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Katie Hopkins on shared custody: My kids haven't seen their dad since he left me for his secretary and I like it that way

Katie Hopkins: Shared custody doesn't work. It's a place for Saturday night drunks, not kids

Controversial TV star Katie Hopkins, who is mum to India, 9, Poppy, 8 and five-year-old Max is blogging exclusively for Yahoo's parenting section. This week she argues that shared custody doesn't work for either kids or parents - as she reveals her husband left her in the labour ward.

After a long Christmas break with familiar tensions about turkey and tinsel, today is d-Day – the day many couples decide to untie the knot. Solicitors are busy.



No matter how much valuable stuff you share out like adults you will always end up screaming at each other over who gets the last silver spoon.

Then the really awkward bit begins – the children.  We are so squeamish about how awful it all is we put a useless plaster over the wound so we don't have to look at it and flinch. We call the useless plaster, custody.

Custody is a place we put drunks on a Saturday night. It was never designed as a holding pen for children – shunted endlessly between parents that hate each other.



Sharing kids is all about making adults feel better for their failure as a couple. It is like renewing your vows after an affair. It will never work but you can smile for the cameras and pretend.

It all ends up feeling forced and complicated. Handing over the baton of parenting as messily as the British 4 x 100m relay team; a tired kid, missing some of their stuff, a scowling face at the door for being late – again.



It makes you want to stamp ‘overdue’ on their foreheads and rename their mother's house The Library.

Inevitably one parent has to take the controlling share – the organiser, the disciplinarian, and the fixer. The other wins the role of endless Father Christmas – dishing out holidays in the Sun, new trainers and trips to the cinema.

I have been a step mum and hated it; dealing with the nuclear fall out of my arrival on scene, lurking outside their real mum’s house in the car to pick the kids up, sharing time with their father that I begrudged.

[Katie Hopkins: Bring back grammar schools]

[Katie Hopkins: Why I'm not going into the Celebrity Big Brother house]

Kate Winslet solves the problem of three children by three men by being the sole carer for them all. ‘The children don’t go back and forth – none of this 50/50 parenting for me’. She became the unwilling poster girl of Fathers for Justice for her views.

I empathise. When my husband left with his secretary he never came back. I left the maternity ward as a single mother of two. We have never seen each other since - and never will.



In an imperfect world it is my perfect arrangement where I am mum and our little family unit is the only thing that matters. No handover, no sharing, no need for endless resentment, snide remarks or competition. I am strangely grateful.

Things change, people move on, children adapt.

Shared custody is not a parenting arrangement. It is an aversion of guilt. We need to accept we stuffed up and be tougher with ourselves. Children need one place to call home.

When kids are old enough to make their own choices very soon they pick the one parent that they want to be with full time. I think that tells you everything you need to know.