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Child Custody Arrangements: Their Characteristics and Outcomes
2004-FCY-3E
ENDNOTES
[1] It still not uncommon for the term joint custody to be used in the literature. The reader must take care to determine whether joint legal custody or joint physical (shared) custody is being discussed.
[2] Melli and Brown (1994: 549) note that state laws in the United States do not define what constitutes visitation with a parent as compared to residing with that parent.
[3] This may not be uniformly true. In both the Stanford Child Custody Project and a Wisconsin study (Brown et al., 1997), there were indications that shared custody was sometimes used to resolve custody disputes.
[4] See Lye (1999) for a review of the flaws in this body of research.
[5] Other than by using retrospective accounts by respondents.
[6] The Divorce Reform Act of 1978 authorized Michigan courts to give
"care and custody"
of children to the parties jointly when they agreed and when the court found that this arrangement was in the best interest of the children (Brown et al., 1997). Amendments to the law in 1987 allow the courts to award joint custody over the objection of one party under certain circumstances.[7] This paper is one of many that emanated from the Stanford Child Custody Project.
[8] Only half of the mothers with shared custody according to court files actually shared custody.
[9] This Ontario sample was from the early 1980s; 201 male and female respondents with shared custody were interviewed. The sample was non-random, made up of volunteers obtained by contacting parenting, mediation and child care groups (Irving et al., 1984).
[10] This time frame removes any misperceptions introduced by subsequent events. That is, having respondents recall the nature of their relationship in earlier months or years does not blur the data.
[11] The discussion of this issue on pp. 62-3 of Rhoades et al. (2000) offers no support for the conclusion found in the summary of the report.
[12] Note that the court file study and Survey of Child Support Awards use the separating/divorcing family as the unit of analysis whereas the national survey uses children as the unit. This difference means that the findings cannot be directly compared.
[13] At the same time, there may be
"a need to acquire a more recent model or a better-maintained automobile on the part of the secondary parent"
(Melli and Brown, 1994: 556).[14] In a multivariate analysis of factors affecting father-child contact, Nord and Zill (1996) found that joint legal and physical custody did not predict the amount of contact. The authors suggest that this may have been because parents with shared custody misinterpreted the question.
"Some parents in such arrangements may exclude from their calculation of contact times when the child or children are actually living with the other parent."
Another possibility, not mentioned by the researchers, is that the arrangement in the court order was not the same as the de facto arrangement.[15] The effects of separation and divorce on children's well-being may vary according to the way in which child outcomes are measured. For example, Healy et al. (1990) found that frequency and regularity of fathers' visits affected self-esteem and behavioural problems differently.
[16] There were two questions relating to custody type.
"Did the court order [the child] to be put into sole custody of mother, sole custody of father, shared physical custody of both, other?"
"With whom did [the child] go on living with at the time of separation—mother only, father only, shared time basis mostly mother, shared time basis mostly father, equally shared time, mother and father?"
[17] In total, 33 percent of the children who were not living with both parents had one or more behaviour problem.
[18] About 520 adolescents from 365 families were interviewed: 70 percent lived with their mother, 19 percent lived with their father, 10 percent lived in both residences (shared custody), and 1 percent lived elsewhere (Buchanan et al., 1991).
[19] In a sample of parents who were in high conflict, Johnston et al. (1989) found that children had more emotional and behavioural problems when they had more frequent contact with both parents and more transitions (movement from one home to another) per month.
[20] The authors of this research did not precisely define co-parenting.
[21] The majority of this non-random sample were white collar workers and professionals with some higher education.
[22] Kelly offers no empirical support for this conclusion.
[23] In the research by Luepnitz (1986), about one third of shared custody parents relied on the other parent almost exclusively for substitute care. Sole custody parents, especially mothers, were forced to rely on their families or paid child care.
[24] Disengagement was measured as couples who had low discord and low co-operative communication. Conflicted parents were those with high discord and low co-operative communication.
[25] Another phrase for disengaged parenting is parallel parenting.
[26] However, from 1989 to 1992, only 38 percent of equal shared custody cases contained a child support order. The authors speculate that the omission of equal shared custody in the 1987 Wisconsin child support guidelines may have led judges, parents and lawyers to believe that these cases did not require a child support order.
[27] The number of families with joint physical (shared) custody was too low to separate in the analysis.
[28] Cited at http://www.fnf.org.uk/shared.htm.
[29] In all Australian states except Western Australia, the application of the legislation is much broader because it applies to all parents, married or not.
[30] These criticisms were made by the Family Law Section of the New Zealand Law Society on its Web site, http://www.nz-lawsoc.org.nz/fls/news/sharedp.htm (July 2001).
[31] See http://econ.massey.ac.nz/cppe/papers/spb.htm for a critique of the Bill, the contents of the Bill, press releases, and the governmental response.
