Accommodating family diversity and social parenthood within constitutional conservatism

Recognition of family diversity in Polish law is limited. Many children are cared for by adults to whom they are legally strangers but who act as social parents. In contrast, Ireland has recently extended the definition of legal parentage to include LGBT+ families and has allowed social parents to become legal guardians of children. In both jurisdictions, tensions arise between conservative constitutional framing of the family and constitutional protection of respect for family life and the rights of children. The authors assert that the law should prioritise the best interests of the child in a functioning family where circumstances so require, even at the cost of infringing the traditional rights or status of the birth parents. This requires flexibility in legal provisions determining parentage and allocation of parental responsibilities and rights. Ideally, family law should directly recognize connections between children and their caregivers, regardless of biological relationship or the structure of the family in which they live. As a first step, recognizing social parenthood through established hierarchies of legal caregivers, as Irish law has done, is a good model for Poland to follow as a politically safe way to embrace diversity in family law

Best interests · Conservatism · Diversity (politics · Family law · Family life · Flexibility (engineering · Framing (construction · Irish · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Discrimination and Equality Law · European Law and Migration · Polish Law and Legal System · Gender Studies · Law

• Affinal parenthood after divorce

  Open Access•José Luis Castilla-Cabezudo, Reimy Zegarra-Castañeda et al.•Frontiers in Sociology•2026

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