As sexual partnerships become conditional and revocable, parenthood seems to be gaining a new salience for fathers as well as mothers. At the same time, a new emphasis is being placed on sustaining parental, and in particular paternal, bonds in family law and social policy. Thus measures to extend and/ or enforce the support obligations of out-of-household parents (the Child Support Act 1991) and to sustain the parental responsibilities of both parents after divorce (the Children Act 1989 and the Family Law Act 1996) have been introduced.

In Family Fragments?, Carol Smart and Bren Neale examine the impact of these developments on parenting after relationship breakdown. Not surprisingly, they find that parenting across households removes most of the material and emotional foundation of the marital parenting project and is difficult to achieve; that being separate yet connected creates major dilemmas for parents; and that in any case the viability of co-parenting after divorce is related to the quality of the marital relationship and is often jeopardised by the hostilities of that relationship.

They also show that co-parenting after divorce effectively negates, on the one hand, the ideal of reconstituting exclusive nuclear family units through remarriage, and on the other hand, conceptualisations of the nuclear family as a co-residential unit.

It is possible to cavil at the methodology of Family Fragments? It is based on a small, self-selected sample of 60 parents (31 mothers and 29 fathers). The parents are from different families. We are thus given accounts of post-divorce parenting experiences from the position of one, rather than of both, of the parties to any particular relationship, and the account of the parent only - the voices of children are not heard, but are to be the subject of a further study.

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Cohabiting and married parents are not clearly distinguished. The data-analysis is rooted in grounded theory and this approach, though it has undoubted strengths, is at risk of selective and subjective interpretation.

However, Family Fragments? is a sensitive and insightful study. Smart and Neale emphasise the fluidity, diversity and ambiguity of post-divorce relationships. They treat their subjects as active, reflexive and moral social beings and emphasise the negotiation of commitments. They provide an incisive and helpful account of recent family theorising as well as of legislative change. In their use of the work of male theorists such as Anthony Giddens and David Morgan, their refusal to adopt a simplistic view of social policy and family law as a unified system of oppression and their rejection of the assumption that power is automatically and unambiguously in the hands of men - they epitomise the distance that feminist thought has travelled from the fundamentalism of the early 1970s.

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On the basis of their theoretical position and data, Smart and Neale propose the incorporation of an ethic of care into divorce/ child-care proceedings and disputes and the application of this ethic to parents as well as children so that cooperation between parents may be facilitated. However, it is difficult to see how an ethic of care could obviate the reality of relationship breakdown and the difficulties of parenting across households. And if it could, could it not be deployed to obviate relationship breakdown in the first place? This is not a question that the authors address - or would think it appropriate to address - for they endorse "liberal" notions of the conditional nature of modern sexual partnerships and of divorce as the appropriate solution to "unsatisfactory" marriages.

Faith Robertson Elliot is an honorary research fellow, University of Edinburgh.