Ideas about the role of fathers in the separated family have changed over the last few decades. The prevalent legal construct of ‘co-parenting’ implies that children should be able to maintain contact with a non-resident parent, usually the father, if they wish, except in cases where there has been abuse or violence. Research in several disciplines has sought to explain the processes of contact by examining the behaviour of separated fathers, their relationships within the family, and the separated family as a whole. Quantitative studies have explored levels of involvement, the father–child relationship and the inter-parental relationship as factors affecting children’s outcomes, while an expanding body of qualitative work has sought to map the practice of co-parenting through identifying the diversity of separated parenthood and the perspectives of non-resident fathers in particular. The contributions of these diverse approaches to current debates on non-resident fathers are reviewed in this article.
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