Post by @ga.shared.parenting

“Dad, why does it feel like I spend more time with Mom than with you?” At some point, kids get old enough to notice. They learn the days of the week. They understand what “every other weekend” means. They notice where they wake up most mornings, who gets them ready for school, whose house feels like their everyday life, and which parent they mostly see on weekends. And eventually some of them ask why. That’s part of what makes William Fabricius’s research on parenting time so interesting. His work has repeatedly looked at custody from the perspective of the CHILD, including what children and young adults say they wanted after their parents separated. One of the things his research suggests is that children don’t experience parenting time as some meaningless percentage on a court order. Time communicates something. Ordinary time together. School nights. Homework. Dinner. Running errands. Sitting around doing absolutely nothing important. Those experiences help tell a child: “I’m part of your everyday life.” Fabricius and his colleagues have found that adolescents’ ordinary involvement with a parent is related to how much they feel they MATTER to that parent. And that creates a really uncomfortable problem when one parent gets substantially less time. Because eventually the child may wonder: Does Dad not want to spend more time with me? And if Dad says, “Of course I do,” the next question is obvious: Then why don’t you? That’s a brutal position to put a parent in. Tell the child the truth about a custody dispute and you risk putting them in the middle. Don’t explain it, and the child may invent an explanation of their own. Fabricius and Hall found that young adults from divorced families generally wished they had spent more time with their fathers. They also noted something especially interesting: kids often seemed to know when their fathers wanted more time with them. Children are not oblivious to these arrangements. They grow up. They notice. And a parenting plan written when a child is 4 may eventually have to make sense to that same child at 8, 11, 14, and 17. Maybe that should be part of the conversation when we decide how much of each parent a child gets to have. Because someday the person asking “why?” might not be either parent. It might be the kid. Research: Fabricius & Hall (2000), Young Adults’ Perspectives on Divorce: Living Arrangements; Fabricius et al. research on parenting time, father-child relationships, and children’s sense of mattering. #SharedParenting #Custody #Coparenting #FamilyCourt #5050