Everyone’s personal dignity guarantees freedoms and rights irrespective of age, which means that they also apply to the child. The rights of the child emphasise his or her subjectivity and draw attention to his or her special status determined, admittedly, by dependence on adults, but not without freedom. Emphasising the rights of the child is a kind of compensation for the child’s legal situation due to his/her physical and mental immaturity and dependence. However, every human being, including the child, has duties in addition to rights, which remain in relative balance. In this way, they contribute to the formation of the child’s personality in a balanced way. Limiting oneself exclusively to rights and at the same time margi-nalising duties leads to a disturbance of this balance, the formation of attitudes of entitlement towards others, teaches laziness and lives at the expense of others. As it seems, it is therefore necessary to restore the balance between highlighting children’s rights and depreciating their duties.

The aim of the article is to evaluate the draft of a new Family Code developed by the Social Codification Commission for Family and Guardianship Law attached to the Children’s Rights Ombudsman with regard to the advisability and legitimacy of the changes proposed in it, as well as to analyse its selected detailed solutions in the context of their impact on the protection of the child’s welfare. The aforemen tioned detailed issues concern, among others, the issues of parental custody and material and legal grounds for divorce. The proposed changes, namely the replacement of the institution of parental custody with “parental responsibility” and the introduction of a new divorce premise are perceived by the authors of the article as clearly negative.
The authors of the article are also critical of the procedure of preparation of the discussed draft. In their opinion, the applicable Family and Guardianship Code is not an anachronistic legal act and can and should continue to play the role of a basic regulator of legal and family relations in our country. The proposal to replace it with a new code is not sufficiently justified, either legally or socially, and its adoption may prove to be dangerous for the stability of the legal and family regula tions, shaped by the latest amendments to family law and contrary to the principle of protection of the best interests of the child.