Police officers place people in custody. Parents care for their children. On Oct. 1, New Hampshire will recognize that difference with a historic change in the state's divorce and custody laws. In fact, the word "custody" will no longer be used in divorce decrees to refer to the guardianship of children.

This welcome change was part of a comprehensive, multi-year effort to redesign the state's family law statutes. The new policies will not eliminate the pain of divorce, but they should reduce it. More important, the changes will help to protect children, who too often become physical and emotional pawns in a war between the two people they love most.

The new law is called the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act. Under it, parents seeking a divorce can be ordered to attend a mediation session to discuss how to divide their children's time between them. Most parties in an acrimonious breakup don't believe that agreement is possible. Yet most of the time, mediation works. That not only speeds up the process and makes it less expensive, it leaves people feeling less bitter and more in control of their lives.

The changes are the work of the Task Force on Family Law. Its goal was to devise a system that truly placed the interests of children first. The current adversarial system, which pits one parent against the other, makes doing that all the harder. Existing law forces parents to compete for their offspring. Children almost always lose that competition and win when parents agree to collaborate despite their differences.

Officially, state policy now is "to support frequent and continuing contact between each child and both parents"and "to encourage parents to share the rights and responsibilities of raising their children."

Under the new law, divorcing parents are expected to use mediation to agree on crucial aspects of their children's lives: where they go to school, how vacations, holidays, birthdays and other important events are handled, what happens when a parent wants to relocate, how they will be contacted by telephone and e-mail and more. The law also allows courts to recognize and grant visitation rights to stepparents and grandparents. If a child is deemed mature enough to show sound judgment, his or her opinion will count heavily with the court.

The law also clearly states that "in determining parental rights and responsibilities . . . including residential responsibility, the court shall not apply a preference for one parent over the other because of the sex of the child, the sex of a parent or the financial resources of a parent." That emphasis on equality is welcome, and many people who've been through a divorce will be watching to see if reality conforms with the law.

"We need to address the mentality that one parent will own the child and the other will borrow the child," John Cameron, a Laconia lawyer and member of the task force told Monitorreporter Allison Steele. The old system, he said, made one parent subordinate to the other. The new law recognizes that for the sake of the children, parents - whatever their differences -must still continue to be parents together.

Divorce can be one of life's most wrenching, painful and scarring experiences. The newly enacted legal reforms - particularly the substitution of "parental responsibilities" for the words "custody" and "child support"-won't turn the process into a handshake and a goodbye. But they will help. We congratulate the task force on its work.