November 24, 2021 – Parents’ Duties (According to Justice Sloan)

“I am assuming your children are your most important concern.

You are responsible to raise and for the development of a human being. You get to do this without a license. You don’t need to have specialized courses.

Your most important job in life is to raise healthy, happy, well adjusted, educated and independent adults.

That job started at your children’s birth and today is the first day of the rest of their lives.

What you do going forward into the future, will affect them for the rest of their lives.

You are the most important people in their lives and therefore you have the greatest influence BOTH positively and negatively over their development as human beings.

You as parents have the inside track to emotionally damage up your children.

You are the male and female role models they will learn from with respect to all their future relationships. Think about it! How you treat each other is imprinting on them.

How you treat each other teaches them how they should treat and be treated by the opposite sex or significant other.

Please don’t think of each other as ex-spouses, think of each other as your children’s mother & father. Show your children’s mother and father the respect they deserve because they are your children’s mother and father.

Think of how you would react if someone referred to one of your parents in unflattering terms. I suspect they better duck.

To put it another way you don’t have to like each other but you should treat each other, with at least the respect you would show a neighbour.”

         Bridgeford v. Bridgeford, 2016 ONSC 7338 (CanLII) at 56-67