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Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets is available is available in an English translation. The transition of wealthy economies from a market economy (“Capitalism”) to a welfare state (“Socialism”) has apparently pretty painless for most citizens. Nearly half of the U.S. economy is now centrally-planned or taxpayer-funded and people pay their property tax, sales tax, gasoline tax, payroll tax, Medicare tax, income tax, etc. without complaining too much.

Alexievich interviewed people in former Soviet republics, including Russia, to find out what it was like to go in the other direction: from Socialism to a free-market Capitalism that demands much more of citizens than the U.S. or Western Europe.

Everything below is a quote from someone she interviewed:

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery—they even liked being slaves. I remember it well: After we finished school, we’d volunteer to go on class trips to the Virgin Lands, and we’d look down on the students who didn’t want to come.

So here it is, freedom! Is it everything we hoped it would be? We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in battle. Instead, we ushered in a Chekhovian life. Without any history. Without any values except for the value of human life—life in general. Now we have new dreams: building a house, buying a decent car, planting gooseberries… Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence, which has traditionally been suppressed in Russia. The freedom of Her Highness Consumption.

My wife and I graduated from the Philosophy Faculty of St. Petersburg (back then, it was Leningrad) State University, then she got a job as a janitor, and I was a stoker in a boiler plant. You’d work one twenty-four-hour shift and then get two days off. Back then, an engineer made 130 rubles a month, while in the boiler room, I was getting 90, which is to say that if you were willing to give up 40 rubles a month, you could buy yourself absolute freedom. We read, we went through tons of books. We talked. We thought that we were coming up with new ideas.

There were new rules: If you have money, you count—no money, you’re nothing. Who cares if you’ve read all of Hegel? “Humanities” started sounding like a disease.

There was so much love! What women! Those women hated the rich. You couldn’t buy them. Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb…

Before, I had hated money, I didn’t know what it was. My family never talked about it—it was considered shameful. We grew up in a country where money essentially did not exist. Like everyone else, I would get my 120 rubles a month and that had been enough. … Back then, books replaced life… This was the end of our nightly kitchen vigils and the beginning of making money then making more money on the side. Money became synonymous with freedom. Everyone was completely preoccupied with it. The strongest and most aggressive started doing business. We forgot all about Lenin and Stalin. And that’s what saved us from another civil war with Reds on the one side and Whites on the other. Friends and foes. Instead of blood, there was all this new stuff… Life! We chose the beautiful life. No one wanted to die beautifully anymore, everyone wanted to live beautifully instead. The only problem was that there wasn’t really enough to go around…

The Soviet was a very good person, capable of traveling beyond the Urals, into the furthest deserts, all for the sake of ideals, not dollars. We weren’t after somebody else’s green bills. The Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, the Siege of Stalingrad, the first man in space—that was all us. The mighty sovok! I still take pleasure in writing “USSR.” That was my country; the country I live in today is not. I feel like I’m living on foreign soil.

Socialism isn’t just labor camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world: Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others. They say to me that you couldn’t buy a car—so then no one had a car. No one wore Versace suits or bought houses in Miami. My God! The leaders of the USSR lived like mid-level businessmen, they were nothing like today’s oligarchs. Not one bit! They weren’t building themselves yachts with champagne showers. Can you imagine! Right now, there’s a commercial on TV for copper bathtubs that cost as much as a two-bedroom apartment. Could you explain to me exactly who they’re for? Gilded doorknobs… Is this freedom? The little man, the nobody, is a zero—you’ll find him at the very bottom of the barrel.

A cult of money and success. The strong, with their iron biceps, are the ones who survive. But not everyone is capable of stopping at nothing to tear a piece of the pie out of somebody else’s mouth. For some, it’s simply not in their nature. Others even find it disgusting.

Did I believe in communism? I’ll be honest with you, I’m not going to lie: I believed in the possibility of life being governed fairly. And today… as I’ve already told you… I still believe in that. I’m sick of hearing about how bad life was under socialism. I’m proud of the Soviet era! It wasn’t “the good life,” but it was regular life. We had love and friendship… dresses and shoes… People hungrily listened to writers and actors, which they don’t do anymore.

Everywhere you look, you see our new heroes: bankers and businessmen, models and prostitutes… managers… The young can adapt, while the old die in silence behind closed doors. They die in poverty, all but forgotten. My pension is fifty dollars a month…[ She laughs.] I’ve read that Gorbachev’s is also fifty dollars a month… They say that the Communists “lived in mansions and ate black caviar by the spoonful. They built communism for themselves.” My God! I’ve shown you around my “mansion”—a regular two-bedroom apartment, fifty-seven square meters. I haven’t hidden anything from you: my Soviet crystal, my Soviet gold…

The first thing to go was friendship… Suddenly, everyone was too busy, they had to go out and make money. Before, it had seemed like we didn’t need money at all… that it had no bearing on us. Suddenly, everyone saw the beauty of green bills—these were no Soviet rubles, they weren’t just play money. Bookish boys and girls, us house plants… We turned out to be ill suited for the new world we’d been waiting for. We were expecting something else, not this. We’d read a boatload of romantic books, but life kicked and shoved us in another direction.

More: read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

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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:

• Colorado family law

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Submission by Michel Houellebecq imagines France’s transition to Islamic law and, therefore, legal polygamy (the U.S. has already transitioned, de facto if not de jure!). He starts off describing the legacy Western model:

Mostly I had mistresses—or rather, as people said then (and maybe still do), I had girlfriends, roughly one a year. … They would start at the beginning of the school year, with a seminar, an exchange of class notes, or what have you—one of the many social occasions, so common in student life, that disappear when we enter the workforce, plunging most of us into a solitude as stupefying as it is radical. … When we came back from summer vacation and the school year began again, the relationship would end, almost always at the girl’s initiative. Things had changed over the summer. This was the reason they’d give, usually without elaboration. A few, clearly less eager to spare me, would explain that they had met someone. Yeah, and so? Wasn’t I someone, too? … The way things were supposed to work (and I have no reason to think much has changed), young people, after a brief period of sexual vagabondage in their very early teens, were expected to settle down in exclusive, strictly monogamous relationships involving activities (outings, weekends, vacations) that were not only sexual, but social. Yet there was nothing final about these relationships. Instead, they were thought of as apprenticeships—in a sense, as internships (a practice that was generally seen in the professional world as a step toward one’s first job). Relationships of variable duration (a year being, according to my own observations, an acceptable amount of time) and of variable number (an average of ten to twenty might be considered a reasonable estimate) were supposed to succeed one another until they ended, like an apotheosis, with the last relationship, this one conjugal and definitive, which would lead, via the begetting of children, to the formation of a family.

I had made only very occasional forays onto escort sites, usually during the summer months as a sort of stopgap between one student and the next.

The complete idiocy of this model became plain to me only much later—rather recently, in fact—when I happened to see Aurélie and then, a few weeks later, Sandra. (But if it had been Chloé or Violaine, I’m convinced I would have reached the same conclusion.) The moment I walked into the Basque restaurant where Aurélie was meeting me for dinner, I knew I was in for a grim evening. Despite the two bottles of white Irouléguy that I drank almost entirely by myself, I found it harder and harder, and after a while almost impossible, to keep up a reasonable level of friendly conversation. For reasons I didn’t entirely understand, it suddenly seemed tactless, almost unthinkable, to talk about the old days. As for the present, it was clear that Aurélie had never managed to form a long-term relationship, that casual sex filled her with growing disgust, that her personal life was headed for complete and utter disaster. There were various signs that she’d tried to settle down, at least once, and had never recovered from her failure. The sourness and bitterness with which she talked about her male colleagues (in the end we’d been reduced to discussing her professional life: she was head of communications for an association of Bordeaux winemakers, so she traveled a lot to promote French wines, mainly in Asia) made it painfully clear that she had been through the wringer. Even so, I was surprised when, just as she was about to get out of the taxi, she invited me up “for a nightcap.” She’s really hit rock bottom, I thought. From the moment the elevator doors shut, I knew nothing was going to happen. I didn’t even want to see her naked, I’d rather have avoided it, and yet it came to pass, and only confirmed what I’d already imagined. Her emotions may have been through the wringer, but her body had been damaged beyond repair. Her buttocks and breasts were no more than sacks of emaciated flesh, shrunken, flabby, and pendulous. She could no longer—she could never again—be considered an object of desire. My meal with Sandra followed a similar pattern, albeit with small variations (seafood restaurant, job with a pharmaceutical CEO), and it ended much the same way, except it seemed to me that Sandra, who was plumper and jollier than Aurélie, hadn’t let herself go to the same degree. She was sad, very sad, and I knew her sorrow would overwhelm her in the end; like Aurélie, she was nothing but a bird in an oil slick; but she had retained, if I can put it this way, a superior ability to flap her wings. In one or two years she would give up any last matrimonial ambitions, her imperfectly extinguished sensuality would lead her to seek out the company of young men, she would become what we used to call a cougar, and no doubt she’d go on this way for several years, ten at the most, before the sagging of her flesh became prohibitive, and condemned her to a lasting solitude.

Don’t read this book if you’re enthusiastic about settling down in the suburbs:

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless.

I thought about Annelise’s life—and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether “stylish” or “sexy,” most likely “stylish” in her case. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her a while to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted (Bruno was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner—he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and yoga pants, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known—had to have known—that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.

Bruno and Annelise must be divorced by now. That’s how it goes nowadays. A century ago, in Huysmans’s time, they would have stayed together, and maybe they wouldn’t have been so unhappy after all.

Don’t read this book if you’re depressed about aging:

my body was the seat of various painful afflictions—headaches, rashes, toothaches, hemorrhoids—that followed one after another, without interruption, and almost never left me in peace—and I was only forty-four! What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I’d be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition, my life an unending torment, grim, joyless, and mean.

Houellebecq’s novel predicts the outcome of the 2017 elections:

The National Front was way ahead, with 34.1 percent of the vote.

(Marine Le Pen actually won 33.9 percent.) He added that the Muslim Brotherhood was running as well (and ultimately prevails in forming a government). He also described the potential for voters to fail to obey instructions from the elites:

the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to a situation that was chaotic, violent, and unpredictable.

French Christians are excluded from the country’s educational system:

It was two weeks before I received the letter from Paris III. According to the new statutes of the Islamic University of Paris–Sorbonne, I was no longer permitted to teach. Robert Rediger, the new president of the university, had signed the letter himself. He expressed his profound regret and assured me that this was no reflection on the quality of my scholarship. I was, of course, welcome to pursue my career in a secular university. If, however, I preferred to retire, the Islamic University of Paris–Sorbonne could offer me a pension, effective immediately, at a starting monthly rate of 3,472 euros, to be adjusted for inflation. I was invited to schedule a meeting with HR in order to fill out the necessary paperwork. I reread the letter three times in disbelief. It was, practically to the euro, what I’d have gotten if I had retired at sixty-five, at the end of a full career. They really were willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media, under rubrics such as “tribune” or “points of view”; nowadays these had become a private club. Even if all the university teachers in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn’t found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.

But they react by converting to Islam. At which point dating and marriage procedures change…

“What about the girls?” [a former Christian colleague] grinned. “Obviously, that’s all changed. I guess you could say things are organized differently now. I got married,” he added, rather brusquely. Then he elaborated: “To one of my students.” “They arranged that for you, too?” “Not exactly. Let’s just say they don’t discourage the possibilities of contact with female students. I’m getting another wife next month.” With that he headed off toward the rue de Mirbel, leaving me openmouthed at the top of the stairs.

I’d been waiting two or three minutes when a door opened to my left and in walked a teenage girl wearing low-waisted jeans and a Hello Kitty T-shirt, her long black hair loose over her shoulders. When she saw me, she shrieked, tried awkwardly to cover her face with her hands, and dashed back out of the room. At that very moment, Rediger appeared on the landing and came down the stairs to greet me. He had witnessed the incident, and shook my hand with a look of resignation. “That’s Aïcha, my new wife. She’ll be very embarrassed that you saw her without her veil.” “I’m so sorry.” “No, don’t apologize. It’s her fault. She should have asked whether there was a guest before she came into the front hall. She doesn’t know her way around the house yet, but she will.” “Yes, she looks very young.” “She just turned fifteen.”

At that moment the door opened, just in time to save me from having to answer. It was a plump woman, perhaps forty years old, with a kind face, carrying a tray of warm canapés arranged around an ice bucket. This held the promised bottle of Meursault. “That’s my first wife, Malika,” he said once she’d left. “You seem to be meeting all my wives today. I married her when I was still living in Belgium … Yes, my family’s Belgian. So am I, for that matter. I was never naturalized, though I’ve lived here for twenty years.”

“Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world as such, Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is dukkha—unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn’t Satan called ‘the prince of the world’? For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it’s an absolute masterpiece. What is the Koran, really,

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At the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017, researchers noted that at least some of what drove custody litigation was differences in what people believed was the norm: “What do sisters, brothers, and friends say?” Marriages that mixed partners from different social classes tended to result in the most intense litigation: “People from lower social class families are more accustomed to single moms. So if you have a mom who was herself raised by a white trash single mom and a dad who grew up middle class raised by two parents, they’re never going to agree on whether shared parenting is good for the kids.”

Related:

• The Son Also Rises: Tips for Optimizing Your Life

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Submission is an impressive achievement because the protagonist is a literature professor and the author says, in the acknowledgments at the end, that he was never either a graduate student or a professor.

Here are a few samples:

Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him, never once was I tempted to drop him or take up another subject; then, one afternoon in June 2007, after waiting and putting it off as long as I could, even slightly longer than was allowed, I defended my dissertation, “Joris-Karl Huysmans: Out of the Tunnel,” before the jury of the University of Paris IV–Sorbonne. The next morning (or maybe that evening, I don’t remember: I spent the night of my defense alone and very drunk) I realized that part of my life, probably the best part, was behind me. So it goes, in the remaining Western social democracies, when you finish your studies, but most students don’t notice right away because they’re hypnotized by the desire for money or, if they’re more primitive, by the desire for consumer goods (though these cases of acute product-addiction are unusual: the mature, thoughtful majority develop a fascination with that “tireless Proteus,” money itself). Above all they’re hypnotized by the desire to make their mark, to carve out an enviable social position in a world that they believe and indeed hope will be competitive, galvanized as they are by the worship of fleeting icons: athletes, fashion or Web designers, movie stars, and models.

I was poor, and if I’d been given one of those polls that are always trying to “take the pulse of the under-25s,” I would certainly have checked the box marked “struggling.” And yet the morning after I defended my dissertation (or maybe that same night), my first feeling was that I had lost something priceless, something I’d never get back: my freedom. For several years, the last vestiges of a dying welfare state (scholarships, student discounts, health care, mediocre but cheap meals in the student cafeteria) had allowed me to spend my waking hours the way I chose: in the easy intellectual company of a friend.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.

all he’d written was a vague dissertation on Rimbaud, a bogus topic if ever there was one, … Millions of dissertations were written on Rimbaud, in every university in France, the francophone countries, and beyond. Rimbaud was the world’s most beaten-to-death subject, with the possible exception of Flaubert, so all a person had to do was look for two or three old dissertations from provincial universities and basically mix them together. Who could check? No one had the resources or the desire to sift through hundreds of millions of turgid, overwritten pages on the voyant by a bunch of academic drones.

My interest in the life of the mind had greatly diminished; my social life was hardly more satisfying than the life of my body; it, too, presented itself as a series of petty annoyances—clogged sink, slow Wi-Fi, points on my license, dishonest cleaning woman, mistakes in my tax return—and these, too, followed one after another without interruption, and almost never left me in peace.

More: Submission

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As a former teacher of a section of an applied probability class at MIT and a recent tutor for AP Statistics, here are my favorite recent news stories…

“Facebook says high-frequency posters often share fake news” (Engadget):

Adam Mosseri, the Facebook VP in charge of News Feed, said that the company’s research shows that people who post more than 50 times per day are often sharing low quality content.

“Harassed, Propositioned and Silenced in Silicon Valley” (nytimes front page headline; the story itself carries “Women in Tech Speak Frankly on Culture of Harassment”)

More than two dozen women in the technology start-up industry spoke to The Times in recent days about being sexually harassed. … The women’s experiences help explain why the venture capital and start-up ecosystem — which underpins the tech industry and has spawned companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon — has been so lopsided in terms of gender.

[What’s the denominator for those 24 women who complained to the Times? This report shows total Silicon Valley employment at 1.5 million jobs in 2015. The EEOC says that 36 percent of “high tech workers” in 2014 were women (Google says that 31 percent of its employees in 2016 identified as “women”). If all Silicon Valley jobs were in tech, that would be roughly 500,000 women, so the denominator is at most 500,000 but almost certainly smaller due to the fact that not all jobs in SV are tech jobs.]

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Our youngest is almost two years old, so it is time for him to get a passport. He needs to catch up to Lani Shea, who had visited 100 countries by age 2 years, 8 months (Wikipedia entry on Travelers’ Century Club; also this BBC article on Lani’s dad). First stop: Niagara Falls! (Can we see everything that matters to toddlers in one day? Do we actually need to go to the Canadian side? Or if we ride Maid of the Mist will we get a good enough view of the Canadian falls to avoid La Migra?)

The State Department passport application form provides only two options for “Sex”: “male” and “female”. This is true both for the applicant and the applicant’s (not to say “his or her”) parents. Could this be Rex Tillerson’s fault? (see “Proof that being straight and gay are not treated the same in the world of business“) Or do we blame Donald Trump?

Separately, I looked for places where we could go and submit the application (both parents, lots of IDs, etc.) and our local post office showed up at the top of the list. Thursday is the walk-in day for passports. But you can’t go during the lunch break. “Lunch Start” is at 10:00 and “Lunch End” is at 14:00. (There are only three establishments in our town that serve lunch commercially. The farthest from the post office is a 1-minute walk.)

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Presenters and attendees at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017 had some ideas for improving the way that custody disputes in U.S. family courts are resolved (see Real World Divorce for how they typically are resolved now).

Presenters agreed the the temporary order process, which comes early in what might be years of divorce or custody litigation, is a critical part of why shared parenting is so uncommon in the United States. “That’s the end of the children’s relationship with one parent,” said a panel speaker regarding temporary orders favoring the other parent, and the rest of the panel nodded. Kari Adamsons, of the University of Connecticut (a great state for alimony plaintiffs!), summarized this with “there is a lot of momentum from temporary orders, especially for kids.”

The psychologists suggested mandated 50/50 shared parenting via temporary orders because it gives judges the opportunity to test the workability of shared parenting. When the trial comes around months (or two years, in Massachusetts, or maybe never, in Canada) later, the court will know whether or not shared parenting has been successful. Kentucky has recently put this suggestion into effect (see “New child-custody law lets Ky. children win with shared parenting,” April 12, 2017, Lexington Herald Leader). [Note that litigation over possession of children is less intense in Kentucky than in many other states because it is difficult for a plaintiff parent to get more than $14,700 per year per child in child support revenue.]

Given that a lot of states’ family courts see their mission as “maintain the status quo,” this Kentucky-style temporary order presumption would be likely to change the custody outcome statistics.

Some of the psychologists wanted courts (with the help of paid psychologists, typically!) to investigate “conflict.” Instead of simply ignoring one party’s assertion of “conflict,” as a lot of Western states do when awarding a 50/50 schedule to children, psychologists should try to figure out which parent was responsible for the conflict. The psychologists said that there was usually one parent who had “moved on” with a new lover, maybe some new kids, etc. while the other person had “not moved on” and would generate conflict. They never explained, however, how this was better than a fairly strict 50/50 presumption. Nor did they address “How are people supposed to move on when one person has to pay the other every month?” (unlike in England, for example, where they try to achieve a “clean break” of transferring assets from defendant to plaintiff in one big lump) The most that they came up with was that parents would be “taught” (by psychologists?) how to cooperate. Professor Linda Nielsen didn’t contradict her colleagues directly, but she noted that “most shared parenting arrangements are in fact parallel parenting. There is very little need for communication. Children are not benefiting from parents being buddies. There should be less emphasis on looking at parent-parent relationship and more on the parent-child relationship.”

Psychologists were sometimes realistic about the limitations of their profession. Pamela Ludolph, a PhD in clinical psych at University of Michigan, said “there are some awful custody evaluators out there” but admitted that she doesn’t know how to fix the problem.

Some of the American experts presenting almost tripped over themselves in advocating for victims of domestic violence, though they simultaneously presented statistics showing that domestic violence was generally not a relevant factor for separated parents, whether children in 50/50 or primary/secondary parenting. Richard Warshak, for example, opened his panel talk by saying that judges shouldn’t award shared parenting if there was “a history of intimate partner violence.” He didn’t acknowledge, however, that the financial and practical rewards to becoming the winner parent might shade witness testimony and make it challenging for judges to determine the truth of “intimate partner violence” allegations. Nor did he explain how, if one parent is actually violent, why it is a good idea for the children to be with that violent person roughly 30 percent of the time or for the violent parent and the victim parent to have four or five face-to-face interactions every two weeks (Wednesday pick-up for dinner, Wednesday drop-off after dinner; Sunday night drop-off every other weekend) as opposed to zero face-to-face interactions in a 50/50 week-on/week-off arrangement with exchanges at school or camp.

A European researcher in the audience reacted privately to these righteous sentiments by asking why American courts would even want to hear either parent-parent or parent-child abuse allegations simultaneously with a divorce or custody dispute. “People can have a child and care for the child 100 percent of the time, but the state will take the child away if he is being abused. Why not presume a 50/50 care arrangement and then, separately, the state can investigate whether or not the child is being abused under one or both parents’ care? If one parent is abusive, the child can then be taken away by the child abuse agency and put into the other parent’s care for 100 percent of the time.” (Certainly every state in the U.S. does have the machinery in place to implement her idea. There is always a DSS or DCF or CPS. See Family Law Reform Conference Report, for example: “Child Protective Services [in Texas] gets a report on every father in high-income custody and child support cases. They love to go out and investigate upper-middle-class white men in safe neighborhoods and will spend a whole day with a father who is the target of a custody action. CPS social workers don’t like to go into housing projects where they might get their asses kicked.”)

Summary: It is tough to believe that American voters would, starting from scratch, ask for a litigation-based parenting dispute system like the one that we have. On the other hand, even the experts are reluctant to let it go and their suggestions tend to be tweaks of the legacy system that can easily consume 100 percent of what would have been a child’s inheritance in order to protect his or her “best interests.”

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Text message from a friend:

Mother of our kid’s friend emails Susie: “I am really sorry to ask, but I always do this. Do you have any guns in the house? Any trampolines? Do you have a pool?” Susie replies “Yes. Yes. Yes.” Mother says “Oh, ok. Thank you for telling me. We will bring him over to play at 3.”

What is the point of asking if you are going to let your kid play there anyway?

[Names changed to protect the guilty, but knowing that this message originated in Massachusetts I am sure that any of my face-to-face friends will immediately recognize the source!]

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Professor Linda Nielsen of Wake Forest University presented at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017. We interviewed Nielsen for a chapter in Real World Divorce:

What does Nielsen think of the winner/loser custody system that prevails in most U.S. states? “A lot of social scientists say that a court cannot possibly pull together enough custody evaluators and psychology experts to accurately predict what is going to be the best parenting plan for each child in a particular family ” responded Nielsen. “The premise that custody evaluators can always give an objective recommendation is flawed. It is not like a driving test or a math test. There may be no standard set of credentials for custody evaluators. There is not necessarily consistency from one evaluator to another and many of the measures used in these evaluations were not designed for that purpose.. A psychologist can’t walk into an intact family, do an assessment and determine which parent is better for which child at which age in that family – or who will be the better parent four years from now. So why bring that difficult task into family court?”

Nielsen says that a deeper problem with courts picking the “better parent” at the time of divorce may be that the judge is answering the wrong question. “It doesn’t matter who is a better parent at the time of the divorce,” says Nielsen. “I ask students [in a Wake Forest University Department of Psychology course] ‘Was your mother or father the better parent when you were 6, 10, 16 years old? Now answer the same question for your brother or sister. The answer is different at each age and, with siblings, depending on the personality of the siblings and the parents. The importance or effectiveness of each parent will go up and down as the child ages, which is one reason that children who are in shared parenting arrangements do better than children who spend less than 35 percent of their time with one parent.”

In other words, if Nielsen’s research-informed perspective is correct, states are collectively spending billions of dollars of tax money (to pay for judges and courthouses) and consumers are spending tens of billions of dollars (on litigators) on an exercise that, in most cases, should not be undertaken.

What about the fact that some divorce lawsuit defendants turn out to be “Disney Dads” post-divorce? Doesn’t that confirm the wisdom of the judges who assigned them a secondary role? “Research shows that the type of parenting you can do depends on what activities and how much time you get to share with the child,” says Professor Nielsen. “The best kind of parenting is called ‘authoritative parenting’, as distinct from ‘permissive parenting’, which is the worst. An authoritative parent sets rules and talks to children about important things. He is a child’s parent, not the child’s uncle. For this to be possible the children must spend ample time with the father and have a full range of activities with him, including ample time during the school week. When you cut the parenting time down to every other weekend there’s not an opportunity to be an authoritative parent. It is not that the dad is a different person. He’s the same person with the same parenting skills but in a restricted situation.”

She displayed more of her academic side at the conference, talking about a meta-analysis of 52 studies of shared parenting. She started by looking at all published studies in the English language, which used definitions of “shared” parenting ranging from a 35/65 to a 50/50 schedule. Generally these studies looked at shared parenting versus every-other-weekend-with-the-loser parenting. Nielsen first gave the raw results:

• 30 studies found children in shared parenting did better on all metrics; 12 were equal or better on all metrics; 6 were better on most, worse on 1; 4 studies showed no difference

Nielsen explains that people tend to dismiss shared parenting studies by pointing out that children in shared parenting tend to have wealthier parents, if only because when the parents have a low income there are only sufficient resources for one household physically large enough to hold the kids (e.g., one parent will have a house, perhaps provided by taxpayers, while the other parent will have a studio apartment). Nielsen explained that the skepticism might be motivated by a false assumption. For children in intact families who aren’t in poverty there are “not strong links between family income and children’s emotional, behavioral, and psychological well-being. In fact, richer kids may do worse.” (see Are rich kids better off overall?)

Nielsen looked the subset of the 52 studies where income data were available. These showed similar benefits to children from shared parenting, with 17 studies finding that children did better on all metrics.

American family courts in a lot of states will deny a defendant’s request for shared parenting if a plaintiff seeking sole/primary custody asserts that there is “conflict” between the parties (see the Massachusetts chapter for some examples). The winner/loser schedule almost always results in more parent-to-parent contact than a week-on/week-off shared parenting schedule, but courts simply posit that there will be less fighting if one parent is reduced to loser/babysitter.

Nielsen looked at 6 studies where the “level of agreement” between the parents was recorded. It turns out that 50-80 percent of separated parents generally fall into the category of “do not agree.” For those “do not agree” parents, shared parenting still resulted in equal or better outcomes for the children.

What about fomenting additional conflict between parents? 15 studies showed the parents of children in shared parenting had an equal amount of conflict compared to children in sole custody, 2 showed less conflict, 1 showed more conflict from shared parenting, and 2 showed mixed results.

Nielsen’s overall conclusion: Adults participating in a shared parenting arrangement did not have higher incomes, less conflict, better cooperation, or better parenting skills.

From my point of view, one big weakness in the American studies is the failure to distinguish between 35/65 and 50/50 parenting schedules. The 35/65 threshold is used for historical reasons (some early studies used it) and, like most things that the research psychologists do, it considers practical issues of litigation and cashflow to be irrelevant to human behavior and emotions. From our Rationale chapter:

In November 2014 we interviewed Margaret Bennett, a prominent divorce litigator in the Chicago area and a member of legislative committees redrafting the core Illinois family law statutes and creating a new child support formula. We asked her what she thought of the existing Illinois winner-take-all system in which one parent is designated as primary and receives potentially unlimited amounts of child support. Did that give parents a cash incentive to fight? The answer was “no,” a typical perspective among attorneys involved in making laws and guidelines in the winner-take-all states.

We gave Bennett a concrete example of two doctors were splitting up, each with an after-tax income of $200,000. If they had two children the parent who won custody would get $56,000 per year. That would work out to roughly $1 million over the 18-year period of child support eligibility in Illinois. If the parents had a 60/40 time split, the parent with whom the children spent 60 percent of the time would be $2 million wealthier than the parent who took care of the kids 40 percent time. Bennett said that “upper income parents spend a lot on their kids” and that this $56,000 per year annual payment would not cover what the victorious parent was actually spending. Why did parents spend so much on legal fees fighting over custody if not because of the $2 million at stake? Bennett responded that it was primarily because “it is a big status symbol to be the residential custodian.”

When the two litigants have similar incomes, an increasingly common situation in family court lawsuits, there is an enormous practical difference between a 35/65 schedule outcome and a 50/50 outcome. At 50/50 the parties will end up with equal spending power. At 35/65, one party will be paying the other and therefore, depending on the state and the number of children, the winner may have 2X the after-tax spending power of the loser. The dynamics of the co-parenting relationship, particularly when stepparents are involved, may be very different when one household is living off the other household’s income compared to when the two parents are financially independent of each other.

Thus I think that the European studies provide better guidance to the psychology per se. They tend to use a strict 50/50 definition of “shared” and the child support formulae in Europe don’t result in large spending power differences even if one parent does emerge as “primary.”

What did Nielsen think about putting presumptions of 50/50 shared parenting into the law? She was for it: “Children with cancer should not be vaccinated, but we still have a presumption of vaccination. It is the same with shared parenting. There are rare exceptions where it wouldn’t be in a child’s best interest.” Professor Kari Adamsons responded with “We have a presumption of innocent, but that doesn’t mean nobody goes to jail.”

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