| To see the importance of shared parenting, consider how you, as an adult, would feel if you could see your children only four days a month. Like most parents, you would miss them terribly, even with your adult level of emotional maturity. Children, with their fragile, still-developing emotions, often suffer much more. Children naturally love and need both parents. Sadly, most children of divorce see their non-custodial parent only four days a month. The concept of shared parenting, or joint custody, was developed about 1970 to help provide for the active participation of both parents in raising their children. The first joint custody statute was passed in Indiana in 1973, and since then shared parenting has spread to all 50 states. | 
Children need |
Shared parenting helps provide emotional stability for children by promoting the involvement of both parents. There are two aspects to shared parenting in divorce: joint legal custody, which refers to shared decision making responsibility between divorced parents, and joint physical custody, which provides children with a more balanced residential arrangement than was allowed under sole custody. With joint physical custody, children spend at least 30% of their time with each parent. This may be accomplished with an evenly balanced, alternating week arrangement, or through other arrangements that provide ways for the children to spend significant amounts of time with both parents. Joint legal custody has become the norm in most states in the U.S. Joint physical custody is less common, but Federal government statistics show that joint physical custody was awarded in more than one fifth of divorces in 1994, and in some states has become the predominant type of custody award.
|
"Although the dispute is symbolized by a 'versus' which signifies two adverse parties at opposite poles of a line, there is in fact a third party whose interests and rights make of the line a triangle. That person, the child who is not an official party to the lawsuit but whose well-being is in the eye of the controversy, has a right to shared parenting when both are equally suited to provide it. Inherent in the express public policy is a recognition of the child's right to equal access and opportunity with both parents, the right to be guided and nurtured by both parents, the right to have major decisions made by the application of both parents' wisdom, judgement and experience. The child does not forfeit these rights when the parents divorce."
--Presiding Judge Dorothy T. Beasley, |