9 minute read
To Be or Not to Be a Father
What does ‘being a parent’ mean? What do custody or parental responsibility entail? For instance, do you have a say in the choice of school for your children? Especially for unmarried expat parents, the answers to these questions are not simple.
By Edith van Ruitenbeek I f an expat father wants to create the best conditions for his children to grow up safely, with the health care and education he considers to be the best, the best thing he can do is make sure that he has a legal say in this.
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Are You the Parent? In the Netherlands, at least at the moment, the woman who gives birth to a child, is considered this child’s mother and automatically has parental responsibility. This might change, however, as new legislation is in the make regarding surrogacy. If the biological father is not married to the mother, nor has entered into a registered partnership with her, then he is not considered their child’s parent, at least not from a legal point of view. Pursuant to Dutch law, this can be ‘repaired’ by having the father recognize the child at the municipality or by notarial deed, provided the mother agrees to this – in which case, a DNA test is not required. When foreign law is applied, the rules might be different. If the mother does not cooperate, the father can request permission from the court to recognize the child. In this case, the first thing to take into account is which national law applies. Dutch law states that, in this type of situation, the court might request a DNA test and request the mother to coop erate. If the biological father does not want to recognize the child, or if it is considered important to establish paternity from the day of birth, the court can be asked to es tablish this by means of a DNA test – unless it regards a situation in which the applicable law does not offer this possibil ity. This request can only be made by the mother (within five years of the birth of the child) or the child. Not by the father! The father can give his permission beforehand, though. Further rules and regulations on this matter can be found in the applicable legislation. gotten married in a fourth country, some research had to be done to determine the applicable law before a request could be made to have the birth certificate and the name of the child amended.
Unmarried Parents As a family lawyer with an expat practice, I regularly meet expat families in which paternity has not been established, particularly for the eldest child. This is often because the parents were not married at the time of birth and forgot to do about recognition of the child. For instance, one couple had to move to another country for job purposes, and simply did not have enough time to arrange recognition of the child in the country of birth. In another case, the parents were married and living in the Netherlands – but only registered with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Because the father had been abroad on a mission when the mother gave birth, and the civil servant had had no means to verify that the mother was married, while the child had also not been recognized by the father in any other way, he was not willing to mention any man as the father on the birth certificate. As the parents had three different nationalities among them and had Parental Responsibility From a legal point of view, being a father does not mean you also have parental responsibility. At least, according to Dutch law, not when the father is not married to the mother. Belgian law, for instance, has different rules and does give the unmarried father parental responsibility. If the legal parents are not married and do not have joint parental responsibility, this can be fixed easily – provided both parents cooperate. It can even be arranged online if the child was born in the Netherlands. If the mother is not cooperative, the father can file a request with the court to establish joint parental responsibility. In these situations, however, the children are often ‘caught in the middle’. As this should preferably be prevented, for the sake of the children, parents are advised to arrange joint parental responsibility while the relationship is still good. Referring to the Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), requests filed before a Dutch court regarding fatherhood or joint parental responsibility are likely to be honored, under ‘normal’ circumstances. This is because a child has a right to grow up knowing who his parents are and to be in contact with them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Edith van Ruitenbeek is a lawyer and partner at van Hilten Advocaten & Mediators, Nassaulaan 15, The Hague, and De Lairessestraat 129, Amsterdam www.vanhilten.nu
MAKING THE DIFFERENCE: Multiculturalism that Matters
Let’s play a game. I’ll give you the name of a country, and you have to tell me something about its culture. Only, there’s one rule; you can’t refer to any of the ‘six fs’: food, flags, festivals, fashion, and famous people or places.
By Paul Michael S o, no Eiffel Tower, frogs’ legs or berets for France. No burritos, mariachi bands or Día de los Muertos for Mexico. And no daal, Diwali or dhoti for India. What would you choose?
Fascinating Hard, isn’t it? And for multicultural communities, especially international school communities where there is a steady and heady influx and efflux of families on an almost weekly basis, understanding one another in a meaningful way truly matters. So, in the spirit of the game, how does this work in practice? We have to move beyond simplistic knowledge and pervasive myths about ethnicity, traditions, and even some wonderful recipes. And then we find that what remains is fascinating and can help in forging strong bonds across different cultures.
Connecting Cultures Whilst there are clearly important qualities that make nations impressively individual, we must remember the important role that the awareness of interdependence can play in creating meaningful relations between people from different nations. As leading educational thinker Martin Skel ton has suggested, dwelling on the experiences and outlooks that connect cultures
14 | the xpat journal | 2020 and countries is not simply a better way of understanding multiculturalism, or even an attempt to replace it – being Scot tish and European, a New Yorker and an American, or Thai yet Southeast Asian are, he says, ‘complementary, not conflicting, concepts’.
Language Language plays a key role here, of course. Whilst on a ‘week without walls’ student leadership trip recently, I remarked to a Dutch colleague that a beautifully-isolated cottage, nestled amongst the dunes, looked gezellig, or ‘cosy’ in its nearest English translation. In the discussion that followed, I learned that the adjective is not usually used for a scene in which there are no people. In Dutch, for something to be truly gezellig, there have to be people, happily and convivially sharing time and space together. I was thrilled to learn this, as English Romanticism holds that the more remote and removed a place is from human civilisation,
the better. This interaction taught me much about the values of Dutch hospitality and allowed for a richer insight into my host culture.
Starting Point The question for schools is often, how do we explore, celebrate, and seek to better under stand the cultures of our cohorts? In classes, corridors and during coffee mornings, culti vating an authentic interest in language, perceptions and presentations of friendship and family dynamics offer a terrific starting point. Ensuring that such opportunities are not only annual, but frequent and friendly, helps too.
Deep Culture At the British School of Amsterdam, we strive to create such opportunities. From providing the environment for cross-cultural encounters to take place between parents to pairing new students with an understanding of their interests and experiences, we aim to engage in what scholar Joseph Shaules refers to as ‘deep culture’. This can encompass areas such as beauty (and its associated myths), authority, leadership, and ideas surrounding cooperation versus competition, as well as how cultural expressions of handling and displaying emotion may be communicated.
Improving Well-Being Improving well-being strategies for our students so that they can better cope with the fast-paced and sometimes high-stakes en vironments they may find themselves in is essential. Last term, as a part of the Elective programme in the Sixth Form, the class was engaging in a mindfulness-based stress re duction course designed especially to support students who experience life from a plurality of cultural perspectives. Some in sightful comments leaned into secular and non-secular origins of peacefulness and tran quillity. Other contributions concerned the thorny topic of work-life balance, concluding that we should seek alignment rather than the ideal of harmony in the competing de mands on our time and energies. A fortnight later, I heard the same students talking about how what they had learned in this class had reverberated across the days that followed. One student said that they had recognised the moment-to-moment awareness that had been explored in the mindfulness when in prayer. In kneeling and taking time for re
flection, gratitude, and worship, they had noticed that their ability to sustain attention had improved. Another student said they had noticed something similar. This time it was in the gentle yet persistent pressure of their feet on their pedals as they cycled to and from school and the pleasure of being more pre sent for their journey. Both students rounded the conversation off with smiles of recogni tion in each other’s experiences.
Bringing Education to Life Ranging comfortably across a multiplicity of socio-cultural meanings, students in richly international settings are seldom drawn into simplistic categorisation and easy compart mentalisation. They eschew narrow interpretation for a more subtly nuanced understanding of what makes each other both unique and independent as well as interconnected and interdependent. In such moments, edu cation comes more fully to life and multiculturalism begins to matter in a manner that more clearly allows us to glimpse the exciting potential that we share when we engage au thentically with one another.
