Post by @ga.shared.parenting

“Kids need one primary home for stability.” It sounds reasonable. It sounds child-centered. And it gets repeated constantly in custody discussions. But researchers have actually tested the basic idea behind that claim. In a 2023 systematic review, Vowels and colleagues examined 39 studies of children’s post-separation living arrangements and compared the findings against several competing explanations for why children might do better or worse after separation. One of those was the stressful mobility hypothesis: the idea that moving regularly between two parents’ homes creates enough disruption, stress, and instability that children should fare worse in shared physical custody. The review found no support for that hypothesis. That does NOT mean every child should automatically be placed on the exact same 50/50 schedule. Distance matters. Safety matters. Parenting capacity matters. The individual child matters. But it does mean we should be much more careful about treating “two homes = instability” as though it were an established fact. In fact, the explanation that received the strongest support in the review was the fewer-resources hypothesis: when children lose meaningful access to one parent after separation, they can also lose relational, social, and economic resources connected to that parent. A child can have two homes and a highly predictable, consistent life. A child can also have one “primary” home and experience enormous instability. Vowels et al. (2023), Systematic review and theoretical comparison of children’s outcomes in post-separation living arrangements. #SharedParenting #FamilyCourt #ChildCustody #Coparenting #divorce