It is almost universally the rule that natural or adopting parents have a primary duty to maintain their minor children. In the great majority of cases, the care and upbringing of a child belongs to its biological parents automatically, without regard to their qualification or suitability. No doubt this arrangement was due originally to its convenience and to lack of alternatives, though examples may be found of groups rearing their children in common (usually in tribal societies). The parental system also has been justified on religious grounds.
Legitimacy
By the common law of England, an “illegitimate” child was a filius nullius (without relatives). There may have been two main reasons for this former, discriminatory attitude. First, certain unions between the sexes were designated as lawful marriages, and a man of importance, agreeing to his daughter’s marriage, would insist on her having the status of legal wife. Second, paternity, in the legal sense, was easier to establish in the case of a lawful marriage than in its absence. The common law of England, for example, presumes in favour of legitimacy when the child is born in lawful wedlock, even if the biological facts may be otherwise. Civil law systems—those derived from Roman law—have been less absolute than the common law; they provide ways of legitimating a child, such as through subsequent marriage of the parents or through an act of recognition by the father. Modern statute law has brought the positions in different systems closer together and removed some of the worst features of the doctrine of legitimacy. Legitimacy is a concept of diminishing importance in modern law, and even countries that still retain it have usually modified it. They have done so by basing support obligations on parentage rather than on a legally valid marriage and by giving rights of intestate succession to children born out of wedlock. By the legal devices of legitimation and adoption and by other means, the difference between the legal status of a legitimate and that of an illegitimate child has been narrowed.
Adoption
The ordinary legal principle is that the consent of a natural parent (or guardian) is required for an adoption order by a court. This consent may be dispensed with if the natural parent or guardian cannot be found or has proved to be uninterested or cruel.
Adoption in the older legal systems (as in Roman law) was treated mainly in terms of the law of inheritance and succession. It provided a way of introducing an outsider into a family group and so bringing him within the scope of the succession rules. In modern systems, succession rights and other obligations and rights in cases of adoption are usually treated by analogy with those of unadopted children, and in some systems there is an explicit equation with such children.
Education
The rapid development of education in the 19th and 20th centuries dramatically affected the family and the rights and obligations of family members. Until the latter part of the 19th century, even in highly developed countries, the organized education of children in the poorer classes tended to be casual or nil. Subsequently, the powers of parents to determine the educational upbringing of their children declined before the advance of public education and the complex legislation and financing on which it rested, though alternative systems of religious and other private education continued to exist for families who could afford them. In the late 20th century, increasing numbers of families in the United States and elsewhere chose to educate their children at home. Today the pattern in most of the industrialized world is compulsory education up to the late teens with opportunities for higher education into the early 20s and perhaps later.
Decision making
The older law in many countries treated decision making with regard to children as a private family matter in which the courts should not intervene except in cases of serious child abuse or the like. In the English common law, for example, decisions of the latter part of the 19th century carried this doctrine of the “family veil” to considerable lengths by granting the father an autocratic position during his lifetime and even after, if a testamentary guardian was appointed upon his death. In most undeveloped societies, customary law gave similar authority to the father, though sometimes the custody and training of girls was the special province of the mother. In modern law, the power of the father has yielded to the principle that the welfare of the child is paramount; but this relaxation has raised important and difficult questions. The prevailing view is that the courts should take jurisdiction and intervene in family decision making when injustice, oppression, or cruelty might result if they did not. The consensus seems to be that it would be an extreme and undesirable principle to make parent-child relations wholly private and exclude the jurisdiction of the courts, but that it would also be extreme and undesirable to have no private domain of decision making and to bring all family disputes to court. The practical rule lies between the extremes; the application of such a rule is uncertain, and there are bound to be differences of opinion.
Questions of custody
Questions of custody cannot be determined solely by deduction from a rule of law. They require the exercise of judicial discretion that takes account of all the relevant circumstances, which may be very complex. In divorce cases the situation is often a de facto one: separation of the parents has taken place some time before the legal proceedings, and the child is already in the custody of one of them, so that the divorce decree may do no more than regularize in law what has already happened in fact. Some common-law courts have on occasion ordered joint custody, whereby the noncustodial spouse is involved, together with the custodial spouse, in decision making regarding the welfare and upbringing of the child. Another development of growing importance is the use of some form of family counseling in questions of custody of children. The basic argument in favour of this approach is that a custody plan worked out with the help of mediation and agreed to voluntarily by the parents is likely to have greater success than a custody judgment imposed on the parents after litigation.