Family

Shared parenting was enshrined in changes to the Family Law Act in 2006, but as Malcolm Knox discovers, the only thing that many separated parents now share is confusion, isolation and heartbreak. Anna* and her ex-husband had been sharing the care of their three-year-old daughter and two-year-old son for nearly a year when she noticed […]

I need advice about my daughter who is 18 years old and won’t get up for work. She stays in bed all day and doesn’t get up until the late afternoon and then goes out all evening. I’m at my wits end about what to do. I’ve done pretty well for myself financially and my […]

An old friend of mine has started going out with our 20 year old daughter and we are so upset. My wife is distraught and I can hardly sleep thinking about this horrible man pawing my lovely daughter and that he seems to have no shame over taking advantage of her and our friendship. He […]

Please let me start by saying that I love my husband and kids. But the truth is I never had a yearning to be a parent. If I had not married Michael, who desperately wanted children, I doubt I would have become a mother. To complicate things, both my pregnancies were difficult, so I did […]

My 20 year old daughter is away at university and is coming home for a long weekend with her boyfriend. They’ve been going out together for six months and this is her first serious relationship although she’s had more casual boyfriends in the past. We’ve met him twice and now and while discussing her visit […]

My sister told me she can’t have children just weeks after I had an abortion and now I’m in turmoil. Trying to support my heartbroken sister and cope with my own feelings of guilt and loss has left me ill, but when I first made the decision I thought it was the right one. I’ve […]

In a battle worthy of one of his hugely successful books, author Stieg Larsson’s untimely death has pitted his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, against his family, as she tells William Langley. On a November afternoon in 2004, 50-year-old Stieg Larsson, an overweight, chain-smoking, Swedish news agency reporter, arrived at his office in central Stockholm. The lift […]

I would dearly love to offer a message of hope in the bleak landscape of dementia and maybe I can. The journey with Mum over the course of her Alzheimer’s has been a roller-coaster of ups and downs, and I only wish I knew at the outset many of the things I’ve learned along the […]

My daughter – Jade – is 5 years old and is starting to get invited over for sleepovers by her school-friends. She has a very good circle of friends at school and she desperately wants to spend as much time with them as possible. The problem is that I’m paranoid and maybe a little overprotective. […]

My husband and I have been married for 7 years now. We’ve been through a lot of ups and downs and having kids really changed our relationship. I kept working after the birth of our 3 year old daughter, Ashley, and then went back to work with the same company after our second daughter arrived […]