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Child Custody:  No easy answers

 By Harriet Shaklee, Family Development Specialist
University of Idaho Cooperative Extension

 Recent decades have seen the rise of a new norm for American children:  single and separated parenthood.  In the 1950’s, family life for most children included both Mom and Dad living together with their children.  However, divorce rates in the country began to climb in the 60’s, doubled between 1966 and 1976, and leveled off in the late 80’s to an historically high level.  Unwed births rose over the same period, contributing even more single parent households to the American landscape.  By 1990, a majority of American children could expect to spend a significant portion of their lives with a single parent.

 However, these children have a second parent somewhere and may benefit from continued involvement of that parent in their lives.  This is the reasoning behind the joint physical and legal custody arrangements now common for divorcing couples in many states.   Economic benefits are clear when both parents stay involved, with greater child support compliance for parents in regular contact with their children.   Emotional benefits are likely as well.  Separated parents and their children experience grief over the loss of the parental relationship.  In fact, loss of contact with their other parent is children’s most frequent complaint about divorce.

 Joint custody arrangements vary from primary custody with one parent and visitation with the second parent, to fully shared parenting plans with children spending half of the time with each parent.   However, all of these plans require considerable effort from the parents involved, setting aside their disagreements as former spouses to work together for the benefit of their children.  Children, too, must adjust to living in two homes with frequent transitions in between. 

 The evolution of this family form has met with mixed responses from professionals in the field.  Some have warned that the transitions back and forth would be too difficult for children (with special concern for younger children) and have wondered if inconsistencies between rules and expectations in the two households would present mixed messages to the children.  Others, on the other hand, thought these were manageable problems for children, which were more than compensated by the advantages of continued involvement of both parents. 

 Eleanor Maccoby and Robert Mnookin launched a study in 1985 to address these questions about children and parents in dual-residence families.  They interviewed 1124 families in California at the time they filed for divorce, and also one and three years later.  Both moms and dads were included in the survey, and child outcomes were measured in a follow-up.   The result is an impressive body of data to inform us about how parents make the adjustment to separated parenthood, how they handle their continuing relationship with their ex-spouse, and what life is like for children in these households.

 New Roles for Mom and Dad

 First, let’s consider what plans these couples made for caring for their children when they separated.  Here the force of tradition is evident, with children residing with the mother about 70 percent of the time.  Typically, dads maintained contact through one or two overnight visits to his house in a two week period.  In about 1/6 of the families, arrangements were more evenly balanced, with 1/3 to ½ of children’s time in each parent’s household. In about 10% of households, children resided with their father and had visitation with mom.

 In order to appreciate the changes ahead for these parents, let’s review some common patterns of parenting for married couples.  First, in most families, moms have considerably more contact with the children than do dads, with 3 times as many face to face interactions.  In addition, dad time with the kids often includes the mother as well, with moms mediating interactions between dad and the kids, facilitating communication or smoothing the rough points.  

 Mother’s and father’s roles in the family are often complementary.  Mom time with the kids generally involves more reciprocal role taking and comfort giving.  Moms are also more likely than dads to chat with and listen to their children.  As a result, moms are the more likely parent to know their children’s interests, friends, preferences, and goals.   Dads, on the other hand, prefer playful interaction with their children.  In addition, dads get more child compliance to their demands, and often serve as “back-up” authority to mom’s requests.  These complementary roles suggest that mom and dad make a great alliance together.  But how do they manage once they are separated?

 Maccoby and Mnookin’s data suggest that each parent has a lot of learning to do after separation.  Dads are more likely than moms to report problems in monitoring their children’s school progress, whereabouts, friends, and interests.  Moms, on the other hand, report having a hard time remaining firm and patient.   Comparing dual-custody with primary custody parents, those with dual-custody arrangements, especially mothers, had an easier time making these adjustments.  These parents reported less difficulty remaining firm and patient, and more time for playing and chatting with their children.  Dual-custody arrangements appear to ease the transitions to new parental roles for moms and dads, perhaps through continued contact with the other parent who had filled those roles when they were married.  Shared custody also may have allowed each parent more child-free time to problem solve about ways to better fulfil their new parental roles.

 However, the difficulty of the dual-custody arrangement was shown in a number of ways.  First, of the families awarded joint physical custody, only half adopt a dual residence arrangement with time shared between the two parents.  The remainder had a primary residence with visitation to the second parent.  In addition, dual custody was the most unstable parenting plan, with over half of the custody arrangements changing over the three year period.  Dual residence families also communicated less frequently over time; initially 67.6% conferred at least once a week about the children, but only 40.5% did so three years later.  Many parents reported actively avoiding communication as time passed.  Dual custody families also reported more difficulty keeping track of their children, a finding restricted to conflicted couples.  Finally,  about ¼ of the dual-residence parents had serious concerns about problems at the other parent’s home, including concerns about life style, laxness, mental instability, etc.

 Family Conflict or Cooperation?

 Dual-residence families were categorized according to the degree of cooperation between parents.   Cooperative parents were those who coordinated parenting goals and strategies in the two homes, a style shown by about ¼ of the families, and tending to remain stable over the three years of the study.   Disengaged parents maintained their own parenting styles independent from the other parent, a style seen among 29% of families at first, but increasing to 41% 3 years later.  Conflicted parents disagreed regularly about parenting issues, a style of interaction for 34% at the beginning of the study, but declining to 26% at the end of the study.  Parental conflict was most frequent in larger families (3+ children) with one or more children of preschool age and younger.  Couples who were initially hostile, but learned to manage their conflict generally shifted to the disengaged style of co-parenting.

 The children in the study were interviewed as teenagers, 4-5 years after their family divorce, to see long term effects of custody arrangements.  As is often found, young people fared poorly if their parents’ conflict continued over the years, with more depression and negative teen behaviors (e.g. school problems, substance abuse, delinquency).   Effects were most negative for those teens who felt caught in the middle of their parent’s fights.  Teenagers from cooperating dual-residence families had the most positive outcomes, with those from disengaged families in between.  Looking only at cooperative families, dual-resident teens were better off than single-parent custody teens.  However, when parents were conflicted, teens were better off living with just one of the parents.

 Maccoby and Mnookin find cause for concern in these findings.  That is, couples who come to divorce court in conflict about custody arrangements often challenge a judge to come up with an appropriate settlement.  Rather than favor either parent with sole custody, judges often award joint custody.  In fact, about 1/3 of the dual-custody cases in this study involved intense legal conflict at the divorce settlement.  However, the study findings suggest that, when couples are in conflict, children are better off in sole custody than in joint custody arrangements.  In these cases, sparing the children further conflict may outweigh the disadvantages of limited contact with the second parent.   The challenge, of course, is in figuring out which families are headed for long-term conflict,  since hostility subsides in the first year of divorce for many families, evolving into a disengaged parenting pattern.

 Two-parent Involvement for Children

 This study can also inform us about factors that keep both parents involved.  In recent years, states have preferred joint-custody divorce settlements in the hopes of keeping two active parents in the lives of children of divorce.  Most encouraging is the evidence that dual-residence families have the lowest rate of parental dropout of any of the groups.  Over the three year study period levels of commitment of mothers and fathers in these families remained high.  However, many primary-custody families did lose contact with the second parent over time.  Especially unstable were those families in which Dads were limited to daytime visits.  These fathers tended to drop out of the family picture.   Visitation schedules were sustained in mother-custody families in which the mother had a conviction that continued contact with dad was good for the children.

 Finally, when joint physical custody is not possible, courts have often assigned joint legal custody to encourage continued involvement of the second parent, most likely the father.  In fact the most common divorce settlement in California courts at the time of this study was mother physical custody with joint legal custody.  In this case, the second parent has the right to continued involvement in decision making about the children.  However, Maccoby and Mnookin’s study suggests that this practice has no effect on father behavior.  Dads with joint legal custody were no more likely to pay child support, keep in contact with the children, or become involved in decision making about the children than were those without legal custody.  Further monitoring of effects of joint legal custody are in order to evaluate its role in divorced family life. 

 With this extensive study, Maccoby and Mnookin help complete the picture on divorce by offering data over time on outcomes of common custody arrangements for children and their parents.  What can we, as a society, learn from this work?

 

This discussion was based on: 

Dividing the Child;  Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody by Eleanor Maccoby and Robert Mnookin,  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

“Caught Between Parents: Adolescents’ Experience in Divorced Homes,”   by Christy Buchanan,  Eleanor Maccoby, and Sanford Dornbusch, Child Development, 1991, 62:1008 – 1029.

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