2024 International Shared Parenting Day Event
Thank you to all who attended National Parents Organization’s second International Shared Parenting Day event! Thanks to you, our event built on the successes of last year and brought together shared parenting supporters from all over the world. If you were not able to attend, you can watch a video of the event on YouTube at this link. Thank you to our excellent host, Ashley-Nicole Russell of ANR Law and to our generous sponsors, Sourcebooks and the International Council on Shared Parenting.
Our 2024 International Shared Parenting Day event was held on April 25, 2024, which is Parental Alienation Awareness Day. To acknowledge that and the profound suffering of so many, we invited Madi Welborne of the Anti-Alienation Project to share her story as a former alienated child. Although shared parenting is not a cure for parental alienation, it can be an important preventative measure.
The overall message of the event was one of hope and of celebrating our successes so far. Matt Hale spoke about the six year history of Shared Parenting Day and all we have to celebrate since the passage of Kentucky’s first in the nation equal shared parenting law in 2018. We also celebrated the many collaborations within our movement with speeches from Mark Ludwig of Americans for Equal Shared Parenting and Alan-Michael Graves of the Good+ Foundation. Ashley-Nicole Russell spoke about the growing field of collaborative law, which removes the fighting and winner-take-all mentality of the current divorce and custody process.
Because National Parents Organization bases our advocacy on the best research available, we announced the winners of the 2023 Ned Holstein Shared Parenting Research Award, which celebrates the best research in the past calendar year related to NPO’s mission. One of the authors of the award winning paper, Jennifer Harman, spoke about the research conducted in "Gender and Child Custody Outcomes Across 16 Years of Judicial Decisions Regarding Abuse and Parental Alienation,” which she co-wrote with Christine Giancarlo, Demosthenes Lorandos, and Brian Ludmer. And NPO conferred a Ned Holstein Shared Parenting Research Lifetime Achievement Award to Dr. William Fabricius of Arizona State University.
Finally, we heard from Elizabeth and Mike McNeese, creators of the fantastic We The Parents documentary that looks at family court through the eyes of parents who have been through it.
Thank you again to everyone who was able to attend the event, to all of our speakers, to our amazing emcee, and to our generous sponsors. We look forward to seeing you all at next year’s Shared Parenting Day event!
