The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Divorced Mothers' Experiences with Coparenting.

This study produces a grounded theory of how 20 predominantly White, well-educated women experienced sharing physical custody of their children with their former partners after divorce or separation. Three patterns of coparenting were identified in the data: continuously contentious, always amicable, and bad to better. Five negative factors and three positive factors that influenced mothers' coparenting relationships were identified. The type of relationship women had with their expartners was related to how they shared custody of their children (e.g., how they exchanged their children). The findings of this study suggest that shared physical custody relationships are dynamic and can vary greatly.Key Words: coparenting, divorce, grounded theory, shared custody.Although the divorce rate is lower than it has been since 1970 (Tejada- Vera & Sutton, 2010), the number of first marriages that end in divorce remains around 40% (National Center for Health Statistics, 2002). Because many who divorce are parents, approximately 1.1 million children each year experience their parents' divorce (Kreider, 2007). When parents divorce, shared legal custody is the legal presumption of judges in most states, but children tend to reside most of the time with their mothers (Cancian & Meyer, 1998). In the past, divorced fathers were generally considered minimally involved in raising children after divorce, but that is changing; divorced parents more frequently share both legal and physical custody of children (Melli, Brown, & Cancian, 1997). The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate divorced and separated mothers' experiences sharing physical custody of their children.DivorceThere is a large body of research on divorce, much of which addresses issues of how divorce afFects children (e.g., Johnston, 1995), fathers' involvement after divorce (e.g., Minton & Pasley, 1996), and how divorced partners coparent (e.g., Markham, Ganong, & Coleman, 2007). Most divorce researchers have either used cross-sectional designs, primarily surveys, or they have relied on large secondary data sets (e.g., National Survey of Families and Households) to examine relationships between variables (e.g., Kim & McKenry, 2002). These studies, however, provide snapshots of coparenting and have shed little light on the process of coparenting.Although mothers are typically the primary parent, divorce researchers have seldom focused on them. This may be due to perceptions that women's mothering behaviors do not change after divorce; their involvement with children is similar to when they were married (Maccoby, Buchanan, Mnookin, & Dornbusch, 1993). Father involvement, however, has tended to change after divorce (Minton & Pasley, 1996), and scholars have been intrigued with how it changes and how these changes affect children. When investigators have studied the effects of divorce on mothers, they have tended to focus on the economic consequences of divorce (e.g., Sayer, 2006), role changes that occur after divorce (e.g., Ardirti & Madden-Derdich, 1995), mothers' psychological well-being (e.g., Kim & McKenry, 2002), and coparenting issues (e.g., Markham et al., 2007). Because most children reside primarily with their mother after divorce, there is much more research on mothers with sole custody than on those who share physical custody. Although increasing numbers of parents share custody of their children (Cancian & Meyer, 1998), we still know little about how divorced parents negotiate this process.Shared CustodyLegal custody decisions are supposedly ' 'gender neutral" and decided with the "best interests of the child" in mind (Maccoby, Depner, & Mnookin, 1990); mothers are no longer assigned sole custody of their children simply because of their role as mother (Demo & Fine, 2009). Scholars have viewed fathers as increasingly important in their children's lives, and by the 1980s, the courts responded by interpreting the "best interests of the child" to mean continual contact with both parents after divorce (Maccoby et al. …