Introduction: <scp> <i>Family court review</i> </scp> special feature on changeovers, choices, and challenges—Understanding children and young people's between‐home transitions after parental separation

The seeds of this Special Feature were planted 15 years ago through the observation of young children's everyday routines and rituals at a day-care centre. It was clear, even then, that children developed inventive ways to manage transitions seeking comfort and connection in the moment of parting, such as pressing a hand against a window to mirror a parent's touch on the other side. Children often relied on transitional objects to self-soothe after parents or carers left. Drop-offs and pick-ups involved not only parents but also siblings, grandparents, and others, with children's belongings carried in an assortment of bags, backpacks, and containers that held both practical items and cherished objects. These interweaving elements combined to reveal how they and other children, families, and material things actively shaped the experience of children's transitions, highlighting the small but significant practices through which connection, care, and continuity are sustained. More recently, conceptual and empirical work across several disparate but closely related fields has been central in advancing our understanding of children's worlds as they move through space and time. These fields span the sociology of childhood (e.g., Prout & James, 2015; Smart et al., 2001), children's geographies (e.g., Holloway, 2014), children's rights (Tobin, 2019), family law (e.g., Birnbaum & Saini, 2015; Fehlberg et al., 2025; Garber, 2019), and multi-local families (Nimmo & Schier, 2019; Schier, 2016) as well as socio-material perspectives on post-separation life such as “divorcescapes” (Warming & Alminde, 2025). Recent work on “families in motion” (Murray et al., 2019) and “children in motion” (Berman, 2019) are exciting off-shoots. Of special note, Merla and Nobels' (2025) recent scholarship on children's experience of shared residence after parental separation sheds light on the neglected area of the so-called “in-between” space (i.e., the “floating” or “third space”) traversed by children and young people as they move between homes after separation. This Special Feature brings together four distinct yet interconnected articles that approach the issue of children's and young people's transitions between homes after parental separation from multiple vantage points. The first article co-authored by Laura Merla and Bérengère Nobels is based on their recent book, titled Belonging and Belongings. The authors use the metaphor of an archipelago to depict each parental home as an “island,” capturing how children move between distinct but linked worlds. Serving as the spine of this Special Feature, the article foregrounds children's voices on life across two households. The remaining three articles began as conference papers presented in July 2025 at the World Congress on the Rights of the Child and Family Law at the University of Cambridge in the UK. The article by Bruce Smyth, Megan Reid Hobbs and Jan Stokkebekk sets out the basic elements of changeovers that warrant consideration, and highlights how children and young people's between-home transitions are often deeply relational events that shape their ongoing sense of safety, continuity, and belonging. From a contrasting perspective, Michael Saini and Lisa Chung explore children's between-home transitions through a judicial lens in Canada. Drawing on an analysis of 66 Canadian judgments issued between 2003 and 2025 that specifically address children's changeovers, the authors found that judicial attention largely centred on the safety of changeover locations and on whether direct parental contact should occur during these exchanges. They note that changeovers can be the most emotionally charged moments in a parenting schedule, and that how they are managed can make the difference between children feeling secure and settled, or anxious and exposed to conflict. Extending this line of thinking, Saini and Chung argue for judicial orders that reflect the potentially complex, multi-layered nature of changeovers in high conflict cases, encompassing their temporal, spatial, relational, communicative, and practical dimensions. The final article takes the form of an invited commentary by Sarah Calvert, a clinical psychologist with over four decades of experience working with children in various forensic and legal settings in New Zealand. In reflecting on the collection, she offers six potent insights: that (a) children and young people's transitions between homes are often regarded by many as fleeting moments and thus are assumed to be of limited significance; (b) children and young people's voices are often marginalized in family court contexts, even though adults' decisions greatly impact them; (c) children's transitions are “relational moments”; (d) the language of “changeover” and “handovers” frames children and young people as objects rather than as individuals with their own feelings and rights; (e) the availability and movement of transitional objects can be especially important for younger children, as they help them manage anxiety, maintain a sense of security, and support their evolving identities; and (f) changeovers can be potential sites of high conflict and danger. By foregrounding children's own experiences of transitions between homes after separation, this collection aims to deepen our understanding of how legal and therapeutic processes intersect with daily family life. In the light of these findings and reflections, we hope that courts, attorneys, mediators, mental health professionals, and policymakers oversee processes and make decisions that more truly speak to children's and young people's need for safe, positive, and low-stress transitions between homes.

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