When we are talking about “Rights”, we are talking about a variety of topics, including rights to make decisions and rights to contact, often thought of as “custody”.
When considering the rights of parents, the old-world, outdated view was that the Mother would have the role of “primary carer” and that the Father was very much secondary.
This view is now very much replaced with a more 21st century viewpoint. The 21st century recognises that there are many ways in which a family may divide the childcare responsibilities or how they look after the children day to day, and that the concept of the weekend dad, who just turns up after mum has done all the hard work during the week, is increasingly an anachronism. Indeed, the outdated model works on an assumption of a heterosexual relationship – the old-world view did not even consider what to do if a child had two mothers or two fathers.
There is nothing in law to say that a Mother or Father has more or less rights with regards to their child upon separation, or indeed before separation.
Those individuals with parental responsibility have the right to make decisions about their child. The means by which a parent acquires such responsibility is dealt with in other questions, but to summarise generally Mother’s automatically have Parental Responsibility and Father’s acquire it through either being named on the Birth Certificate or being married to the Mother at the time of birth. This includes decisions regarding education, medical issues and foreign holidays, by way of example.
If a situation arises where only one of the two parents has parental responsibility, then their rights are different at law. Parental responsibility gives a parent more rights regarding a child than a parent without such responsibility, so if you are an unmarried father not on the birth certificate, then you do have fewer rights. You can apply for an order granting parental responsibility, which is covered elsewhere in these questions, but you will need the court’s permission to do so (which should not be a huge hurdle to overcome).
What parents must remember is that the court is less interested in the “equal rights” of a parent and more in what are in the child’s best interests, and actually it can often be more about the rights of the child to having a meaningful relationship with both parents. Flipping the question of whether either parent has a right to see the child around to ask whether the child should have the right to having that meaningful relationship with both parents can be an instructive tool to aid parents when looking at their arrangements post-separation.
