Smart Parenting During and After Divorce: Changing Notions of Custody in Society

It is very important to understand a few things about the word custody. First, perceptions about how children should spend time with parents after divorce are different than they were, say, fifty years ago. Back then, when there were far fewer two-parent working families, and it was presumed that mothers would stay home and rear children, a mother had to be considered "unfit" to "lose" custody of the children. Today, the practical and economical realities of needing two parents working to make ends meet mean that when parents separate there cannot always be one parent at home taking care of the children.

Second, fathers are seeing their roles differently than they were fifty years ago. Many fathers want to be equal or at least equivalent parents. They do not want to see their children merely on weekends. They want to be active participants in their children's lives and are willing to fight for the privilege.

Unfortunately, the more traditional roles of parents continue to prevail in bitter custody disputes. I find it fascinating that the comparative worth of mothers and fathers to children is a factor in so many custody cases in this modern day, but it is. Often, if an attorney thinks she can sell the position that a mother's love is more essential to a child than a father's love, the mother will have an advantage. In the worst of cases, babysitters are given priority over available fathers when it comes to being with the children. Obviously, if a parent is so defective as to be a danger to a child, contact with children should be limited, but this is far rarer a circumstance than what the motion papers of contested custody battles would have you believe. Civilized co-parenting encourages parents to take advantage of the fact that parents living in different houses can actually help one another when schedules change.

Because custody and child support often go together, attaching the term custodial parent to one parent can have everything to do with finances and not be related to relative custodial fitness at all.

The bottom line is that there are a myriad of factors that make understanding the term custody difficult and confusing for people, and on top of that, the legal aspects of custody can differ tremendously from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

For the purposes of this article, noncustodial parent refers either to the noncustodial parent in the legal sense or the parent who has the children a minority of the time. Shared parenting refers to an arrangement in which responsibilities for child rearing are more shared than they are the domain of one or the other parent.