Shared parenting literature review from Michael Lamb: is the main point of social science research to bolster personal prejudice?

Michael Lamb, a professor of psychology at Cambridge University (“the real Cambridge”), gave a literature review with historical perspective at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017.

The highest-level perspective:

• “hundreds of papers show a higher risk of maladjustment in children when parents have separated.” (note the genteel phraseology for what might have been a pretty interesting “separation” that was unlikely to be mutual!)
• maintaining a relationship with both parents minimizes the risk and the bad effects of parental separation

[So we can already conclude that the U.S. will have the highest proportion of maladjusted citizens because (1) we have the highest percentage of children living without both parents, and (2) a family law system that, in most states, discourages regular contact with the loser parent.]

To stay within his 30-minute slot, Lamb concentrated on “attachment theory” and, in a winner/loser parent system, the question of whether or not young children should spend overnights with the loser parent. In a family law system that consumes 3 percent of GDP, why would toddler overnights be worth a special focus? Litigators told us that cash-motivated plaintiffs tend to sue when the youngest child is 2 years old. This is the point at which a second adult in the household is less useful because (a) the child can be parked with day care, (b) the child can be parked with an iPad or TV, or (c) the child can be parked with a babysitter in the evening. In the “preserve and extend the status quo states” the winner parent from the first round of litigation is generally guaranteed to retain winner parent status until the child ages out of the child support system, age 18-23. Preventing the child from spending overnights with the loser parent is an important first step in severing the relationship with the loser parent, which is helpful for keeping the cash flowing and also with getting court permission to relocate.

Courts have historically awarded winner status to the mother, who is also typically the plaintiff in a divorce or custody lawsuit, with young children spending 100 percent of their overnights with the mother and enjoying occasional visits with the father (though that tenuous relationship often withers away to nothing). In the old days it was enough to say “the kids go with the mother because she is the mother,” but in a nominally gender-neutral legal system it became necessary to find more elaborate theories for why the outcomes should continue to park children exclusively with mom.

Lamb explained that “attachment theory” suggests that attachment forms at 7-8 months “usually to both co-resident parents.” Courts would then deny children overnights with the loser parent (father) not because courts hated fathers but because they were concerned that a young child spending overnights with the loser parent would have a problem attaching to and/or maintaining an attachment to the winner parent (mom).

Lamb described Solomon and George, 1999. He explained that the frequent citation of this paper by family court practitioners was problematic because the population was not representative. It is about biological parents who barely knew each other, often having separated before the child was born and certainly prior to the 7/8-month attachment threshold. Of the fathers with whom children spent overnights, 86 percent of them were under restraining orders obtained by the mothers (compared to 100 percent of the fathers who were blocked by the court from caring for children overnight).

Australian judges denying young children overnight time with their fathers rely on work by Mcintosh, Smyth, and Kelaher (2010). Lamb found the study flawed due to lack of information regarding whether or not the separated parents had ever lived together and, if so, how old the child was at the time of separation. He noted that the children who were supposedly being harmed by overnights with their fathers had the same scores for “vigilance” and “irritability” as the children in intact families. Lamb pointed out that the study showed no differences on teacher- or observer-reported behavior for young children and that, by age 4, there were no differences at all, even including reports from mothers.

Tornello, Emery, et al. (2013) is another popular paper that is cited to deny children overnight access to fathers. Lamb noted that the population is also not representative of typical family court litigants. For example, 70 percent of the parents were not living together when the children were born and 85 percent were black or Hispanic. The survey was designed for use by trained observers, but the researchers asked mothers to fill it out themselves. The researchers concluded that children who spent overnights with fathers were less attached to their moms, but they included children who spent 5 out of every 7 nights with their fathers in this group of children who “visit fathers.” So basically they found that children who spend most of their time with Parent A are less attached to Parent B. One curious data point was that the children with the best behavior and adjustment lived exclusively with their dads (see also the Spanish children who were happiest when they lived with two fathers!).

In Lamb’s opinion, one of the best studies on the subject of toddler overnights was Fabricius and Suh (2017), which found a more or less linear relationship between overnights with the father and quality of relationship with the father while at the same time, at least up to a 50/50 shared schedule, there was minimal/positive impact on the relationship with the mother.

The audience, many of whom get paid to show up in court as expert witnesses from time to time, did not see decades of courts using obviously-flawed research as an indication that litigation might not be the best way to resolve questions about a child’s schedule. Instead they hoped that the judges and psychologists involved in adjudicating custody disputes would upgrade to relying on the latest and best research.

At one point in the conference, however, I asked “aren’t there enough papers that a Guardian ad litem, judge, or expert witness can find at least one study to justify any personal prejudice or to support one side in a case?” The answer was, of course, “yes” and nobody had a clear explanation for how the use of social science would result in different outcomes compared to judges simply ruling according to personal inclination or prejudice. In fact, I said “Wouldn’t children who’ve been through the family court mill actually be better off if none of this research existed? Common sense would have suggested that a child who never spends overnights with the father is unlikely to develop a close or even a real relationship with that father. Without support from social scientists, judges might have been reluctant to sever the father-child relationship.” The social scientists at the conference didn’t disagree, but pointed out that if results were communicated to the public and judges there might be a change either to legislation, e.g., mandating 50/50 shared parenting (such as has happened in Arizona and Nevada), or in the personal prejudice of judges, such as has happened in Pennsylvania (moved to a 50/50 shared parenting default without any change in the “best interests” standard).

Readers: What do you think? Is the main point of social science to justify conclusions that would otherwise seem absurd? We have a subset of social scientists ready to tell us that when costs for low-skilled labor are pushed up by minimum wage laws, businesses won’t cut back on their use of low-skilled labor (examples). We have a subset of social scientists ready to tell us that we can offer people free housing, health care, food, and smartphones conditional on them not working and yet they will remain eager to work.

Related:

• Steven Pinker in Blank Slate (2003): “”The denial of human nature has spread beyond the academy and has led to a disconnect between intellectual life and common sense. I first had the idea of writing this book when I started a collection of astonishing claims from pundits and social critics about the malleability of the human psyche: that little boys quarrel and fight because they are encouraged to do so; that children enjoy sweets because their parents use them as a reward for eating vegetables; that teenagers get the idea to compete in looks and fashion from spelling bees and academic prizes; that men think the goal of sex is an orgasm because of the way they were socialized. The problem is not just that these claims are preposterous but that the writers did not acknowledge they were saying things that common sense might call into question. This is the mentality of a cult, in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one’s piety. That mentality cannot coexist with an esteem for the truth, and I believe it is responsible for some of the unfortunate trends in recent intellectual life. One trend is a stated contempt among many scholars for the concepts of truth, logic, and evidence. Another is a hypocritical divide between what intellectuals say in public and what they really believe. A third is the inevitable reaction: a culture of “politically incorrect” shock jocks who revel in anti-intellectualism and bigotry, emboldened by the knowledge that the intellectual establishment has forfeited claims to credibility in the eyes of the public.”