JOINT custody isn't about "sharing." It's about rendering children possessions and splitting them down the middle to "share" in the sense of halving.
It's about operating separate automonous households that do NOT have to confer, because EACH can do whatever the heck it wants to, consistent or not, approved by the other parent or not.
Joint custody is not two homes. It's NO home. Children are entitled to the stability and security of having a real home.
Living out of a knapsack is SO SELFISH. Thank you to those who support and research on this SELFISH attitude.
Embargoed until 00:01 hrs Wednesday 3rd May 2006
When couples break up, future contact with their children should be measured in terms of quality, not quantity, according to a new booklet 'Private arrangements for contact with children', published by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
We need to focus more on relationships and less on the quantity of contact when considering the quality of young people's family lives, say its co-authors, Dr Fran Wasoff, of the University of Edinburgh, and Dr Bren Neale, of the University of Leeds.
The booklet was produced to accompany a special seminar organised in Edinburgh on May 3 for the Scottish Executive, examining the effects of privately-agreed child-contact deals made by parting parents.
In Scotland since 1995, under the Children (Scotland) Act 1995, parents have had responsibility for ensuring contact, even after separation or divorce when this is in the best interest of the child.
On the whole, says Dr Wasoff, evidence from other countries suggests that both resident and non-resident parents find private arrangements satisfactory, in contrast to high levels of conflict in cases involving the courts. However, she argues that to understand these arrangements properly, it is important to have a picture of the different patterns of contact. This is information available for some other countries, though not currently for Scotland.
Looking for lessons from abroad, she says that while the statutory framework in Australia is broadly similar to Scotland's, new ways of supporting post-separation contact are being developed. A network of 65 community-based government-funded Family Relationship Centres will begin in July 2006, as a single entry point to the family law and support system to foster more use of private arrangements for parent-child contact.
Australian parents are encouraged to develop parenting plans and try to resolve contact and residence issues privately, perhaps with the help of family services, who are to receive enhanced funding. However, where cases go to court, there is also an aim to make proceedings themselves less adversarial and likely to exacerbate conflict.
Meanwhile over here, according to Dr Neale, private arrangements can work well when based on consensus and good quality relationships, when the needs of the children are a priority, and the arrangement is viewed flexibly so that it can begin to break down naturally as young people assume control of their own time and space.
But, she says, they do not work effectively when based on unresolved tensions and poor quality relationships - where the needs of parents are put first, and when they are inflexible and rigidly enforced so as to prevent young people from gradually assuming control of their time and space.
Drawing on first-hand testimonies from the children of separated parents, Dr Neale says that in some cases arrangements for sharing time between the homes of Mum and Dad can be the product of insecure and over needy parenting, and a rather uneasy compromise between parents over rights to the children.
And she argues that if we are to focus on the best interests of the child, we have to attend to their citizenship as well as their welfare.
Dr Neale said: "Once children are recognised, we can start to listen to them and respect their ways of defining their needs, rights and interests, and find ways to include them in discussion and decision-making. This will mean adults no longer making all the decisions for children, but supporting them as they begin to take responsibility for shaping their own lives."
For further information or a copy of the report, contact:
* Amanda Williams at the ESRC on 01793 413126; e-mail: amanda.williams@esrc.ac.uk
For further details only, contact:
* Dr Fran Wasoff on 0131 650 3922; e-mail: Fran.Wasoff@ed.ac.uk * Dr Bren Neale, on 0113 343 4813; e-mail: b.neale@leeds.ac.uk
Notes for editors
1. 'Private arrangements for contact with children' is published by the ESRC to accompany a seminar on May 3, 2006 in Edinburgh - the first in a series to be organised by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Scottish Executive on key policy issues. Speakers are Dr Fran Wasoff, Reader in Social Policy, School of Social and Political Studies, and Co-Director, Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, at the University of Edinburgh; and Dr Bren Neale, Reader in Child and Family Research at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds. 2. The event is part of the Public Policy Seminar series, which directly addresses key issues faced by ESRC's key stakeholders in government, politics, the media, and the private and voluntary sectors. The next to be organised with the Scottish Executive will examine how to reduce re-offending in Scotland. 3. The Scottish Executive is the devolved government for Scotland. Established in 1999, it is responsible for most of the issues of day-to-day concern to the people of Scotland, including health, education, justice, rural affairs, and transport. It manages an annual budget of more than £27 billion in the financial year 2005-2006, which is due to rise to over £30 billion in 2007-2008. http://www.scotland.gov.uk 4. The ESRC is the UK's largest funding agency for research and postgraduate training relating to social and economic issues. It provides independent, high quality, relevant research to business, the public sector and Government. The ESRC total expenditure in 2005/6 is £135million. At any time, the ESRC supports more than 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and research policy institutes. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk 5. ESRC Society Today offers free access to a broad range of social science research and presents it in a way that makes it easy to navigate and saves users valuable time. As well as bringing together all ESRC-funded research (formerly accessible via the Regard website) and key online resources such as the Social Science Information Gateway and the UK Data Archive, non-ESRC resources are included, for example the Office for National Statistics. The portal provides access to early findings and research summaries, as well as full texts and original datasets through integrated search facilities. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk
Our Research
ESRC Society Today contains a database of ESRC funded awards, and replaces the Regard service previously available at ILRT Bristol. This database, can be accessed either by browsing through "Our Research", or through the (advanced) search functionality available at the top of this page, and provides a key source of information on ESRC Social Science Research awards and all associated publications and products.
JOINT CUSTODY DOES NOT WORK
(or maybe the road to hell isn't paved with such good intentions.)
The URL for this webpage is http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/joint-custody-does-not-work.html
parallel parenting shared custody parenting plansRESEARCH CITES HERE bauserman 5/5/3/3 shared parental responsibility joint custody research
Joint Custody Just Does Not Work. Research from the California Judicial Council, 2000. Look at the findings; ignore the "spin." This study was done ostensibly to look at the results of mediated "parenting plans."Look what happened to joint custody. As a lifestyle, it just does not work. Its only arguable accomplishment probably is to ultimately send more children into the sole custody of their fathers than otherwise would occur. (A primary reason fathers' rights groups push for it.)
However, it's unlikely that any group, children, mothers, or fathers, benefits from this phenomenon -- other than, of course, custody mediators, evaluators, and parenting coordinators, who make more money the more problematic and unworkable a "parenting plan" is. See "The Agenda Behind the Rhetoric." Most fathers who weren't the primary parents during their marriages eventually (if not immediately) palm off the primary parenting ontostepmothers and others. And in the long run, while it saves on paying child support (a psychic reward for the bread-winning father), it rarely costs less to have custody of a child than to pay child support. Mothers who initially were stay-home parents or merely their children's primary caregivers, and/or the dependent spouse, suffer long-term detriment, both economic and emotional. Most of all, the children themselves, who most likely did not need this in order to have a "relationship" with their fathers, just don't do well from repeated changes in household/family composition, and from the lack of stability.Read the research, here, and here, and here.
Below, a graph from the California Judicial Council study. Does joint custody work well? Do families like it? Is it stable?
The above graph shows what happened to 1032 children's custody over a five-year period in California. Joint custody diminished for all age groups, and nearly disappeared as children entered their teens (and expressed some opinions?). But also look at what happened over the same period of time to father sole custody. Fathers used joint custody as a means of taking children away from their mothers.
While more of the older children who left joint custody went to live with their mothers, a significant lesser portion did go with their fathers. And look at the fathers' glom of custody of the younger children. According to the study (which really wasn't about "this" issue), joint custody also caused a higher number of subsequent household changes and instability for many of the children placed into it. Joint custody theory however, even when very young children commenced in sole mother custody, arguably resulted in far more children ending up in the sole custody of their fathers than would reasonably be expected -- or reasonably would approximate that parent's share of the childcare and homemaking in "intact" two-parent homes. It is used as a stepping stone where the real agenda is to position the father to remove custody of children from the mother down the road (often he cannot do that at the time of divorce because he has not established himself as an equivalent parent. Of course, at that later date, if he's remarried, he gets credited with the stepmothers' caregiving.)
So much for the specious pablum by the "bi-nuclear" rhetoric set about "sharing" and "co-parenting." (In 2005 there was a far higher percentage of initial joint custody awards than in 1991. Note to noncustodial mothers who in desperation now support joint custody: you're supporting the most likely reason that today you are a noncustodial parent.)Interesting how as the anti-divorce set decries its perceptions of increasing problems among children of divorce, it usually attributes the problem to the myth that divorce rates are "increasing" -- they aren't, and haven't for more than a generation now, so this hypothesis fails utterly. Reality check: regardless of whether or not divorce is bad for children (and I think it is, in the abstract), if problems are increasing among children of divorce, that simply cannot be from any correlation with divorce rates. It may well be because both the anti-divorce and normalize divorce proponents ignorantly or deliberately equate "children's divorce-related problems" with "father absence." All the focus is on this hopeful and completely unproved factor as a necessity for child well-being. All the focus is on the most absurd minutiae that in the main means little. There is not even a suggestion that if, as a demographic group, children of divorce are having more problems -- assuming they are -- it's more likely to be because of the rise in popularity of the ridiculous, schizophrenic, and unstable co-parenting ideology, which in turn is increasing the absence of mothers from their children's lives, as well as increasing stressful, wasteful, and expensive years of "burgeoning custody litigation," including the endless talkety talk-talk meddling with families by those who make their money doing "therapeutic jurisprudence."
More commentary from Australia:
Trapped in the middle - Gender/Australia/Shared Parenting/Children/Research
Below, the reality of joint custody is not "sharing" and it's not "two homes." It's "no home."
The following factors are the only ones that consistently have been related to positive child adjustment post divorce and are consistent with the findings of all relevant research:
1. Positive "custodial parent" adjustment (i.e. maternal adjustment -- most "custodial parents" in the research were not androgynous parent units but mothers), which is associated with effective parenting;
2. A positive relationship between the "custodial parent" (i.e. mother) and child; and
3. A low level of conflict between parents (more likely when post-divorce parenting arrangements mirror the patterns set in the family prior to the divorce.)
See Marion Gindes, The Psychological Effects of Relocation for Children of Divorce, AAML Journal, Vol. 15 (1998), pp. 144-145
The following factors are the only ones that consistently have been related to positive effects of father involvement, and are consistent with the findings of all relevant research:
1. How the child perceives the father to feel about the child (which is not related to how much time he spends with the child, and not necessarily related to how the child feels about him, a factor that is comparatively insignificant vis a vis the child's well-being); and
2. A father who emotionally cares for, financially supports, respects, is involved with, takes some of the work load off of, and generally makes life easier, happier and less stressful for... his children's mother.
How long more are we to subject our child to such instability!!! It's my son. Not just another child, not just another toy! Please someone, please wake up and do something before my son suffers.
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