Le role du père dans le développement de l’enfant

Extraits traduits

Pour entretenir des relations de qualité avec leurs enfants, les parents ont besoin de temps suffisaments larges et réguliers pour interagir avec eux. La répartition des temps qui permet l’implication du parent non gardien dans les routines ordinaires comme les rituels de coucher et de lever, les départs et retours de l’école, les activités périscolaires et récréatives, lui permettent de jouer un rôle psychologique important dans la vie de leurs enfants.

**Dans les cas de conflits difficiles

Buchanan (1996) ainsi que Fabricius et Luecken (2007) ont montré qu’une augmentation des temps parentaux n’était pas nocif dans les familles très conflictuelles. Johnston et a1. (1989) ont montré que la résidence alternée n’étais pas nocive dans les familles référées en court pour désaccord sur la garde. Cependant des études ont indiqué que l’augmentation du nombre de transferts étaient nocive, vraisemblablement parce qu’ils exposent les enfants à plus de conflits. Pour éviter ces transitions il et possibles de supprimer certaines visites, ou de les organiser sur de plus longues périodes continues. Dans le premier cas les temps de visite sont diminjavascript:blog_go(’http://psychology.clas.asu.edu/file...’) ;ués, dans le second ils sont augmentés, ce qui est sans aucun doute préférable car rien ne dit que plus de temps parental est nocif pour les enfants de parents conflictuels. Au contraire l’évidence suggère que les relations pére-enfant peuvent être renforcées par l’augmentation du temps parental dans les familles à fort aussi bien qu’à faible conflit. Les relations chaleureuses avec le père ou la mère peuvent amortir et atténuer les aspects négatifs du conflit (Sandler, Miles, Cook- ston, & Braver, 2008 ; Vandewater & Lansford, 1998)

Il y a d’autres raisons qui remettent en cause la politique de limiter les temps parentaux des pères dans les conflits forts. Le premier est que cette politique assume que le conflit est immuable et incontrôlable par les parents ou les autorités. Mais Lamb et Kelly ont parlé des nombreuses interventions qui sont maintenant disponibles pour les courts pour aider les parents à réduire le niveau de leurs conflits, d’en instruire les enfants lorsque cela arrive et d’identifier le petit pourcentage de parents pour qui il est approprié de limiter les contacts.

Le second souci avec la politique de limitation des temps parentaux est le mauvais message que cela envoie. Les avocats sont tentés de dire aux parents que la meilleure manière de réduire le temps parental de l’autre est d’exagérer l’occurence des conflits. Au lieu d’inciter les parents à gérer leur conflits cette politique produit le contraire et encourage l’escalade, avec l’impact nocif qui l’accompagne.

Bien que dans les conflits lourds suite au divorce on considère souvent la responsabilité partagée des deux parents en colère, notre expérience clinique de médiation et d’arbitrage nous apprend qu’il est courant de trouver que l’un des parents est enragé et défiant tandis que l’autre n’a plus de colère, est émotionellement libre et évite les conflits qui impliquent l’enfant.

IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR DECISION MAKERS

We summarize the conclusions we have arrived at for custody and parenting time policy :

• 1. There is clear and strong public support for equal physical custody, and strong public condemnation of courts as unreasonably gender biased in their usual custody and parenting time proclivities.
• 2. The literature clearly supports permitting any kind of custody and parenting time arrangements to which both parents freely agree. Spe- cifically, courts should not discourage or prevent parents from joint custody if they both desire it.
• 3. The literature supports the benefits of joint legal custody in most circumstances even when it is imposed over the objections of one party. Of course, there are some exceptions, such as protracted unilateral abuse (Braver & O’Connell, 1998), where it should not be ordered.
• 4. The outcome literature is less definitive about the desirability of man- dating equal physical custody when one party opposes it. Although those in joint custody are better adjusted, strictly speaking, there is no causal evidence about the impact of mandated equal physical custody on children and the parents. However, there is reason to suspect that findings of beneficial outcomes for children in joint physical custody may not be simply due to self-selection.
• 5. The common finding from previous research that frequency of contact (measured by ordinal category scales) is weakly related to child out- comes should not be overextended to conclude that parenting time is weakly related to outcomes, for two reasons. First, frequency of contact (and number of transitions) is not the same thing as amount of parenting time, and second these earlier studies tested the zero-order correlation between contact and outcomes, rather than theoretically informed mediational models.
• 6.The literature does not support a presumption that amount of parenting time should be restricted in cases of parent conflict, though for some conflicted parents the number of transitions may be harmful.
• 7.While more definitive data may soon become available (see below), it is not necessary for researchers to take a firm position on mandated joint physical custody. In disputed cases, courts no longer face a black-and- white dichotomy (sole vs. joint physical custody), but rather must direct parents to a point along a continuum of how parenting time should be distributed.
• 8.In the typical family, more parenting time than the traditional alternat- ing weekend visitation is required to achieve the well-recognized bene- fits of two involved parents, each with a close relationship to the child. An emerging consensus is that that a minimum of one-third time is necessary to achieve this criterion and that benefits continue to accrue as parenting time reaches equal (50-50) time.
• 9. Attaining desirable changes in de jure parenting arrangement practice may not require legislation, court rulings or any other kind of official imprimatur. Since parents’ bargaining appears to be strongly affected by the informal guidance they receive from judges, custody evaluators, parent educators, and mediators, and (especially) attorneys, all that is likely required is a change in this informal professional culture of belief. We believe our review of the evidence here provides strong support for such a change.

IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH

1. Research should attempt to be more clearly directed at the precise questions decision makers need to know to make the best decisions and policy on behalf of divorced families. 2. Most importantly, future research needs to use research designs that better answer the question of what arrangements should be preferred when one of the parents does not prefer it or even actively opposes it. Thus, the causal question needs better answers. Three appropriate designs were discussed : those that statistically control for predisposing (or self-selection) factors ; those that condition on each parents’ initial preferences ; and those that take advantage of natural experiments when policy shifts. Just such a natural experiment is presently occurring in Australia, and researchers there such as Parkinson, Smyth, and Cash- more are poised to exploit that rare opportunity. 3. Researchers need to use more sophisticated measures of parenting time that do not group the most meaningful gradations into overly coarse categories, and do not confuse amount of parenting time with frequency of contact. 4. Researchers need to test more sophisticated theoretical models of the mediational mechanisms by which parenting time produces beneficial effects, and to move beyond simple formulations about the relative importance of quantity versus quality of father involvement. This will help answer the question of how much parenting time is enough, as well as suggest ways to improve the quality of the contact, the father-ehild relationship, and ultimately the family’s outcomes. 5. Researchers need to suggest better ways of dealing with postdivorce conflict between the parents, such as the program of Cookston, Braver, Griffin, DeLuse, & Miles (2007). The simple view that high amounts of conflict imply that parenting time should be minimized and shared parenting avoided produces perverse incentives for the custodial parent to maintain conflict, inhibits the child’s relationship with the other parent and thereby makes it even harder to deal with the conflict, and ignores the reality that most parents can successfully learn to minimize conflict when they are motivated to do so.