Joint custody is a growing reality—but the country’s systems for supporting families aren’t built to accommodate it.
For most of American history, when parents separated, their kids almost always ended up living with just one of them. But recent studies have confirmed a new era: Joint physical custody, in which a child resides with each parent a significant portion of the time, has become dramatically more common in the U.S.
The trend was first documented in Wisconsin, where court data revealed that the percentage of divorces leading to equal joint custody—in which time with each parent is split 50–50—rose from just 2 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 2010. Even among never-married Wisconsin couples who came to court to establish child support—a group in which the prevalence of shared custody is, perhaps unsurprisingly, low—shared arrangements doubled from 2003 to 2013. And a 2022 study found that, nationally, the share of divorces resulting in joint custody jumped from 13 percent before 1985 to 34 percent in the early 2010s. (We don’t have the data to assess custody arrangements among never-married couples nationwide.) Although the increase is steepest among high-income couples, it’s happening across the socioeconomic spectrum, Daniel Meyer, a social-work professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies child custody, told me.
The same change appears to be happening in Europe: The prevalence of equal joint custody roughly doubled from the mid-2000s to 2021, according to a study published earlier this year. The rate of shared custody varies massively among European countries, but it seems to be rising in many of them.
On average, children in shared arrangements tend to fare slightly better than those in sole custody on a variety of metrics, including life satisfaction, stress levels, and self-esteem. But the couples that share custody are usually wealthier, better educated, and have a less fraught relationship with each other, which makes sense: Even in an unequal joint arrangement, a child must be housed, fed, and cared for in two places—which usually requires duplicating expenses. Coordination is needed to transport the kid back and forth. Whether the better outcomes associated with joint custody reflect the arrangement itself or the conditions that make it possible is unclear, Meyer told me. And of course, in some situations—if one parent is abusive or unstable, for example—sole custody is in fact what’s best for the child.
Regardless of whether it’s the right outcome for a given separation, though, joint custody is a growing reality—one that our systems for accounting for and supporting families aren’t built to accommodate. Americans may be ready for the two-household child, but American public policy isn’t.
Read: The high cost of divorce
In America’s earliest years, custody of children, who were largely considered property, was typically granted exclusively to fathers following divorce. But as the nation industrialized and men began working outside the home, women developed a distinct role in domestic matters—and a stronger claim to their children. Over the course of the 19th century, sole maternal custody became the near-universal outcome of divorce. But both arrangements were rooted in the conviction that custody is “indivisible,” as J. Herbie DiFonzo, a law professor at Hofstra University, once wrote. A child may have two parents, but only one household.
That bedrock assumption has made it difficult for researchers to track the rise of joint custody in the first place. In the rare cases where national surveys ask about a parent outside of a given household, they don’t usually clarify whether or how often the child is actually residing with them, Molly Costanzo, a scientist at the Institute for Research on Poverty, told me. This makes it hard to know how joint-custody kids, whose parents could both report that the child is living with them, are showing up in data sets. “I’m sure there are instances where they’re double counted,” Katherine Michelmore, a public-policy professor at the University of Michigan, told me. To be fair, constructing surveys that capture the complexities of joint custody is difficult. Anecdotally, we know that such arrangements tend to be highly fluid, shifting throughout the year during summer breaks and holidays, and over time as kids age.
The recent Wisconsin and national data provide the clearest picture yet that shared custody is rising in prominence. In one sense, this development is hardly surprising. As more couples take a more egalitarian approach to family life—with mothers working and fathers involved in child care—more are carrying that dynamic into separation as well, Mia Hakovirta, a social-work professor at the University of Turku, in Finland, told me. This helps explain why famously egalitarian Sweden is the only country in Europe—and likely the world—where the majority of parents who live separately share custody of their kids.
Over time, and often with pressure from fathers’-advocacy groups, legal systems in Europe and America have adapted to facilitate or even encourage shared custody. And at least in the U.S., courts tasked with ordering child support, Costanzo told me, have started taking custody arrangements into consideration. Our social policies, unfortunately, do not.
Consider the earned income tax credit (EITC), a refundable tax credit available to low-income Americans. The refund is substantially larger for those claiming a dependent child—but a child can be claimed only once each year. That makes some sense in a sole-custody arrangement (though some people would argue that a “noncustodial father” paying child support shouldn’t be treated like a single, childless adult). In a joint-custody arrangement, it creates confusion about which parent is entitled to claim the credit—and ultimately a lopsided scenario in which two adults regularly house and care for a child while only one gets state help.
Read: The great, overlooked tax policy for getting people to work
This problem has no obvious solution. Perhaps both parents should be able to claim a shared child for the purposes of the tax credit; New York, for example, already has what’s called a “noncustodial parent EITC” available to parents paying child support. Something of the sort could be adapted at the federal level for parents sharing custody. But treating single parents sharing custody and those with sole custody in the same manner might be unfair. Splitting a child’s care with a co-parent can afford more time for leisure and paid work than managing it all yourself.
Another approach, Michelmore told me, would be to base eligibility for the credit solely on a worker’s income, without factoring in their dependents—and then award a “child benefit” for all kids, as many European countries do. Such an allowance would theoretically be easier to split across two households, though that’s rarely an option in practice. In Germany, Anja Steinbach, a professor of sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen, told me, the child benefit is sent to the house where the child is registered; as in most countries, there can only be one and it’s usually the mom’s. And even if Germany enabled parents to split the allowance—as dual-residence parents in Norway can—that benefit would still go a lot further in one household than in two. Some Germans have argued that the child benefit should be more generous for dual-residence families to account for their greater costs.
Joint custody raises these sorts of complications for any program for which one’s eligibility depends on the presence of a child in their home. That includes most benefits targeting people with low incomes—even those that, at face value, have nothing to do with kids. Take Medicaid, the public health-insurance program for Americans with limited means. In most states, an adult’s eligibility is determined by whether their income falls below 133 percent of the federal poverty level, a cutoff that varies by the size of the individual’s household; the size of their household hinges on who they expect to claim as a dependent on their tax return. Again, each child can be claimed only once.
Figuring out an equitable path forward for joint custody will force the U.S. to ponder some fundamental questions about what it means to be a family, what constitutes parenting, what the government’s role is in supporting it, and how much of it one has to do before being entitled to such assistance. The answers won’t be straightforward, but two-household children are already here. There’s no sense in ignoring them any longer.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
Michael Kwet
visit website
