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The voices of experience: some hows, whys and whens of 50:50 shared care

By Anna Ferro, Bruce Smyth and Catherine Caruana - posted Friday, 22 August 2003


The Federal government has recently announced a parliamentary inquiry to investigate whether a rebuttable presumption of joint residence should become part of Australian family law - that is, if parents separate and cannot agree on arrangements for their children, the starting point should be that children spend equal time with each parent unless there is evidence that this arrangement would not be in the children's best interests.

However, with around one million children under 18 living with only one of their natural parents in Australia (ABS 1998), a core concern for public policy continues to be how to foster the ongoing care and support of children following parental separation.

The inherent complexity of shared care is currently being played out in policy by a lack of consistency between different departmental and legislative guidelines as to what constitutes "shared care". For instance, since 1 July 2000, to reflect shared-care arrangements, non-resident parents exercising contact with their children for more than ten per cent of nights may seek to have the Family Tax Benefit apportioned to each parent according to their respective levels of care. On the other hand, the Child Support Scheme requires a minimum level of care of 30 per cent of nights per year before child support liabilities can be reduced. The scheme defines "shared care" as between 40-60 per cent of nights per year.

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From a legal standpoint there has been a gradual shift in recent years towards a more equitable division between parents of the rights and obligations of the parenting role. The Family Law Reform Act 1995 saw the introduction of s60B which outlined the principles underpinning the law relating to children. So the present situation is that both parents now retain an equal level of parental responsibility following separation except insofar as this is necessarily modified by the effect of residence and contact orders or is the subject of a specific issues order.

In many ways the patchwork of policy and law reform around shared care is understandable. First, society has changed markedly in recent decades. Movement away from a (maternal) "sole custody" model of parenting towards encouraging co-parenting after separation means that the boundaries around sharing the care of children have become fuzzier. Policy necessarily lags behind social change.

A voluminous literature exists on joint legal custody, the bulk of which has been produced during the 1980s by scholars working in North America. It is a complex literature because of the various methodologies and samples employed across studies, and the occasional conflation with joint physical custody.

As part of a larger study investigating contact and child-support issues we interviewed 56 parents (27 mothers, 29 fathers) who had separated from their partners.

Little is known about parents who opt for 50:50 care of their children. They often have logistically complex arrangements and look to be a relatively distinct subgroup of separated parents. Their profiles shed light on some of the necessary conditions required for shared parenting: namely proximity, work flexibility, money and infrastructure, and a co-operative parenting style, which perhaps largely explains why most of these parents did not seek legal interventions.

Marcus is 30, and has been separated for about four years. He has now has another partner and has had a "week about" arrangement. Like some of the focus group members in the 50:50 care group, Marcus's dealings with his former partner are not always cordial and cooperative. He does not define his arrangement as "co-parenting" but rather sees it as two parents each doing their own thing, otherwise known as "parallel parenting".

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Sally (aged 45) and Rod (aged 49) have been separated for four-and-a-half years. They have two boys, and a teenage daughter. Rod now has another partner but Sally does not. Rod and Sally have an extremely cooperative relationship and are happy with their shared-parenting arrangement. The complexity of their arrangement appears to be a function of each family member's need to have frequent contact with one another. Sally and Rod swap care of their children during the week and take turns at weekends. Sally says: "It sounds mucky - it works for us."

Kathy is 40. She and her former husband have shared the care of their ten-year-old son and six-year-old daughter for five years. Kathy and her former partner have little contact with each other. Essentially they parallel parent. They have been involved in extensive litigation regarding the children. Kathy says her arrangement is very rigid.

The kids adjusted to it. They get annoyed at times and say, "I wish I didn't have to go" or "I wish I didn't have to do this!" … because it's not an amicable situation … but in relation to the children, they know the routine. It's been that way basically since … what, we've been split now five years and it was probably six months after the split, this was the arrangement. And so it hasn't been any different. But you know, how they'd like it I don't really know at this stage because they just know that's what the judge said so that's the arrangement.

Among the parents who have 50:50 arrangements, the week-about arrangement was the most common. And a common theme among all participants was the strong desire for guidance from information or services to help ensure a shared-care arrangement was suitable for their particular circumstances, and to help develop a schedule that would fit those circumstances.

For instance, Kathy was happy to try a 50:50 care arrangement but was keen to have some information about how to set up a schedule. She pressed a Family Court mediator but to no avail.

It was an answer like "You have to work it out. You're an individual group and you need to do it." Which made it really difficult because then it looked like I was dictating terms to which he [her former spouse] repelled straight away.

Mothers and fathers appeared to have different motives in choosing shared parenting. For example, for many of the fathers, their own rights as parents appear to have been a key motivating factor for 50:50 care. By contrast, mothers appeared to be more child-focussed and were also motivated by the rights of the both the child and the father to continue their relationship. But that is not to say that fathers do not become child-focused as they become embedded in their children's lives.

One of the most conspicuous features of the 50:50 parents was that all were in paid employment. In the case of fathers, all had some degree of flexibility in their work hours. Several had even chosen to work a four-day week or less; several had also changed jobs (or stayed in jobs) to give them this flexibility. All of the fathers appeared to have framed their work patterns to care for their children. Mothers, on the other hand, found that paid employment gave them the ability to make choices for themselves and their children.

Both mothers and fathers who opt for shared care generally appear to be in a position financially to make choices about their work-family balance. Fathers who spend equal time with their children need access to family-friendly work patterns.

A defining feature of the fathers with shared care was the way in which they viewed contact. In asking them about the sorts of things that they did with their children, and if any aspects of contact (e.g. quantity, quality, predictability, flexibility) were more important than others, fathers spoke of how time gave them a chance to do simple things with children - quality things. Nigel expressed many of the fathers' thoughts on this issue: "What do I do with the kids? I'd say: I'm around them."

Shared parenting involving a 50:50 split is probably the most logistically complex parenting arrangement possible. It can place huge demands on children and parents. The complexity of shared care became abundantly clear during one interchange between two fathers, Rod and Nigel.

Rod: "We see each other all the time. Clothes? … I'm forever driving here and dropping off school clothes there …"

Nigel: "We have three sets of everything: one in each household and one set lost somewhere in-between. And it's kind of true that stuff gravitates one way and you've got to say: 'Hey! I'm out of this' or 'Where are all my towels?'"

Rod: "Or you do a big wash and say 'I've got everything!'"

Nigel: 'That really depends in my case on reasonable relations with my ex-wife. Reasonable relations make so much possible."

Rod's final comment that "reasonable relations make so much possible" hits the family dynamics nail on the head - being able to disentangle their prior intimate relationship from their parenting is one of the key challenges for all parents who separate. The child-focused flavour of Rod's business-like relationship was indeed a common thread that ran through many of the comments of mothers and fathers in the 50:50 group.

Kathy reflects: "Yeah it's amicable. We just take our egos out of the equation and do what's best for the kids basically, all the time."

Little is known about children's views on shared-care arrangements. Moreover, little is known about the long-term outcomes for children and parents with such arrangements. The collection of such data represents a crucial plank of knowledge required to fully answer the question: How well does 50:50 care work?

For 50:50 parenting though, Andrew says:

I notice that the one thing about the group as a whole is that all of us are here because we're putting the kids' welfare first, and most of us are getting on well with the exs because the kids are more important than the ex or whatever … There are so many things where you just have to throw away the remote control and worry about the things that you can do.

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Article edited by David Paterson.
If you'd like to be a volunteer editor too, click here.

This is an edited version of a paper presented to the Australian Social Policy Conference 2003 at The University of New South Wales, Sydney on 9-11 July and published in the Institute of Family Studies' journal Family Matters. Click here (pdf, 294kb) for the full paper.



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About the Authors

Anna Ferro is a Research Officer in the Family and Marriage Program at the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

Bruce Smyth is a Research Fellow in the Family and Marriage Program at the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

Catherine Caruana is a Senior Research Officer in the Family and Marriage Program at the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

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