue of belonging to the category of child.