As anyone who has glanced sparingly at the research evidence will know, children suffer when parents separate.

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This suffering varies from individual child to individual child, but it’s also clear that boys seem to experience a deeper sense of loss when Dad leaves (and it is usually Dad who leaves).

The emotional pain children experience is made infinitely worse if parents are at loggerheads and denigrate the other parent as if engaged in a cross between the debaters of the Oxford Union and the fighters of MMA. What that does is ask a child to take sides when they do not want to and cannot. This is not their fight, after all.

Additionally, a spotlight is shone on the absence of a parent at particular times. Christmas, obviously, but also the summer holiday. Grim-faced single parents, struggling with suitcases and perhaps a pushchair and already exhausted, take their........

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