The “nuclear family”, father, mother and 2.5 children all livng happily together under one roof, is nothing more than a fantasy for many children in Bermuda.

Instead, many children live in a real world in which one parent is nowhere to be seen. Families are often headed by a single parent, often a woman, while the other parent, often the father, is gone, either as a result of divorce or because the birth was out of wedlock.

In the ideal world (this time grounded in something approaching reality), the absent spouse would pay children support on time, share custody, go to school events and spend time with the children — while maintaining amicable relations with the other parent.

That does occur. But too often the reality is that the parents of the child are not speaking, child support is paid only grudgingly or months in arrears, one parent refuses to let the other parent see the child and so on.

Stories of parental misbehaviour are numerous. The storage of grievances and bitterness begins at birth (and sometimes before) and continues until the child reaches adulthood, if that is what it can be called. More often than not, the adult child of a broken home is then doomed to repeat the errors of the parents and the cycle continues.

In all of this, the people who suffer most are the children, who suffer the trauma of seeing the parents separate and then suffer the agony of seeing the two people they should love more than anyone else in the world at each other’s throats, or in some cases, not there at all. Neither alternative is appealing. There are no easy answers to the problem and there is an enormous amount of emotion invested in it.

What is certain is that the current system is not working. The mothers, and occasionally, fathers, who cannot get child support from their fellow parents, face a nightmare of trying to bring children up on little or no money as shown by one of the stories on yesterday’s front page. That there are successful single mothers does not mean the system is working; often they succeed in spite of it, not as a result of it.

And the fathers, usually, who are deprived of access to their children, have equally difficult challenges, as shown by the other story on yesterday’s front page. They are now considering suing the Government because of what they regard as the innate bias of the Family Service departments and the courts.

Before this problem sinks into a quagmire of litigation, the community needs to stop and to try to figure out of there is a better way in which the children will win.

It is with some hesitation that we suggest that the first step into solving this problem is to commission an inquiry, because the history of reports of inquiries in this community is poor. Enormous amounts of work are put in, recommendations are made and then the whole thing is put on the shelf.

But the first step has to be for someone to get a sense of the magnitude of the problem and to separate the anecdotal evidence and the emotion from the facts of child support and parental access. And in this case, an independent board of inquiry is the best vehicle.

Then the board of inquiry can make recommendations and the Government and the judiciary can and should take them up.

Too many young lives are at stake for this problem to be neglected any longer.