We frequently hear reports of tragedies where children have died from neglect or worse. Last week, an alcoholic mother-of-eight was sentenced to 15 years in prison after her son died of malnutrition. Cries of  ‘How can this have happened again?’ and ‘Who is to blame’ are commonplace, understandably. While it may be natural to want to blame someone, we should also be looking positively at cases where particular interventions worked. We will learn from them. In the world of  divorce, relationship breakdown and family disputes, we know that adversary tends to lead to poorer outcomes, and that the court process tends to lead to the ‘revolving court door’ syndrome. The outcomes tend not to be sustainable. Recoveries tend to  be poor. this is because the final decisions are not taken by the protagonists, but are made by professionals for them.

I’d hazard a guess that more than 90% of those going through a divorce, financial settlement or parenting disagreement end up attempting to communicate their interests and positions through letters, emails or, worse still, text messaging. Writing is slow, time-consuming and expensive to create and deliver (especially if you are engaging professionals). Apart from the expense, it  is also a very blunt way of working: not an efficient way to resolve deeply sad, traumatic and personal matters. Expecting it to work is misguided. It’s as if the medical world ignored the advances made by drug therapy and continued to insist on treating mental health problems through surgical lobotomy. But societies learn from what works. That’s why they progress.

Family mediation in many ways is a distillation of what works in dispute resolution. Once upon a time there was only face-to-face communication. Smoke signals, the Alphorn, the letter post, email, text messaging and others all followed.  They all have their place  – the announcement of new Pope is still made by releasing smoke from a Vatican chimney. But corresponding by post or email as a credible family dispute resolution tool?  It should have been superseded by the phone over 100 years ago. And as useful the phone undoubtedly is, it’s still second place to face-to-face conversation. And it’s this face-to-face element that makes family mediation work so successfully. Because it’s successful it’s quicker. And because it’s quicker it tends to cost much less.

Family mediation is not a second-rate process because it is cheaper. It’s a first-rate process that happens to be cheaper. In fact it’s priceless. Don’t settle for anything less, no matter how expensive it might be.

I am Stephen G Anderson. I am a professional mediator.