Drawn from a joint study I did at UNR for child psych back when I lived in Reno.
“The Family Arrangements that Work Best for Children”
Father and Child Reunion (2004) is a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies from the U.S. and other countries. Many of the studies look at what leads to children doing the best and worse after divorce. The documentation for these findings is in Father and Child Reunion.
These are the family structures ranked according to the ones in which children do the best—the last three after divorce:
Intact family
Shared Parent Time With the Following Three Conditions: the child has about equal time with mom and dad parents live close enough to each other that the child does not need to forfeit friends or activities when visiting the other parent, no bad-mouthing
Primary father time (primary father custody).
Primary mother time
Perhaps the most surprising is that children raised by single dads do better in more than 20 areas of measurement in comparison to children raised by single moms. These measurements include academic progress, social competence, psychological health and physical health.
Caveat - This does not mean that men are better fathers than women are mothers. Single fathers usually have more income and education, tend to be older, and are more self-selected, thus more highly motivated. Single dads in the year 2004 are similar to female doctors in the 1950s: exceptionally motivated.
One reason, though, that children on average do so much better with single dads is ironic— it is rare for the single mom to disappear from the child’s life. To moms’ credit, they are more likely to stay involved; to dad’s credit, dads are more likely to facilitate mom’s involvement than mom is to facilitate dad’s. In brief, the child living primarily with dad is more likely to live in conditions that come closer to the intact family than is the child living primarily with mom.
Why this difference? One clue appears to be the bad-mouthing gap. When Glynnis Walker, in her research for Solomon’s Children, asked children years after divorce which parent bad-mouthed the other, the children were almost five times more likely to say “only mom says bad things about dad” than vice versa. Also, dads are more likely to ask for mom’s input and value mom’s input, thus encouraging mom to remain involved. Perhaps as a result, when children live with only their moms, the parents are nine times as likely to have conflict as when children live with their dads.
These findings are significant for two reasons. First, because in high-conflict divorces if we conclude that the parental conflict will prevent 50-50 involvement from working, we tend to revert to primary mother time, when in fact it’s far more likely that with primary father time the parents will have less conflict, and that the children will have more of both parents, and will do better.
Second, once primary father time is understood to have these advantages, and therefore becomes the first choice of the law if there is conflict, it eliminates any incentive the mom may feel to make the divorce appear to be high-conflict because she knows that will lead to her having the child. Once she knows the likely alternative to equal involvement is primary father involvement, the incentive is to reduce conflict and have equal involvement—which is better than primary father involvement. If, of course, the dad is the primary alienator, the current preference for the mother should remain.
Let’s look at why the following three conditions seem to work best or children after divorce:
First, the child has about equal time with mom and dad.
Second, parents live close enough to each other that the child does not need to forfeit friends or activities when visiting the other parent
Third, no bad-mouthing
One-Parent Stability vs. Two-Parent Stability.
Until now, we have understandably thought that amid the instability of divorce, children experience the most stability by staying primarily with the parent who has been their primary parent. I call this “one-parent stability.” However, research shows that one-parent “stability” in reality creates psychological instability. Children with minimal exposure to the other parent after divorce seem to feel abandoned, and often psychologically rudderless-- even when they succeed on the surface (e.g., good grades).
Children with both parents, and especially children with substantial father contact, do better--even when socio-economic variables are controlled for. They do better on their SATs, on their social skills, on their self-esteem, in their physical health, in their ability to be assertive, and, surprisingly, the more dad involvement the more a child is likely to be empathetic. These children are far less likely to suffer from nightmares, temper tantrums, being bullied, or have other signs of feeling like a victim.
These findings occur even though one and two-year old children of divorce with developmental disabilities are fifteen times more likely to be given to fathers to raise, and children who are raised by moms and have problems with the 5 D’s (drinking, drugs, depression, delinquency, disobedience) are most likely to be given to their dads to “take over” in early teenage years. The propensity of dads to take on the more challenging children and yet still have positive outcomes speaks highly of dads’ contributions. Nevertheless, these children still do not do as well as when the children are in an intact family, or when the involvement of both mom and dad are closer to equal.
Why does the approximately equal involvement of both parents appear so important, and even more crucial after a divorce? No one knows for certain, but here appears to be three rarely-discussed possible reasons that emanate from “between the lines”. I believe they are crucial to a cutting-edge understanding of child development:
The child is half mom and half dad. The job of a child growing up is to discover whom it is. Who is it? It is half mom and half dad. It is not the better parent. It is both parents, warts and all. So we are not talking about fathers’ rights, mothers’ rights or even the child’s right to both parents. We are talking about a new paradigm: the child’s right to both halves of itself. Psychological stability seems to emanate from the child knowing both parts of itself.
The implications for the court is that there is much less need for psychological testing of both parents—if the child does better by being about equally with both parents, warts and all, we don’t have to conduct a court battle as to which parent has the fewest warts. The “warts” that matter are bad-mouthing and alienation of the other parent; the desire to move the child away from the other parent; being consistently physically abusive; being sexually abusive.
Checks and balances. Dads and moms, like Republicans and Democrats, provide checks and balances. Moms tend to overstress protection; dads may overstress risk-taking—there has to be a balance of power for the child to absorb a balance of both parents’ values. One parent dominating tends to leave the child with a stereotyped and biased perspective of the values of the minority parent, and ultimately the child is unappreciative of that part of itself. The minority parent becomes a straw-man or straw-woman, thus that part of the child becomes a straw self. The minority parent becomes undervalued, thus that part of the child becomes undervalued to itself.
Overnights. As children enter adolescence, they connect best with the values of the parents during the peaceful moments prior to bedtime, often the only time when the pressures of peers recede and the presence of parents’ values can reenter the child’s psyche.
Second, Parents Living Close.
When children have to forfeit friends or activities to be with the other parent, resentment toward the parent is created just when parental involvement is most needed in balance with independence. Whether during the earlier years or adolescence, neither one can be forfeited.
Third, No Bad Mouthing
Criticizing the other parent is criticizing the child—it is criticizing the half of the child that is the other parent. As the child looks in themirror and sees that his or her body language is the body language of the criticized parent, the child fears she or he might also be an “irresponsible jerk,” “liar,” or whatever…
Bad-mouthing the other parent is the most insidious forms of child abuse because the child feels she or he has no place to go—arguing with the parent doing the bad-mouthing makes the child the parent’s enemy; reporting it to the parent being bad-mouthed threatens to lead to parental arguments which further erode the child’s stability.
Those are the three most important conditions after divorce for the best likely outcome for the child. If dad is so important, though, what are his conscious and unconscious contributions?
