Saraswati Singh, her husband Chadar Pal Singh and their five children - three daughters and two sons - arrived in British Columbia from Fiji in 1974.

The family made their living by getting rent money from a theatre they owned in the South Pacific island while dad worked as a security guard. The children all worked both full-time and part-time to help the new immigrant family grow.

The family lived in a basement suite and as the finances got better, Saraswati and her husband eventually bought their Vancouver home at 3124 East 21 Avenue.

There was little to distingush in the love, respect and contributions the sons and daughters gave their parents.

Similarly, the parents loved their children equally.

That was until their death.

Chadar died in 1994.  Saraswati died in December 2004.

Following the age old traditional belief  that sons are worth more than daughters, Saraswati split the family estate - worth $550,000 thus - $10,000 each for the three daughters and $260,000 each for the sons.

The elder two girls sued saying this was unfair. A B.C. Supreme court judge agreed, tossed the traditional belief and awarded the women an almost equal share in the estate, which by then had grown to be more than $750,000, thanks to a booming real estate market.

This family dispute, is but one of the cases that has worked its way through our legal system, which is increasingly being asked to balance the will of a parent against the want of a child.

Judges are being asked to weigh the cultural practice of preferential treatment for sons - a bias that permeates nearly all of Asia - against the laws of the land.

So far, most of the rulings have gone in the way of balancing out the cultural disparity, which one judge states has no legitimate context in our society and runs afoul of B.C. laws.

But moves are now underway to alter the law in B.C., which for close to a century has evened out unfair wills drawn up by parents who favoured one child over another.

One of the changes being proposed by the B.C. Law Institute will make it virtually impossible for adult children, who feel they have been robbed of the family fortune, to contest their parents will.

This change, the institute says, will bring B.C. in line with the practice of other provinces.

If conformity is the key reason for this change, the law institute perhaps should be pushing the other provinces to follow the lead of British Columbia.

Sure there will be malcontents and ingrates who will contest what is left to them by their parents.

But for every one of these cases, there will be one where a child is unfairly disinherited because he is gay or complained that she had been abused by dad.

Dysfunctional families, unfortunately, make up a large portion of the landscape in B.C. today and many a time the final act of abuse by an abusive parent is striking the target of abuse out of the will.

The current Wills Variation Act is a good piece of legislation that is rooted in the respect for the rights and the equality of the individual.

It does not tolerate gender bias, cultural hangups or sexual discrimination.

There is really no need to tinker with this legislation.