Quotes of the Day

Marion Crossman doesn't like it when her ex-husband wanders through her house on changeover days looking for one of his children - and her new husband likes it even less. But for the greater good she bites her tongue. "They are his daughters and I have to be loyal to him in front of them," says Crossman, 45, a high-school teacher in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.

Crossman and her ex- husband have pulled off something the Australian Government hopes will become more common. After their marriage ended in 1994, they devised - without the involvement of lawyers, let alone a judge - their own care arrangements, which are close to 50/50.

"My feeling is that people go to court when they've done something wrong," says Crossman, adding she never considered trying to restrict her ex-husband to weekends-and-holidays-only access. "Particularly as I left him, I couldn't see why he should miss out on seeing his kids. And it wouldn't have been fair on our daughters (now 17 and 14) to deprive them of him just because their parents' relationship broke down."

Substantially shared parenting (where the parent not living with the children looks after them at least 30% of the time) is an arrangement seldom imposed by the Family Court: judges ordered it in only 2.5% of cases in 2000-01, down from 5.1% in 1994-95. While Chief Justice Diana Bryant argues that shared care is a more likely outcome of the simpler cases, which tend to be determined in the Federal Magistrates Court, it happens most often when parents agree between themselves to try it. Recent research by the Australian Institute of Family Studies suggests that some 6% of separated parents use shared care - and that it's parents more than judges who conceive of more novel and mutually satisfying contact arrangements.

"The revolution has begun," says retired barrister Michael Green, QC. "There's been an outbreak of common sense. People are staying away from the courts and lawyers in droves."

Not far from Crossman, Greg Cairns, 51, is making a week on-week off arrangement work with his ex-wife and their three daughters - 13, nine and seven. Because he was an involved father while the marriage was intact, the prospect of not seeing his girls for a fortnight at a time was unbearable, Cairns says. It wasn't as difficult as many men might imagine, he adds, to negotiate with his employer working hours that allowed shared care.

"There's a myth out there that you have to be totally compatible (with your ex-spouse) to have shared parenting," Cairns says. There's always a hint of tension, "but you've got to bypass that, give yourself a reality check and say, 'No, you don't argue in front of the children, you don't behave bitterly, you don't try to make it more difficult for the other parent.' Look, I couldn't have done it without her. If she wanted to be spiteful, I could have ended up . . . maybe not even seeing (the girls). There's got to be some respect for each other, even if it's grudgingly given."

• Daniel Williams
• Marion Crossman doesn't like it when her ex-husband wanders through her house on changeover days looking for one of his children