Family Law

Keywords: Parenting education - parental conflict - soft law - evaluation

This article reviews evidence, principally from the USA, on the efficacy of educational programmes in enhancing the normative power of formal family law. It reviews successful programmes, outlines the lessons these successes offer to policymakers, and describes current US initiatives aimed at reducing parental/partner conflict and enhancing family harmony. It concludes that educational strategies and even exhortation are worth testing and evaluating as a means of boosting the normative power of family law but that policymakers must be wary of assuming that programmes aimed at the right goals can produce the right results and must be willing to undertake long-term, probably high-cost evaluations ion order to produce genuinely useful strategies.