What do Millennials think of the U.S. family law system? How would it run if they were in charge? Professor Jennifer Harman, of Colorado State University, answered this question with some of her research at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017.
Harman introduced her research by pointing out that “decisions in family court are largely discretionary,” consistent with what attorneys interviewed for Real World Divorce told us, i.e., judges tend to rule based on their personal biases and beliefs.
Harman randomly assigned undergraduates to the position of judging custody and alimony disputes via a browser-based survey. One of her goals was to see if people would be punished for “gender stereotype violations,” e.g., being a stay-at-home father or a “breadwinner” mother: “We have strong stereotypes about fathers being better breadwinners and mothers being better at parenting.” As is typical for American college students today, the majority of the subjects in her experiment were women (75/25 ratio).
Harman said that some of the most fascinating results were in the expressed rationales from the mock judges. “I am huge on gender equality.” one girl wrote, and then assigned primary custody and a cashflow to the mother, just as a judge would have done in the 1950s. Stay-at-home dads could not get a fair hearing in front of these 20-year-olds. When a mother had no income, she was the logical primary parent because she would be getting monthly checks from the father. When a father had no income, “he doesn’t earn enough to take care of the children,” so custody was once again assigned to the mother.
The college students disfavored men when it came to alimony: “John should make his own living now. He’s divorced.” versus “She needs five years [of cash from the former husband] to get back on her feet.”
The young would-be judges, especially those whose parents were divorced, favored shared parenting: “if they hadn’t had shared parenting, they wanted it. Most wished they had had more time with both parents,” said Harman. “While kids from nuclear families didn’t get it as much.”
Related:
Divorce rates among white millennials are trending much lower. The boomers and Xers were just a bout of social cancer, it seems.
Bobby: Most custody and child support litigation is between American adults who were never married, so “divorce rates” aren’t necessarily relevant. The percentage of American children who live with two biological parents is not rising (see https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/family-structure/ ). I’m not aware of data that would break out “white millennials” as a group in both married and unmarried parenting situations.