Make the parents bounce

South Carolina’s annual guardian ad litem training, which took place last Friday, always inspires at least a few blogs. It did again this year.

During the closing Q&A, a participant asked if any of the guardians on the lecturer panel found it noteworthy when one parent referred to the other parent’s home as “dad’s house” or “mom’s house.” The implication was that such parents did not consider the other parent’s home to also be the child(ren)’s home and that such a viewpoint was potentially noteworthy.

Such a concern can only exist within the context of a joint-physical-custody culture.  When I began practicing family thirty years ago, 50-50 physical custody was as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth.  In a culture in which the child lived with one parent most of the time, and visited the other parent alternating weekends, no one perceived the child as having two homes. Instead, that child shared a home with a custodial parent and visited the non-custodial parent in that parent’s home.  It is only a culture in which both parents have approximately equal time can the concept of the child having more than one home make sense.

While I applaud the trend away from turning fit parents into every-other-weekend daddies, that trend did not have to lead to children having two homes.  That it did is both a failure of imagination and a failure to truly consider the best interests of the child.

When either parents or children, but not both, can have a fixed residence, parents, as adults, should be expected to adjust to the instability of a shifting residence.  This imposition is further justified by it being parents, not children, who made the decision not to reside with a co-parent.  When our culture began its trend towards joint custody, the family courts could have made the parents maintain a fixed residence for the children while the parents searched for accommodations during the times they did not have the children.  Instead, we have a culture in which children bounce between their parents’ residences. And when parents demand 5/2/2/5 joint custody arrangements—as opposed to week-on/week-off—it means the children have to transition between households twice, rather than once, a week.  Very destabilizing.

We appear to have mindlessly fallen into this system because we never considered these transitions to be a great imposition on children, so we never considered making a great imposition on parents. If we were designing the joint custody system from scratch, and if we truly put the children’s best interests first, we would not have created a system in which parents have a fixed residence, children lack a fixed residence, and children are expected to transition once or twice every week between homes. Instead, we have a joint custody system that is hostile to children and their desire for stability.

Perhaps rather than worrying about the nomenclature joint-custody parents use to describe the other parent’s home, we should create a system in which joint-custody parents have two residences while their children have one.