Professor William Fabricius of Arizona State University spoke at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017 about two of his latest studies.
The first study presented was on infant overnights. Fabricius and his co-author started by asking college students about their relationships with parents. They found a cohort whose parents had divorced when they were aged 0-3 (there are a lot of these because cash-motivated plaintiffs file suits when the youngest child is 2 and can be easily parked in commercial care).
Unlike with a lot of American studies, they kept the time with the father as a continuous variable rather than dividing into sole care/shared care at a 35 percent threshold.
Results:
- overnights at age 2 positively correlate with the father-child relationship in college
- there is no way to make up for a lack of infant/toddler overnights with more father-child contact later; once a child and the father grow apart they stay apart (on average)
- the father-child relationship in college kept improving as a function of overnights with the father, with the maximum quality achieved at 50/50
- the best-adjusted college students had had, as toddlers, a 50/50 schedule with their divorced parents
- the mother-child relationship actually improved in going from 0/14 overnights to 2/14 overnights with the father, but after that it was constant (though no decrease in mother-child relationship quality from a 50/50 shared parenting arrangement)
Judges cite “conflict” as a reason for denying fathers’ requests for shared parenting (see, e.g., Massachusetts). Fabricius and co-author found that “when the parents disagree, it is actually more important to have a 50/50 schedule in order to maintain the father-child relationship.” No matter what the level of conflict, the more overnights with the father the better-adjusted the child turned out to be. (An attorney sitting next to me whispered, “This is interesting, but someone should tell him that judges don’t care about how well-adjusted children turn out to be. They can order dad to pay mom and the question is how much.”)
Fabricius then presented a study of 83 adolescents, half of whom had a parent relocate so that there was a 4-5 hour separation (average) between the parents. The children lived primarily with a mother and stepfather. Relocation degraded the quality of the child’s relationship with all three “parents” (mom, dad, stepdad; either the discarded fathers hadn’t managed to attract any women or the researchers didn’t consider an adult woman visited every other weekend to be significant enough to be labeled “parent”).
I had joint child custody with 50-50 (alternate weeks) and 80-20 (2 weekends a month plus wed. afternoons), and I found that 50-50 had a lot less conflict. The 50-50 had fewer child hand-offs, and fewer things to be negotiated. I had the time and opportunity to do the things I wanted to do on my weeks, and did not have to concern myself with what was going on the rest of the time. I did not have to worry about parental alienation. With 80-20, my ex was always scheming to be the sole parent dealing with teachers, doctors, etc. With 50-50, she had to co-parent (unless she went back to family court with new allegations).