Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

While historically, children typically lived with their mothers after parental union dissolution, recent research has shown dramatic changes in children’s living arrangements after parental separation or divorce. Notably, research using court records in Wisconsin has found that shared physical custody (where children spend a substantial proportion of time with each of their parents) now accounts for half the outcomes in recent divorce cases—35% equally-shared custody and 15% unequally-shared custody (Meyer, Cancian and Cook 2017). Yet this potentially important change for children has received little attention, in part because it is unclear whether this is limited to Wisconsin (and perhaps a few other states) or is more widespread. Therefore, important questions unanswered remain about the extent to which shared custody arrangements are becoming more common on a national scale, as well as whether custody outcomes may be linked to differences in state policies that facilitate (or deter) shared custody. More generally, we have little evidence about how a broader array of family policies in the U.S. are responding to families in which children spend time in two different households (Meyer and Carlson 2014). If this family type is found to be more widespread than previously known, and growing, we argue that policymakers need to consider whether these families are being appropriately supported with existing programs and policies.

This research has three aims: First, we use national data (the Current Population Survey, Child Support Supplement) to estimate the proportion of children of divorce who have shared physical custody, exploring whether the rate is higher in Wisconsin than elsewhere. Second, we examine whether the rates are systematically different in states that have different policy rules (e.g., shared custody as a presumption, acknowledged as an option but not presumed, or completely ignored within statues, etc.). Third, we document the ways that family policy is currently responding to families in which children live roughly equally with both parents, examining how these families are treated by SNAP, TANF, the EITC, housing assistance, etc., in several states.

Our preliminary analyses show that in the recent CPS national data, only 29% of divorced custodial parents overall reported joint physical custody. We will evaluate multiple years of data to expand the sample and to have sufficient samples for state-specific estimates. We will also limit our analysis to those with more recent divorces to be comparable to the Wisconsin estimates and to ensure that cases decided in earlier policy regimes are not biasing our national findings. This approach will enable us to make conclusions about the extent to which shared custody is growing nationally and the extent to which it varies across states. If we do find state variation, we will evaluate whether this variation is related to particular policies in place. Finally, we will document ways that various family policies respond when children spend time living with each of their parents; this work builds on the path breaking work of Hakovirta and Rantalaiho (2011) for Nordic countries, expanding it to the U.S.