INTRODUCTION

Child maintenance and contact concerning the child are the most important parts of the legal relationship between the child and the non-resident parent. However, these legal aspects of parentage are, in principle, regulated separately. The issue of maintenance as a child's right has been treated as an independent legal consequence of parentage, viewed from the fact that child maintenance should always be a duty of parents, regardless of whether parents perform their parental responsibilities or not. Thus, child maintenance tends to be regulated separately from the issue of parental responsibility in both national and international instruments. On the other hand, the issue of the personal relationship between the non-resident parent and the child has been treated as a part of parental responsibilities. It is viewed in two distinct ways both as a parental right to contact and as a parental duty securing the child's right to maintain contact. If anyone has a duty, ironically it is the resident parent who has the responsibility to enable and support the non-resident parent's right to maintain contact with the child. Accordingly, international as well as national instruments regulate the issue of contact separately from child maintenance, without making any connection between the two.

Frequently, the borderline between extended contact and alternative residence is not completely clear. It is possible to decide that the child shall reside with one parent but shall have contact with the non-resident parent comprising up to 50% of its time. Alternatively the same arrangement can be viewed as one of shared or joint residence. In either case, in practice, the child lives equally with each parent but in the first case the arrangement is described as extended contact, while the second case is regarded as one of alternative residence. If a maintenance regime takes account of the amount of time a child lives with a parent, it implicitly makes a link between contact and maintenance. Whether one calls a 50/50 arrangement “residence” or “contact” obviously is a semantic game. Yet, it is a game with important consequences for maintenance, which is likely to be owed under one label but perhaps not under the other. The tension, it seems, is to preserve the theoretical separation of contact and maintenance, while acknowledging their linkage in practice (at least in some national legal systems).