The Children’s Cases Project (CCP) focuses on the interests of the child and the parents' or caretakers' proposals for the future of the child, rather than the past history of the parties' relationships. The final report of the exploratory study looks at, amongst other things, the impacts on parenting capacity and child well-being.

The Children’s Cases Project (CCP) in Australia has set about providing a highly supportive, consensual and less formal process for separating parents to follow, to maximise their chances of settling their dispute effectively, and without full adversarial armoury. The essence of the reform goes beyond the expedition of settlement, to address and accept a new order of social responsibility for ensuring that parenting relationships and family adjustment after separation are not further eroded through adversarial processes. Indeed, a resolve to refocus parents on the developmental issues at hand is dominant in the CCP model, both in its pre-court processes and in the active child-focused partnership between the social science expert and judge allocated to each case.

The genesis of this study lies in the Family Court’s desire to explore the ways in which this less adversarial approach may impact on parenting and postseparation family adjustment, for parents and children. In addition to the process information yielded by a major evaluation of CCP procedures and efficiency (the Hunter study), the current study sought to explore those variables most likely to buffer children’s adjustment to conflicted divorce: the nature of the co-parenting relationship and parents’ capacity to provide less acrimonious care for their children post court.