Why Isn’t Equal Shared Parenting Already the Norm?

Here’s a puzzle for you. As regular readers of Shared Parenting News know, National Parents Organization has commissioned high-quality, independently administered polling in many states about people’s attitudes toward shared parenting.

The results of these polls are stunning! In every one of the more than 26 states surveyed:

• More than 85% of people believe that it’s in children’s best interest to have as much time as possible with each parent when the parents live apart and that children have a right to spend equal or nearly equal time with each parent in these situations; and,

• More than 75% of people support changes in their state’s laws to create a rebuttable presumption that shared parenting is in the best interest of children.

And digging down in the data we find that this support for shared parenting cuts across every demographic divide: income, educational level, age, race, political affiliation, and, importantly, gender. In fact, in many state polls, support for shared parenting and legal presumptions of shared parenting is stronger among women than men. 

This is where the puzzle arises. As one leading shared parenting researcher posed the question: “If both men and women overwhelmingly support shared parenting and think it’s almost always best for children, why isn’t equal shared parenting much more common?”

That’s a great question. It is a very rare thing for a court to deny equal shared parenting when both parents want to do it. Courts, whatever their biases are, tend to defer to parents when the parents are in agreement.

So, what’s going on? No one knows for sure. There’s no research on this. But there are some plausible hypotheses.

One is related to a well-known phenomenon sometimes referred to as “the me exception”. People are quite capable of truly believing a general proposition like “equal shared parenting is almost always best for children” but, based on a variety of motivations, carving out an exception for their own case. 

What are these motivations? Divorce is usually a highly emotional time. Parents involved in a divorce often experience fears about loss of a relationship with their children, loss of the relationship with the other parent, loss of a standard of living. There can be feelings of anger, humiliation, shame, guilt, vulnerability, and other negative emotions. Add to this that there are legal structures and child support policies that push parents into adversarial positions and we can see ample motivation for people to cling to a “me exception”: “equal shared parenting is almost always best … but not in my case.” 

This isn’t blatant hypocrisy. Blatant hypocrisy is when one just baldly doesn’t practice what one preaches; it’s when one recognizes that one is not an exception to the rule but violates the rule anyway. This is something different. It’s what psychologists call “motivated reasoning”—where a person’s desire for a particular conclusion motivates them to seek out support for that conclusion, ignore factors that weigh against it, and even to set aside general principles that they genuinely endorse in the abstract.

We can’t change human psychology. But we can change the legal structure that encourages parents to be adversaries. We can create, in every state, a rebuttable presumption that equal shared parenting is in children’s best interest. And, we can improve child support laws and policies to genuinely support children’s best interests. Those changes will, at least, remove some of the motivations that lead parents to adopt the “me exception”.