Children Likely to Be Better Adjusted in Joint Vs Sole Custody Arrangements in Most Cases, According to Review of Research
WASHINGTON — Children from divorced families who either live with both parents at different times or spend certain amounts of time with each parent are better adjusted in most cases than children who live and interact with just one parent, according to new research on custody arrangements and children's adjustment.
Psychologist Robert Bauserman, PhD, of AIDS Administration/Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in Baltimore, Maryland conducted a meta-analysis of 33 studies between 1982 to 1999 that examined 1,846 sole-custody and 814 joint-custody children. The studies compared child adjustment in joint physical or joint legal custody with sole-custody settings and 251 intact families. Joint custody was defined as either physical custody — where a child spends equal or substantial amounts of time with both parents or shared legal custody — where a child lives with primarily one parent but both parents are involved in all aspects of the child's life. This article will appear in the March issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
Children in joint custody arrangements had less behavior and emotional problems, had higher self-esteem, better family relations and school performance than children in sole custody arrangements. And these children were as well-adjusted as intact family children on the same measures, said Bauserman, "probably because joint custody provides the child with an opportunity to have ongoing contact with both parents."
These findings indicate that children do not actually need to be in a joint physical custody to show better adjustment but just need to spend substantial time with both parents, especially with their fathers, said Bauserman. Also, joint custody couples reported less conflict, possibly because both parents could participate in their children's lives equally and not spend the time arguing over childcare decisions. Unfortunately a perception exists that joint custody is more harmful because it exposes children to ongoing parental conflict. In fact, the studies in this review found that sole-custody parents reported higher levels of conflict.
It is important to recognize that the results do not support joint custody in all situations. When one parent is abusive or neglectful or has a serious mental or physical health problem, sole-custody with the other parent would clearly be preferable, said Bauserman. The judges, lawyers, social workers, psychologists and other professionals involved in divorce counseling and litigation should be aware of these findings to make informed decisions of what environment is best for a child in a custody situation.
Furthermore, to address the question of how much the parents' emotional health compared with the custody arrangement influenced the children's adjustment, Bauserman explained that custody arrangement seemed to have more influence. By statistically controlling for past parental conflict (which indicates parental maladjustment), the joint custody children still were significantly better adjusted. This result was also found in other studies cited in Bauserman's review. More primary research is needed, said Bauserman, "on the past and current adjustment of joint custody and sole custody parents before this question can be completely answered."
Article: "Child Adjustment in Joint-Custody Versus Sole-Custody Arrangements: A Meta-Analytic Review," Robert Bauserman, Ph.D., AIDS Administration/Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Journal of Family Psychology, Vol 16, No. 1.
Robert Bauserman, PhD can be reached by telephone at 410-767-4322
The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists. APA's membership includes more than 155,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 53 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting human welfare.
Read the journal article ~ Child Adjustment in Joint-Custody Versus Sole-Custody Arrangements: A Meta-Analytic Review (PDF, 76KB)
HuffPo: Fathers At Fault For Single Motherhood
February 1st, 2013 by Robert Franklin, Esq.I read a lot about the family, parents, children, child rearing, family law, the social science of the family, etc. Much of what I read is in some way ill-informed, biased, shallow, etc., but sometimes I run across a piece that is so aggressively bad, so entirely lacking in redeeming qualities, that it’s hard to get a grip on. This is such a piece (Huffington Post, 1/29/13).
Where to begin? The high-school-level prose? The rhetorical questions left unanswered? The utter lack of evidence for the proposition asserted? The tone of whining entitlement? What about the desperate desire to avoid the truth at any cost, even to the extent of purposefully refusing to read anything on the topic at hand? Cara Lemieux’s article is such a smorgasbord of awfulness, it’s truly hard to decide.
Lemieux seems to be a producer of sorts for ABC. Occasionally she reads a book on parenting, calls the author and writes an article on her interview. Based on her HuffPo piece, she should definitely stick to producing. Writing and thinking aren’t her long suits.
But whatever her personal merits and demerits, the gist of her article is that we should stop blaming single mothers for being single mothers and start blaming fathers for making them that way.
What I am saying is if we really want to change the statistics (on children of single mothers), we need to start talking to the party that is abandoning their responsibilities — not to the party that is doing everything in their power to live up to theirs.That’s not just a summary of her article, it’s all of it; the other 500 words or so are just filler. But what is clear is that Lemieux believes that “the party that (sic) is abandoning their (sic) responsibilities” is meant to indicate fathers and ”the party that (sic) is doing everything in their (sic) power to live up to theirs” means mothers. Where does Lemieux get the idea that, as a general rule, the fathers of children born to single mothers are “abandoning their responsibilities?” Amazingly, she makes no effort to say. She wrote an entire article with that as her thesis and makes not the least effort to support it. Naked assertion is good enough for her and, she hopes, for us, but I suspect most readers demand a bit more. The same holds true for her claim that single mothers are “doing everything in their power to live up to” their parental responsibilities. Not a hint of support for the claim. Not a word. High school English teachers demand more of their students than that, don’t they?
How does Lemieux come by her ignorance? It turns out to be entirely self-imposed, so I suppose it’s a point in her favor that she freely admits it.
So, in an effort to avoid becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, I decided to deliberately avoid reading anything related to those statistics while I was pregnant and single. I had to, or I think I would have lost my mind.Her determination to avoid facts about her chosen topic extended well past pregnancy, but at some point her bubble of ignorance seems to have been pierced by a couple of headlines. Ever the anti-intellectual though, she was able to avoid reading the articles. Hey, it’s not easy staying dumb, but Lemieux manages.
But it’s not just remaining ignorant in the face of so much information that taxes her, it’s the fact that, if she did read something on the subject, she’d have to change her opinions about single motherhood and therefore her high regard for herself. What’s truly remarkable though is not her non-reading on the well-researched subject of paternal motivation regarding children and why women become single mothers. Given the opportunity, she even avoids her own anecdotal situation.
Oh wait — did we all forget how most moms (referenced in these articles) become single moms? Right, at one point there was a man… and then there wasn’t. But for some reason (which infuriates me), the headlines don’t typically frame the story that way.No Cara, we didn’t forget, but by all means tell us. She doesn’t. She doesn’t even tell us how she became a single mom. I suspect I know the reason why Lemieux chose to raise the issue of how women become single mothers and then dropped it like a hot rock. After all, if we examine that we have to deal with information Lemieux doesn’t want to mention and come to conclusions she hates and fears drawing.
How do women become single mothers? There are many ways, but virtually all of them involve the exercise of maternal power over the rights of fathers and their access to their children. For example, if a woman wants to exclude the father from her child’s life, there are many ways to accomplish the feat and she can feel confident that the family court system will back her up every step of the way.
Should he somehow learn of his child, the matter becomes more difficult for her, but by no means impossible. If enough time has passed, courts will give him at best a marginal role in his child’s life while still requiring him to pay child support not only in the future, but also for all the time she kept knowledge of the child from him.
If he happens to have the money to pursue his rights more aggressively, a lie or two about domestic violence or sexual abuse will reliably throw him off the track while preserving her receipt of child support.
Does the court grant him greater access to his child than she desires? She can move to a different state or even take the child to a different country. The latter of course is illegal, but what matter? Even if she’s found, it’ll be years before courts will adjudicate the matter and, often as not they’ll simply abrogate the plain meaning of the international pact meant to remedy parental child kidnapping. As we’ve seen before, if she evades accountability for her crime long enough, courts will reliably rule that too much time has passed and the father’s presence would be too upsetting for the children. Presto! She’s home free. And of course she’ll remain unpunished for her wrongdoing.
What about maternal gatekeeping? Has Lemieux ever heard of that? It’s astonishingly common as the many studies of the phenomenon show. Mothers do all sorts of things to cut fathers out of the lives of their children, including all of what I’ve referred to above plus murder, but Lemieux and her ilk will never let on about it.
Then there’s the fact that mothers are the ones seeking divorce. Seventy percent of divorces in the United States are initiated by women and we know why. Brinig and Allen report that the variable that “swamps” all others is that mothers know they’ll keep the kids. That’s not fathers leaving, Cara, it’s mothers. If mothers were so interested in keeping fathers involved with their kids, why would they do that?
For that matter, why would they be the ones filing 80% of the claims of domestic abuse in custody cases, the vast majority (some studies say 85%) of which are never substantiated? The clear answer is that those mothers are doing their utmost to destroy the father-child relationship.
Ditto Parental Alienation. Although both mothers and fathers can be alienators, because the vast majority of custodial parents are mothers, it’s mothers who do the vast majority of alienation? How do women become single mothers? PA is a tried and true method.
If dads were truly as uninterested in their children as Lemieux pretends, none of what I’ve referred to so far would be necessary, but it’s as common as dirt. In fact, as Lemieux would know if she’d ever read anything on the subject, men of all races, in all income brackets and all levels of education passionately want to be fathers. They want a substantial (although seldom exclusive) role in caring for their kids. For someone who can’t manage to read even simple mainstream media articles, I know it’s a lot to ask Lemieux to read a whole book, but Sanford Braver’s “Divorced Dads” is a good one. It and countless articles from Sarah McLanahan’s longitudinal study entitled Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing are helpful too. Harvard researcher Kathryn Edin is another good resource. They show fathers not only caring about their children, but moving heaven and earth to maintain contact with them over the dogged efforts of mothers and their allies in family courts.
To put it bluntly, across all categories of race, ethnicity, religion, class and geography, fathers are anything but the feckless, uncaring creatures of Lemieux’s imagination. How they come to be separated from their kids has far more to do with their willful exclusion by mothers and courts than by their own personal shortcomings.
The backlash against the growing fathers’ rights movement, the overwhelming weight of social science showing children’s need for two parents and its rapidly increasing acknowledgement by courts, legislatures and popular culture is weak and entirely lacking in intellectual heft. Face it, the anti-dad crowd’s got nothing to go on. So they resort to junk like Lemieux’s. As I’ve said before, if they had anything of substance – or even anything that makes sense - don’t you think they’d produce it?
Thanks to Glenn for the heads-up.
False Accusations, Family Law/Divorce/Separation/Child Custody, In the News, Move Away/Relocation Cases, Parental Alienation/PAS/PAD, Parental Kidnappping, Single Fathers/Single Mothers, House of David, Advocates for Fathers, IncDads In Court - Child Custody For Fathers Fathers Rights Fathers Helping Fathers Pay It Forward Fathers should not have to fight for equal rights of their childern Non Absent Fathers REEL FATHERS Fathers Who Care The Father Effect Movie Father Daughter Journey Go Fatherhood Women In Fatherhood, Inc. Fathers-4-Justice USA TOWARDCHANGE ACTIVIST 4 CHILDREN AND FAMILIES Keeping Families Connected Families Against Parental Alienation Step Families Against Parental Alienation Family Law Reform
We only support organizations who show an understanding that children need both parents, and that either parent is equally capable of the choice to perpetrate hate or declare peace.
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You Want Family Law Reforms? Here's One Thing That Needs To Happen from FamilyLaw
"CHILDREN OF DIVORCE DESERVE FULL ACCESS TO BOTH PARENTS, WHENEVER POSSIBLE."
ReplyDeletePersonally, I can’t find anyone willing to reject that statement publicly. It’s a fundamental truth. We now have a wealth of evidence demonstrating children are better off, in most situations, when they have something near equal time with each parent. So why are shared-parenting bills are being rejected throughout the country?
Do legislators believe mothers are more important to children than fathers? For the most part, I don’t think so. Politicians are, however, under quite a bit of pressure from some very powerful anti-shared parenting special interests. Recently, we’ve seen these opponents contribute to shared-parenting bills failing to pass in South Dakota and Minnesota.
Some would argue disappointments like those are clear signs that shared parenting legislation will not happen anytime soon. The opposite is true. The near victories in these states and others is an enormous indication politicians are beginning to understand the vast majority of American citizens believe children of divorce deserve equal access to both parents, whenever possible.
In fact, South Dakota’s bill lost in a 21-13 Senate vote. That’s a swing of 5 senators. If merely 5 senators felt more pressure from South Dakotans than they did from special interests, South Dakota would have a shared parenting statute. We should commend the remaining politicians in South Dakota’s Senate for doing the right thing.
In Minnesota … well, Minnesota is a travesty. That bill passed, and on May 24, 2012 Governor Mark Dayton vetoed it. Governor Dayton claimed that both sides made “compelling arguments,” but because the “ramifications” of the legislation were “uncertain,” he decided to single-handedly overrule the will of his constituents and their representatives. Mr. Governor, unless you are ending slavery or beginning women’s suffrage, you will likely never have the benefit of “certainty” in your political career. Again, we should praise the Minnesotan politicians who voted for the bill.
Six people. Six people stopped two states from enacting shared parenting. Six people do not indicate shared parenting is a distant hope – they indicate profoundly that it is an imminent inevitability.
Mike Haskell is a divorced dad, shared parenting supporter and practicing family law attorney in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Posting of this article is not an endorsement for, or recommendation of, Haskell Law.
ACFC is America's Shared Parenting Organization
"CHILDREN NEED BOTH PARENTS"
The members of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children dedicate ourselves to the creation of a family law system and public awareness which promotes equal rights for ALL parties affected by issues of the modern family.
ACFC is challenging the current system of American family law and policy. Through a national system of local affiliates and in alliance with other pro-family and civil liberties groups, ACFC is shifting the public debate to the real causes of family dissolution.
PRO SE RIGHTS:
ReplyDeleteSims v. Aherns, 271 SW 720 (1925) ~ "The practice of law is an occupation of common right."
Brotherhood of Trainmen v. Virginia ex rel. Virginia State Bar, 377 U.S. 1; v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335; Argersinger v. Hamlin, Sheriff 407 U.S. 425 ~ Litigants can be assisted by unlicensed laymen during judicial proceedings.
Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41 at 48 (1957) ~ "Following the simple guide of rule 8(f) that all pleadings shall be so construed as to do substantial justice"... "The federal rules reject the approach that pleading is a game of skill in which one misstep by counsel may be decisive to the outcome and accept the principle that the purpose of pleading is to facilitate a proper decision on the merits." The court also cited Rule 8(f) FRCP, which holds that all pleadings shall be construed to do substantial justice.
Davis v. Wechler, 263 U.S. 22, 24; Stromberb v. California, 283 U.S. 359; NAACP v. Alabama, 375 U.S. 449 ~ "The assertion of federal rights, when plainly and reasonably made, are not to be defeated under the name of local practice."
Elmore v. McCammon (1986) 640 F. Supp. 905 ~ "... the right to file a lawsuit pro se is one of the most important rights under the constitution and laws."
Federal Rules of Civil Procedures, Rule 17, 28 USCA "Next Friend" ~ A next friend is a person who represents someone who is unable to tend to his or her own interest.
Haines v. Kerner, 404 U.S. 519 (1972) ~ "Allegations such as those asserted by petitioner, however inartfully pleaded, are sufficient"... "which we hold to less stringent standards than formal pleadings drafted by lawyers."
Jenkins v. McKeithen, 395 U.S. 411, 421 (1959); Picking v. Pennsylvania R. Co., 151 Fed 2nd 240; Pucket v. Cox, 456 2nd 233 ~ Pro se pleadings are to be considered without regard to technicality; pro se litigants' pleadings are not to be held to the same high standards of perfection as lawyers.
Maty v. Grasselli Chemical Co., 303 U.S. 197 (1938) ~ "Pleadings are intended to serve as a means of arriving at fair and just settlements of controversies between litigants. They should not raise barriers which prevent the achievement of that end. Proper pleading is important, but its importance consists in its effectiveness as a means to accomplish the end of a just judgment."
NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S. 415); United Mineworkers of America v. Gibbs, 383 U.S. 715; and Johnson v. Avery, 89 S. Ct. 747 (1969) ~ Members of groups who are competent nonlawyers can assist other members of the group achieve the goals of the group in court without being charged with "unauthorized practice of law."
Picking v. Pennsylvania Railway, 151 F.2d. 240, Third Circuit Court of Appeals ~ The plaintiff's civil rights pleading was 150 pages and described by a federal judge as "inept". Nevertheless, it was held "Where a plaintiff pleads pro se in a suit for protection of civil rights, the Court should endeavor to construe Plaintiff's Pleadings without regard to technicalities."
Puckett v. Cox, 456 F. 2d 233 (1972) (6th Cir. USCA) ~ It was held that a pro se complaint requires a less stringent reading than one drafted by a lawyer per Justice Black in Conley v. Gibson (see case listed above, Pro Se Rights Section).
Roadway Express v. Pipe, 447 U.S. 752 at 757 (1982) ~ "Due to sloth, inattention or desire to seize tactical advantage, lawyers have long engaged in dilatory practices... the glacial pace of much litigation breeds frustration with the Federal Courts and ultimately, disrespect for the law."
Sherar v. Cullen, 481 F. 2d 946 (1973) ~ "There can be no sanction or penalty imposed upon one because of his exercise of Constitutional Rights."
Schware v. Board of Examiners, United State Reports 353 U.S. pages 238, 239. ~ "The practice of law cannot be licensed by any state/State."