The Stability of Child Physical Placements following Divorce: Descriptive Evidence from Wisconsin.

This study uses administrative data from the Wisconsin Court Record Database, linked with survey data collected from mothers (n = 789) and fathers (n = 690), to describe the living arrangements of children with sole mother and shared child physical placement following parental divorce. Contrary to prior research, results provide little evidence that children with shared placement progressively spend less time in their father's care. We find that, over (approximately) 3 years following a divorce, their living arrangements are as stable as those of children with sole mother placement or more so. To the extent that shared physical placement is associated with increased father involvement and positive developmental outcomes, recent increases in shared physical custody following divorce may benefit children. Key Words: child custody, living arrangements, physical custody, physical placement, shared custody, shared placement. The growth of single-parent families and increases in maternal employment over the latter half of the 20th century have generated interest in whether there have been concomitant changes in parental roles and the gender division of labor in regard to childrearing (see, e.g., Bianchi, Robinson, & Milkie, 2006). For divorced families, these factors may be influenced by public policies that guide child physical placement and the amount of time children spend in the physical custody of each parent. Over the last two decades, the likelihood that divorcing families will receive custody orders for shared child physical placement, as opposed to sole mother placement, which has traditionally dominated divorce cases, has increased considerably (Bauserman, 2002; Bender, 1994). Yet we know little about how this may have affected the stability of children's living arrangements and the gender division of labor for childrearing. Maccoby and Mnookin's (1992) landmark study, Dividing the Child: Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody, revealed that children experiencing shared physical placement in the mid-1980s progressively spent less time in the physical custody of their father and more time in the custody of their mother over 2 years following parental separation or divorce. This discovery led the authors to conclude that "the label of joint physical custody often does not reflect the social reality" (p. 159) of children's living arrangements during separation and divorce. Although not an explicit focus of Maccoby and Mnookin's work, an important implication is that, unless they return to court to have their child support orders adjusted accordingly, mothers with shared physical placement may effectively provide the majority of care for children without being afforded access to the economic resources that would have been assigned to them under an alternative child placement order (e.g., sole mother placement). Indeed, Maccoby and Mnookin (p. 160) write that "advocates for women's rights would suggest that since these women receive less support man they would have received had the [physical placement] decree reflected the reality of the residential arrangement, both they and the children 'lose'. " Conversely, if mothers act as "gatekeepers" to children, potentially limiting the amount of time children spend in their father's care, regardless of the physical placement order in effect, fathers may pay child support amounts that, though consistent with their children's court-ordered placement, are inconsistent with their residential arrangement. In the years since publication of Dividing the Child, both joint legal custody and shared physical placement orders have become increasingly common (Bauserman, 2002; Bender, 1994). Yet research has not examined whether Maccoby and Mnookin's major finding, a phenomenon that we refer to as maternal drift, can be replicated in other samples, nor whether it continues to characterize shared physical placement experiences for children two decades later. The four additional studies (Cloutier & Jacques, 1997; Kline, Tschann, Johnston, & Wallerstein, 1989; Luepnitz, 1982; Pearson & Thoennes, 1990) that have reported on associations among shared physical placement, the amount of time children spend in their father's care, and children's living arrangements after divorce have utilized small, nonrandom samples of divorce cases, also from the 1980s. …