Abstract
The legal terms are custody and visitation. But the real issues are these: How will you continue to be effective parents in separate households? How will your family function after the divorce? If you are only asking the question, Who will have custody? you are solving a legal problem, not a family one. You and your ex-spouse brought your children into the world together, and divorce doesn’t alter that fact. But it does require you to rethink how you will see them through. The family doesn’t end at separation or divorce, it changes. In time, you will become two distinct families connected by common children. This transition from one household to two, from a nuclear family to what has been described by researcher Constance Ahrons2 as a “bi-nuclear” family, takes time. Figuring out the details of when the children will be with each of you, how child care will be shared, who will be responsible for doctor and dentist appointments, how decisions will be made, or even who stays home with a sick child all takes negotiation, planning, and experimentation. If you get hung up on who gets custody, you will get locked into competing positions in which there are only two choices. Someone will be hurt because each of you has to make the other wrong in order to be right.
Parents are teachers of human beings, not owners of human beings.
Virginia Satir
It is not the divorce per se, but the conditions and agreements the parents create during and after divorce that will determine the child’s adjustment.1
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Notes
Joan B. Kelly, “Longer-Term Adjustment in Children of Divorce,” Journal of Family Psychology 2, no. 2 (1988), p. 137.
Constance R. Ahrons, “Redefining the Divorced Family: A Conceptual Framework,” Social Work 25 (1980).
Susan Steinman, “Joint Custody: What We Know, What We Have Yet to Learn, and the Judicial and Legislative Implications,” in Joint Custody and Shared Parenting, ed. Jay Folberg (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1984). Sandra Vogly and Craig Everett, “Joint Custody Reconsidered: Systemic Criteria for Mediation,” Journal of Divorce 8, no. 3/4 (1985).
Constance R. Ahrons and Roy H. Rogers, Divorcing Families (New York: Norton, 1987).
Joan B. Kelly, “Mediated and Adversarial Divorce Resolution Processes: An Analysis of Post Divorce Outcomes,” final report prepared for the Fund for Research in Dispute Resolution (December 1990). In this study of approximately 400 divorcing men and women, Kelly found that 2 years after divorce, the differences in the level of conflict between the adversarial and mediation group disappeared as the conflict subsided in the adversarial group and cooperation increased in both groups.
Kelly, “Longer-Term Adjustment in Children”; W. Glenn Clingempeel and N. Dicken Rappucci, “Joint Custody After Divorce: Major Issues and Goals for Research,” Psychological Bulletin 91, no. 1 (1984); Deborah Leupnitz, “A Comparison of Maternal, Paternal, and Joint Custody: Understanding the Varieties of Post-Divorce Family Life,” Journal of Divorce 9 (1986).
Kelly, “Longer-Term Adjustment in Children.”
M. Zaslow, “Differences in Children’s Responses to Parental Divorce,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 59, no. 1 (1989).
Joan Kelly, invited address 1987 American Psychological Association; New York, reported in the APA Monitor (Jan. 1988).
Joan Kelly, “Examining Resistance to Joint Custody,” in Joint Custody and Shared Parenting, ed. Jay Folberg (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1984).
R. McKinnon and J. Wallerstein, “Joint Custody and the Preschool Child,” Conciliation Courts Review 25, no. 2 (1987).
M. Brotsky, S. Steinmann, and S. Zemmelman, “Joint Custody Through Mediation Reviewed: Parents Assess Their Situation 18 Months Later,” Conciliation Court Review 26, no. 2 (1988).
Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, Second Chances (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989).
D. A. Leupnitz, Child Custody: A Study of Children After Divorce (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1982); Leupnitz, “Comparison of Material, Paternal, and Joint Custody” (1986); S. Steinman, “The Experiences of Children in a Joint Custody Arrangement: A Report of a Study,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 51, no. 3 (1981).
Janet Johnston and Linda Campbell, The Impasses of Divorce (New York: Free Press, 1988).
Steinman, “Joint Custody: What We Know.”
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© 1992 Lois Gold
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Gold, L. (1992). Parenting Plans. In: Between Love and Hate. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6582-0_7
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