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JustResearch no. 12
Shared Custody Arrangements: Pilot Interviews With Parents
Research in Profile (cont'd)
Shared Custody Arrangements: Pilot Interviews With Parents [1]
By Rick Gill and Dr. Cherami Wichmann [2]
The focus of this pilot project was on shared custody arrangements as defined by the 1997 Child Support Guidelines meaning that the children reside in two residences and that they spend a minimum of forty percent of time in the second residence (Department of Justice Canada, 1997). It is important, in particular, to distinguish shared custody in this sense from joint legal custody, in which parents share responsibility for key decision areas in the children's lives, but may have any of several possible living arrangements.
The sample for this study included 50 parents from Alberta who were divorced and had shared custody arrangements. These parents were contacted by phone and responded to an in-depth interview regarding their custody arrangements, including areas such as: demographics; arrangements at the time of separation and divorce; current arrangements; expenses associated with shared custody; relationship between the parents; and, satisfaction with the shared custody arrangement.
This sample was small and not generalizable outside of the current group of parents. However, there were sufficient participants to construct hypotheses to explore in further research.
Findings from this study provided information on how shared custody arrangements were put into practice in some cases. For the majority of cases, living arrangements in the families have been stable throughout the period after separation and beyond the time of the divorce. Parents in this sample reported an ongoing ability to work co-operatively with their former spouses to share the parenting of their children, and overall satisfaction with the living and parenting arrangements they have in place. For the most part, the parents were in frequent contact with each other and on friendly terms, discussing parenting issues as they arose and supporting each others' parenting decisions. In about 75 percent of the cases, the formal shared custody arrangement was translating, in practice, into an actual sharing of parenting on a day-to-day basis. A substantial majority of the parents considered the arrangement to be working well for the children precisely because of the fact that they were able to work together co-operatively.
In this sample, shared custody was more likely to be in place after the divorce than in the immediate post-separation period. This is contrary to some research that suggests that shared custody is sometimes a casualty of the realities that are experienced as parents adjust to their new, separate lives. Factors such as children growing older and becoming more independent, or a parent moving further away from the other parent for employment, were often the impetus for change in the living arrangements after divorce in this sample. Only in a very small number of cases was an apparent inability to parent co-operatively the cause of a change in arrangement. Another finding that was generalized in many of the areas we examined was that parenting arrangements and practices in our shared custody cases appear to be worked out informally and to evolve over time, as opposed to being determined through the formality of the divorce arrangement. The divorce appears to establish the shared custody as an overall parenting model, but parents develop many of the specific arrangements themselves, with little or no involvement from lawyers. Decision-making about the children is often informal, and changes in decision-making patterns reflect changes in living arrangements or other circumstances, rather than deliberate changes in the way decisions are made. The division of the many parenting responsibilities that need to be shared appears also to be somewhat informal and subject to varying interpretations by former spouses. This is largely because those responsibilities are too interwoven and changeable over time to allow for an overly structured arrangement.
The parents in this sample tended to share expenses in most areas, rather than divide the responsibilities by expense item. Few areas of disagreement about expenses were reported. The fact that almost all of the parents we interviewed worked full-time, and that the parents in our sample reported themselves as being in a relatively high socio-economic group, may be a contributing factor. Expenses reported by both fathers and mothers for housing and utilities, in particular, were substantial, and were duplicated in both households in almost equal measure.
