Mavis Maclean is co-founder of the Oxford Centre for Family Law and Policy, Oxford University.

Relationships between adult partners following divorce or separation can be fragile, and the issues which have divided the parents are often hard to disentangle from the ongoing relationships between parents and children. There is a small group who have ongoing difficulty and who need professional help and legal intervention to make arrangements for ongoing parenting. This volume brings together a wealth of new empirical research from the USA, Central, North Western and Southern Europe, and Australia on the nature and importance of children's relationships with parents after parental separation, on the kinds of conflicts which develop, and on the range of professional interventions which support parents and children through these difficult times.

Introduction: Conflicted Contact between Parents and Children after Separation1
Mavis Maclean
Part 1: The Changing Landscape of Relationships
1. Improving the Quality of Parent-child Contact in Separating Families
Michael E Lamb
2. Why Some Children see their Father and Others do not; Questions Arising from a Pilot Study
Laura Cardia-Vonèche and Benoit Bastard
3. From Marriage to Parenthood: Rethinking Parenthood in Times of Reproductive Innovation
Malgorzata Fuszara and Jacek Kurczewski
Part 2: The Conflicts Associated with Post-separation Parenting
4. The Parenting Contest: Problems of Ongoing Conflict over Children
Vanessa May and Carol Smart
5. Dangerous Dads and Malicious Mothers: The Relevance of Gender to Contact Disputes
Liz Trinder
6. Legal Discourse and Gender Neutrality in Child Custody Reform in Spain
Agurtzane Goriena Lekue
Part 3: Professional Intervention
7. Enabling Contact: The Involvement of Psycho-social Professionals in Supporting Contact in Germany
Katrin Mueller-Johnson
8. The Changing Face of Contact in Australia
Helen Rhoades
9. Moving On: The Challenge for Children's Contact Services in Australia
Grania Sheehan, John Dewar and Rachel Carson
10. Children's Contact Services in Australia: The Referral Process
Belinda Fehlberg and Rosemary Hunter
11. Intervening in Litigated Contact: Ideas from Other Jurisdictions
Joan Hunt