When we hear about cases when it seems that parents’ interests have been given more weight than the child’s, we wring our hands and say that a wrong decision has been taken. And we put a lot of effort into making sure that we hear the child’s point of view, both systemically through the work of the children’s commissioner, and individually doing case work.
I know that this is going against the accepted flow, but I’m starting to think that we may have gone too far and that some rebalancing is needed. I’m not thinking about the clearest cases of abuse or neglect where it is obvious that the parents are just not capable of providing proper care. But where there are loving and caring parents – I sincerely hope, the large majority – I’m not sure that we have the approach quite right.
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