Kim Bastaits described research from Belgium at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017.
For custody and child support, Belgium was a standard (for Europe) “mom wins, but not too much cash” jurisdiction until 1995 when courts began favoring joint legal custody (“authority”). Mom couldn’t donate the child’s kidneys without Dad’s consent, for example. In 2006, legislation moved to gender neutrality and favoring 50/50 shared parenting. Did they abandon “best interests of the child”? No. Before 2006 the “best interests of the child” were “live with mom.” After 2006 the “best interests of the child” were “live 50/50 with mom and dad.”
Today roughly 27 percent of Belgian children of separated biological parents are in a 50/50 shared parenting arrangement, with the remainder primarily with their mothers.
Bastaits and her colleagues worked with 623 parent-child relationships, interviewing parents, the new partners of those parents, children, and grandparents. 221 of the relationships involved intact (nuclear) families. 138 were in what the researchers considered “shared parenting,” but it wasn’t the strict 50/50 criterion used by the Swedes. Anything from 35/65 to 65/35 was put into the “shared” bin (the difference between these two schedules in Illinois could be millions of dollars in cashflow!). There were 234 relationships measured for children who lived primarily with their mothers and just 30 for children who lived primarily with a father.
As in Scandinavia, the kids in intact families did the best and kids who were primarily with one parent did the worst. Also as in Scandinavia, the children with a shared parenting arrangement were closer to children of intact families (nobody at the conference would breach decorum and say “normal children” or “children in a normal family”!).
Bastaits and her colleagues looked for differences between “mostly with mom” and “mostly with dad.” In both types of situation, the child’s ability to communicate openly with the other parent was damaged as well as the ability of the other parent to control and support the child. Whichever parent had been reduced to a minority role provided less “emotional support.” Fathers who were primary parents provided more emotional support than mothers who were primary parents (consistent with what litigators interviewed for Real World Divorce told us; American single moms are not that interested in their children, according to their attorneys).