That is the working theory of Dads at School, our new organization devoted to improving child outcomes and closing gender gaps by increasing K12 father engagement.

Dads at School joins other programs that for decades have aimed to increase father-school involvement. Efforts include monthly dad meetings, classroom volunteer schedules, father security patrols and even foam fingers. We aim to entice schools with year-round support and $1,000 father engagement grants [application for the 2026-27 cohort still open!].

The most powerful school improvement initiative that I’ve found comes from the inside, and is free and very simple:

Schools call dads before moms.

Whether to invite parents to back-to-school night, report a sick kid, missed homework, tardiness or acting up, these school administrators and teachers don’t lazily default to calling the mom or the first adult listed on the emergency contact list.

They intentionally phone fathers first.

Phone Fathers First.

That call tells fathers:

Your input matters.

You matter.

We trust you.

You are a capable parent.

You’re equally important as the mom.

You’ve got this.

One Central Virginia principal told me that with rare exception, the dads are pleasantly surprised. “Once in a while a dad will say, ‘My wife handles this sort of thing,’ but most jump in and address the issue at hand,” he told me.

Educators who phone fathers first believe this simple communication activates dads to step into their potential as education partners. The calls also activate men to be more confident parents at home.

Deborah Higdon, a longtime educator in Montgomery County, Maryland, told me she grew up in a loving home with a close relationship with both her parents — including a special bond with her dad and his circle of male friends.

Once she became an educator it was natural for Higdon to intentionally and routinely call fathers.

“I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do that, so I called dads all the time,” she told me.

Higdon called dads to tell them she needed them to attend parent-teacher conferences. She called dads to tell them their kid was doing great at school. She called dads to tell them their kid was failing school. She called dads to tell them they were needed to chaperone field trips, pick up a child with a fever or address behavior issues.

The moms were not ignored. Mothers were also called.

But the dads were called first, and they were called intentionally.

Higdon, whose account is detailed in The Dad Difference: How and Why to Invite Fathers Into Your School (ASCD, 2026), joins other educators I’ve meet who sense that this simple act of engagement makes a big difference in children’s educational outcomes — and school culture as a result.

Higdon did document the impact of her father engagement efforts. While an administrator at a 1,300-student middle school plagued with discipline and academic issues, Higdon was responsible for one of the four quadrants of the school. Armed with her confidence in the positive power of father engagement, Higdon and her team phoned 100% of the fathers of all 300 children in her charge and invited them to parent-teacher conferences.

Despite her colleagues’ skepticism, each and every student had a father figure attend the conferences. Discipline issues schoolwide dropped 70% and academic performance increased. Cynicism amongst her colleagues dissipated and father engagement became a schoolwide priority.

Learnings from family engagement expertise

If you work in education in any capacity in 2026, these results should not be surprising.

Family engagement is one of the hottest topics in education today. Scores of studies find time and again that when school staff meaningfully connect with parents, education outcomes improve.

Karen Mapp, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor is author of the U.S. Department of Education’s Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships, which was developed in response to decades of research showing that students’ academics, attendance and behavior improve when parents are meaningfully engaged in their education.

These changes happen not just because parents show up to volunteer occasionally or sit on the PTA — even though those can be meaningful activities. Family engagement experts report the biggest impact when teachers and administrators call or visit families at their homes, invite them to participate in decisions affecting their student and, eventually, partake in crafting policies that affect the whole school community.

Schools, charged with documenting family engagement, increasingly understand that the term “family” connotes “moms.”

Intentionally targeting father engagement doubles the numbers of potential family members building partnership with schools.

Mapp is often quoted saying: “Family Engagement is a full, equal, and equitable partnership among families, educators, and community partners.”

Phone Fathers First is a practical extension of the family engagement movement — bringing new emphasis to equal and equitable, as PFF highlights equality between moms and dads.

Relevant aside: the call alone can change student outcomes, even if a parent never steps foot in the school. A family engagement manager for a large Central Virginia district told me the school curbed truancy among its Spanish speaking students after bilingual staff phoned those kids’ parents, introduced themselves, asked what they needed for their student to be successful. Parent-school engagement remained low but absenteeism among this population dropped to zero, my friend told me.

Contact form reform

While Phone Fathers First can meaningfully change the DNA of a school, some steps are helpful in accelerating the effort:

1. Before the start of the school year, audit all enrollment forms.

2. For contact information, require information for “Dad” and “Mom” (in that alphabetical order). Both these fields should be present and labeled as “Parent Contacts” — neither as an “Emergency Contact.”
   
   Trust that caregivers understand that sometimes other adults must be substituted in the dad/mom fields — grandparents, aunts, uncles, step-parents, babysitters. Don’t try to twist the language to accommodate every family. Stick to “dad” and “mom.”
   

3. When schools and/or PTAs solicit family volunteer info, give forms to both moms and dads and require both parents fill out forms.
   
   Ask about parent availability — but also interests. Does the dad or mom have special skills or interests they can bring to the school? What can the school do to make that project happen?
   
   Enthusiasm is a precious commodity that should not be squandered! Capture it!
   
   Better yet — schools or parent organizations specifically growing their father engagement should send out a survey specifically to dads and ask:

• What is your biggest concern for your child?

• What are your goals for your child?

• Do you feel welcome in the school? Explain your experience.

• What time of day is best for a teacher meeting? Zoom or in-person?

• What skills or talents would you like to share with the school community?

• Please share any projects or ideas you’d like to see at the school.

• What school rules or policies would you like to change, and why?

As the head of Dads at School — and a longtime gender equality advocate — my goal is to put myself out of business. A mark of this success is making father engagement normal, boring and self-sustaining.

A solid first step is getting the word out.

School leaders can change the world by picking up the phone and dialing a dad’s number.

Implement Phone Fathers First as a schoolwide and even district-wide policy.

Academics, give me a call so we can track and evaluate this effort.

Comment or write and share your thoughts and experience: emma@dadsatschool.org

• Dads at School, my new father engagement nonprofit

• Politics and small-penis shaming

• How everyday people can pass laws

• Congratulations, Mississippi on your equal-parenting law!

• Conferences, summits and webinars
  

P.S. I’m the founding director of Dads at School and we are onboarding K12 Virginia schools for our pilot year. Learn more, sign up for an info session and apply! dadsatschool.org

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Sign up, reach out, learn more about Dads at School.

For decades, schools have depended heavily on mothers to carry the invisible labor of family engagement: volunteering in classrooms, organizing events, joining PTAs, answering teacher emails, coordinating fundraisers, and showing up for school culture in countless ways.

This is both a gift and a burden to mothers: School volunteering can be deeply meaningful, hugely influential and also just one more gendered parenting chore.

The PTA mom cliché has taken on new meaning as emerging research on the importance of family engagement on education outcomes has heightened the call for schools to p…

Read more

The passing of this law also signals that there is potential for broad political will to take seriously male struggles — and votes.

Virginia’s new law is a big deal globally and elected officials and advocates are falling over each other to figure out how to make similar headlines in their jurisdictions. I’ve been involved with Virginia’s law from the beginning and am now being asked for advice on how to pass laws to support boys and men.

New! June 23 Policy Training. Virtual and Free.

Read more

“Yes that MAGA hat makes your dick look small.”

“This administration has little-dick energy.”

Etc.

Read more

In this issue:

• Virginia to create first U.S. commission for boys and men

• Now mainstream: Women are violent, too

• Why are we pushing men into therapy?

  • Related: For men in crisis, VCU offers Feminism 101

• Higher ed is in a free-fall and this is good news for feminism

• Other stuff

  • Newly released: Audiobook for The 50/50 Solution

  • 50/50 and Black. Single. Mother the book

  • Divorce Calculator - what are your odds?

  • Celebrities and 50/50 parenting

  • Equal parenting in the news

  • Colorado, Utah and New York now enjoy 50/50 cultural presumptions!

Virginia to create first U.S. commission for boys and men

The big news in my world is that Virginia will now have the nation’s very first commission for boys and men thanks to bipartisan, 91-6 vote on a bill I’ve worked on over the past 18 months. Big credit goes to Del. Josh Thomas and I could not be more proud and excited for my state and the work we’ve done!

The nation is watching this exciting work and over the p…

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I take issue with Pamela Paul’s What Will Happen When All the Male Therapists Are Gone?, as like every other discussion on this topic I’ve read, she suffers from a giant blind spot:

Therapy is treated as an unquestioned social good, despite evidence that it is most often only modestly effective and frequently leaves clients worse off.

It is absolutely true that rates of male suicide are growing and outpace that of women. This is an alarming issue that requires attention.

Paul is of course correct in that psychotherapy is grossly dominated by women — both clinicians and researchers. Yet despite its status in the zeitgeist as a silver bullet for nearly any form of emotional discomfort, there is growing evidence th…

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In recent months my algorithm has been serving up lots of content about the fact that men and women are physically, sexually and emotionally violent in nearly equal measures, but it is this week’s headlines about reality TV star Taylor Frankie being charged with assault and domestic violence that tipped this understanding into the zeitgeist.

While mainstream feminists have long weaponised the public assumption that men are more violent than women, I maintain that it is a very feminist stance to accept that women are full people capable of the entire spectrum of human emotion and action — not docile, impotent victims requiring special protections.

An excerpt of 2024 book, The 50/50 Solution: The Surprisingly Simple Choice that Makes Moms, Dads, and Kids Happier and Healthier after a Split (SOURCEBOOKS) that sheds some light on this issue, especially how it …

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Yesterday Virginia Delegate Josh Thomas (D21) introduced HB1188, which:

Establishes the Virginia Boys and Men Advisory Commission as an advisory commission in the legislative branch of state government for the purpose of advising the General Assembly on the following, specifically as they concern males in the Commonwealth:

• Education inequity

• Economic opportunities

• Health outcomes

• Social media ues

HB1188 is written to be enacted this year, which will make it the first such legislatively created body in the United States.

The effort was first announced at an October event by House Speaker Don Scott, Thomas, Sen. Lamont Bagby (Senate Patron and party chair) Sen. Lashrecse Aird and Del. Michael Feggans, an event that attracted attention from national media including a Scott Galloway podcast, ABC News and American Institute for Boys and Men founder Richard Reeves.

Read the whole HB8811 announcement…

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My kids are aged 15 and 17 — 10th and 12th graders — and I cannot tell you how welcome and necessary this cultural lightning bolt is, especially for upper-middle-class, white, educated parents like me who are especially guilty of perpetuating and benefiting from this crisis. I find this enormously, orgasmically freeing — like popping a pimple of pent-up insanity that is now proving, finally, to have net negative outcomes for kids, schools, communities, parents and the adults those children will become. Gender equality also stands to benefit.

So many of us have bought into the assumption that it is our right and duty to leverage everything in our power from before birth to ensure our children were on a path for maximum development of frontal lobes, elementary school resumes and sports/music/math skills with the singular end-goal of entrance into the best possible un…

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It has also been featured in dozens of media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Slate and in a presentation before a Scottish Parliament group.

Now you can get The 50/50 Solution in your ears via audiobook!

More about the book and media appearances:

How to support the book:

1. Buy it, silly!

2. Tell your friends (forward this email!)

3. Share on Twitter, Facebook, Substack, LinkedIn!

4. Leave a review. Bumps it up in the algorithm and drowns out the trolls. Plus, nice reviews make me feel good!

Excerpt of The 50/50 Solution:

FAQs about 50/50 Parenting

When I talk about 50/50 parenting, I get a lot of “Yeah, buts” related to specific situations. Here are my answers to the most common questions about equal parenting. Maybe they speak to your concerns, or you may use this lang…

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VCU’s support services for men, however, resemble a women’s studies course more than behavioral health care. It’s a case study in how men’s health is routinely dismissed—and a glimpse into why men’s college enrollment has trailed women’s by double digits for four decades.

VCU counseling and identities

On its counseling services website is a Student Resources page listing 16 “identities” that link to resources for various groups. These include students who are veterans, Asian, first-generation, neurodivergent, parents, etc.

Each resource page lists services for struggling students who identify with that label. For example, under the Black and African American tab, VCU students will find counseling services specifically tailored to Black clients. Disabled students will find links to the school’s accessibility office and the campus Association of Students with Disabi…

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In this monthly roundup of equal parenting news:

• Announcing: Virginia Commission for Boys and Men & Coalition

• New Danish data challenges assumption that unfair divorce leads to suicide

• Data-devoid WSJ article on 50/50 presumptions a relic of yesteryear

• Action items for Canadians

• 50/50 mentions in the wild

• 50/50 celebrities

Virginia Advisory Commission for Men and Boys announced

The big news!

I’ve been lending a hand to this very exciting effort of Democrats aim to create nation’s first legislative committee to address issues affecting males, including health, education, workforce development and family.

The effort was announced this week at a press conference lead by our Commonwealth’s House Speaker Don Scott, Democrat Party Chair Sen. Lamont Bagby, Del. Josh Thomas and others. Very hopeful signs this bill will be passed in 2026.

Awesome coverage from Associated Press, Richmond Times-Dispatch, ABC News:

Read more

I am very proud to have been part of the effort.

More details, media coverage and next steps:

Virginia Coalition for Boys and Men

Virginia Advisory Commission for Men and Boys announced

Yesterday Virginia Democrats announced an effort to create a legislative advisory committee for men and boys — the first ever in the country…

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8 months ago · Emma Johnson

In parallel, we’re building Virginia Coalition for Boys and Men, a bipartisan, multi-discipline force working together to:

• Public-facing force to raise awareness of men and boy issues in Virginia

• Advise lawmakers with data-based recommendations

• Collaborate on research, media messaging and effective advocacy

• Build on the nationwide network of nonprofits, businesses, education, government and academics focused on serving boys and men

Please sign up there to get updates about this and other efforts in Virginia.

Know anyone in Virginia working on issues of specific concern to males, please introduce us.

Exciting times for all the work…

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Data from a new study suggests the answer is no.

A new study found that single dads in Denmark have a markedly higher risk of early death from addiction, suicide and lung cancer.

This new information challenges the 50/50 parenting advocates’ assertion that unequal, sexist divorce laws rob men of their children and drive single dads to suicide. Here we see Danish single dads are among the most likely in the world have equal time with their kids and are still dying deaths of despair at rates much higher than that of single moms or married men.1

Writes journalist Stephanie H. Murray on Family Stuff:

Denmark is an interesting place to study the connection between family structure and parental health because it has the highest share of single parent households in Europe, and one of the lowest rates of single parent poverty among OECD countries.

For clarity, the authors distinguish between partnered parents (who never experienced single parenthood), …

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50/50 schedules when parents live apart is not just good for kids — it also closes gender pay and care gaps, not only for families who practice it, but society at large, studies find.

Old news: 50/50 parenting is good for kids

For decades, social scientists have studied various parenting schedules, and the evidence is compelling: Academic, social, emotional and dozens of other outcomes in children improve the closer the schedule is to a 50/50 split — when a child’s time is shared equally between mom and dad’s homes. Researchers know that schedule increases the likelihood of meaningful father involvement, lessens the children’s anxiety that they might lose contact with one parent (which is likely when the schedule is uneven), and increases the family, social and financial resources that come with having two meaningfully involved parents.

The science is robust: A 2023 meta-analysis of thirty-nine studies published between 2010 and 2022, with a …

Read more

Summary

The the article story is a smash-up of anecdotes from dads who wanted more time with their kids and women who claim they were abused by their husbands and won’t divorce for fear of having to co-parent with a violent man. The article contains no data on family violence trends in Kentucky or elsewhere but relies on unsubstantiated anecdotes. Long-term child outcomes are not considered, but divorce rates are feature prominently even though 43% of Kentucky children are born to unmarried parents.

The article ultimately advances the cause by failing to substantiate concerns about equal parenting presumptions and providing a platform for hundreds of comments that overwhelmingly support 50/50 presumptions.

Full disclosure of my biases here.

• The WSJ article was wr…

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In this monthly roundup of equal parenting news:

• The world is organically barreling towards 50/50 parenting. Are laws relevant?

• Male teacher shortage, a vision

• Would birth rates improve if divorce were fairer to men?

• Shoutouts re: gender equality advocacy

• Research news

  

Is the 50/50 movement obsolete?

Despite millions of dollars of research on how equal parenting schedules affect children, men, women and violence, and thousands of activists working to change laws, I don’t know anyone actively asking the questions:

How many separated parents share parenting time equally?

What is the time-sharing assumption for parents separating today?

In this post, I challenge my colleagues narrowly focused on law change. Evidence shows that in large swaths of the United States, judges, lawyers and everyday people adhere to a cultural presumption of 50/50 schedules when parents split. Why is the movement’s narrative stuck in the 1980s?

How can we study the giant shift…

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Hang out on social media channels devoted to equal parenting activism, you would believe the majority of separated families are lawyered-up, alienating sociopaths at brutal war with benevolent exes, at the mercy of sexist, greedy judges. The answer, they believe, is to pass laws to guarantee a equal parenting presumption.

Meanwhile, there are large and growing swaths of the United States where 50/50 is the norm. In fact, sharing parenting time is so common in many places, parents there erroneously believe it 50/50 is the law in their state. Everyone just sharing parenting time equally, they post on social media and email me directly. They stay out of court, not even entertaining fighting for more parenting time. This is said with a shrug.

This is great news for the equal-parenting movement, right? If goal is the majority of parents sharing time equally when they don’t live together, we have either won or are close to winning.

Despite millions of dollars of research on how equal parenting schedules affect children, men, women and violence, and thousands of activists working to change laws, I don’t know anyone actively asking the questions:

How many separated parents share parenting time equally?

What is the time-sharing assumption for parents separating today?

In this post, I unpack:

Why we need to study actual 50/50 trends
5 years ago 15% of single parents did 50/50 (maybe)
50/50 is snowballing
How social norms change (25% is the magic number)
Why is 50/50 activism stuck in the past?
Alternatives to 50/50 laws
Equal parenting movement’s legacy
Poll: How many people do 50/50?

Why we need to study actual 50/50 trends

There are 11 million U.S. families with 24 million children in which parents live apart. The work we do is hugely important. It impacts those kids, parents, their grandparents, friends, communities today and for generations to come.

Arguably, everyone in the world is impacted by the equal parenting movement. Norms we help create today inform how people form families, procreate, date, marry.

We need to take this very seriously, be strategic, and data-driven.

I am often asked to advise on equal parenting bills. I share this advice that I have gleaned from testing countless messages to convince everyday people to adopt a 50/50 schedule:

50/50 schedules are now the norm in many places and will be everywhere very soon. If you don’t get on board, you will be a relic — and your state will be behind the rest of the country.

If we can quantify this and take it to lawmakers, the results could be powerful. No one wants be a legislative dork.

But, more importantly, if those with the resources — time, money, will — divert said resources away from due process and understand what is happening organically on the ground, in our communities, we will find opportunities to amplify that success. These might include social programs, judicial reform, public education — as I elaborate below.

5 years ago 15% of single parents did 50/50 (maybe)

Until the past few years, all the research on child outcomes in various family structures measured “shared parenting” in which kids spent a minimum of 30% of time with each parent, and primary custody, in which a kid spent less than that sum with a parent.

There simply weren’t enough families who shared parenting time 50/50 to measure it.

Today, that is different, and we do have dozens of studies that measure effects of 50/50 vs other schedules.

We do have a hint of how many U.S. separated families have equal parenting schedules:

About five years ago, as part of a doctoral thesis, equal parenting activist Casey Sowers surveyed more than 5,000 separated families nationwide and found that about 15 percent said their kids split their time between households 50/50.

Also five years ago I surveyed 2,270 single moms and 13 percent said they had 50/50 time-sharing arrangements.

There is no U.S. government data collected about how separated parents share time (in fact, that population is measured by zero-sum Census data, which erases 80% of separated dads, even though most either have a lot or some time with their kids — or want to). Courts do not track or report time-sharing orders. An estimated 97% of custody arrangements are decided outside court.

More of me on this topic at the 2025 Conference on Equal Shared Parenting in Lisbon:

50/50 is snowballing

Again, these polls are from a half-decade ago. The world is dramatically different today, technology transforms the world at ever-accelerating rates, and the positive change in custody trends is snowballing.

Each week my Google alerts blow up with mentions of celebrities with 50/50 schedules, single moms are aggressively forgoing child support to facilitate co-parenting, and mainstream mom blogs celebrate equal parenting after divorce. Taylor, the recently divorced star of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives pushed back on her own mother’s criticism for not having primary time with her kids. “Yeah, I do 50/50 like divorced people do,” she snapped. Duh.

In Canada, a recent article about family law noted: "Many divorced or separated parents are surprised to learn there is no presumption of equal parenting time in Canadian law."

I have been astonished by how quickly this change has taken hold.

When I was navigating my own separation in 2010-2012, not one single lawyer or judge in New York City where I lived mentioned a 50/50 schedule. I did not know one family in the whole world who had such an arrangement.

Fast forward to 2021 and I was invited to speak to a group of Manhattan matrimonial attorneys (a.k.a. family lawyers) to share my pitch for 50/50 presumptions. The group of was polite and asked a few questions, but they all agreed there was no need to convince them. “All the judges here are on the same page: ‘The schedule is 50/50 unless you convince me otherwise,’” they told me. “That is what we advise our clients.”

New York is not one of the six U.S. states with a rebuttable presumption of equal time sharing on its books, but within a mere decade, I observed that 50/50 went from near-zero part of family law culture to the assumption.

But … just how many separated families in New York City or New York State have 50/50 parenting schedules? How many came to that agreement on their own? Under the advice of an attorney? Ordered by a judge?

We have zero idea. No one is tracking or studying this.

This recent tweet sums up how quickly single-parent norms changed within a couple short generations, and everyone is struggling to keep up:

In summary:

1. Mass divorce in the 70s and 80s largely erased or demoted fathers in their children’s’ lives.
2. That generation vowed to do better.
3. Meanwhile, mass social change has been afoot recognizing the importance of gender equality of all, including for men.
4. Messaging about deadbeat or MIA dads and alienating moms read as out-of-touch as this is a diminishing norm.

More evidence from Reddit that 50/50 may be nearing or at a tipping point:

How social norms change (25% is the magic number)

There are countless ways social norms have changed for the better without the passing of laws. Examples:

Smoking in public. Public health campaigns, media coverage, and shifting cultural attitudes stigmatized smoking long before laws banned it everywhere.

Seatbelt use. Safety campaigns and public awareness shifted behavior even when enforcement was lax.

Gay rights. Public attitudes about queer people shifted towards general acceptance in the 1990s and 2000s thanks to media representation, public advocacy, and personal exposure long before same-sex marriage was constitutionalized in 2015.

Recycling. Everyday household recycling was normalized thanks to environmental messaging and public school education before municipal recycling laws were passed.

Of course social changes have happened without laws for the duration of the species’ existence. How can we use the wisdom of millennia of human experience and 100 years of social science to change social norms?

A good start is research on the science of change of Damon Centola, University of Pennsylvania professor whose book Change, How to Make Big Things Happen is based on his 2018 research that found that 25% is the tipping point at which fringe ideas become mainstream.

This Hidden Brain podcast episode is a good summary of the science of change:

So, if five years ago 15% of separated families practiced 50/50, how close are we to the point where this takes off on its own without effort?

Maybe, but we need to study it to understand it.

Why is 50/50 activism stuck in the past?

So, what is the story? Why aren’t we more successful?

Activists are stuck in their past

While I may be a subject matter expert and have the benefit of millions of annual data points from my social media platforms (primarily my content site, wealthysinglemommy.com, I am removed from the personal experience that brought me into this work. I don’t have much in common with most separated parents as I once did — certainly not moms and dads currently navigating the establishment of a custody schedule which is the prime opportunity to change that family’s lives — and influence everyone around them.

My experience was a long time ago, and in an era very different than today’s norms. My personal point of view is dated.

I am 48 and divorced 15 years ago.

I’m also white, educated and affluent. The highest percentages of separated parents are low-income people of color. The average age children’s parents divorce is 4 to 6 (depending on whether the parents were married or not) — making those parents on average much younger than I am now.

Worst part? I am one of the youngest voices in the movement. There are very, very few people of color enrolled in our efforts.

That is really, really important. Personal connection with the zeitgeist informs us what the issues are, helps us design programs to address change, talk the talk of the people who we aim to serve.

Instead, like many movements, many of us are overly informed by our own personal experience, and others in the movement who look like us. You had a really unfair divorce 20 years ago. But divorce courts are very different today — have you updated your narrative? An echo chamber is not productive — and can be dangerous.

The fact that the movement is so lacking in young parents tells me two things:

1. Our organizations and efforts don’t resonate with newly separated parents.

2. Young parents don’t see the need for the services we’re offering.

I see young single parents’ take on their own, less organized forms of activism: Forgoing child support, encouraging each other in co-parenting, taking to social media to challenge assumptions about Black fatherhood and more.

Co-parenting equally is arguably the most powerful form of 50/50 activism. Everyday people living 50/50 creates social norms and changes the fabrics of society.

Join me in amplifying these voices and experiences.

We’re obsessed with changing the law—and we’re really bad at it

Is the goal to get credit for passing laws, or is the goal to ensure the maximum number of kids grow up with both parents equally involved?

While 50/50 parenting is clearly sweeping the nation, there are certainly pockets — still the majority — where courts presume primary care with mothers, family court conflict is high and parents are frequently separated from their children based on false allegations.

The answer, activists in the equal-parenting community say, is law reform.

In fact, they have been saying the exact same thing for 50 years. Almost all of the activism to make 50/50 schedules a rebuttable presumption have been focused on changing laws and academic research. The former has a long way to go, while the latter is robust but poorly publicised.

After 50 years of U.S. equal parenting activism, there are six states with equal parenting laws on their books: Arizona, Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri and Florida.

To be totally fair and appreciative: Activists have been successful in removing from state law nearly all the blatantly sexist language preferring women as primary caregivers.

A presumption of joint, equal legal custody has been the norm for decades.

Child support calculators are increasingly less punitive and fairer.

More public and private programs have arisen that focus on fatherhood as a priority, relieve child support arrears, and support dads being in their kids’ lives.

All this is important. But laws do not automatically equal actual change.

Take for example, Denmark where equal parenting time is presumed when parents separate, even though there are no equal parenting laws on their books. Also, let’s examine Arkansas which passed a very good equal parenting presumption law in 2013, which judges collectively overruled, until another, stronger bill was passed into law in 2021.

By most measures Kentucky has been a resounding success after passing a great equal parenting presumption law in 2017, with documented drops in both family court filings and related domestic violence allegations. However, recently a Kentucky mom commented on our Facebook page that most separated people she knows in her state do not actually share parenting time 50/50.

Again, no one is studying actual human habits, just focusing on the passing of a law.

Again, is the goal to get credit for passing laws, or is the goal to ensure the maximum number of kids grow up with both parents equally involved?

Alternatives to 50/50 laws

Law change is enticing for activists. After all, it is a public endeavor. Your horrible ex can see you on TV, your side of the story validated by the world. A powerful legislator might sympathize with your plight. There is a right and there is a wrong. We all have egos.

Social activism is far less glamorous. It happens behind the scenes. No one gets credit.

However, there are myriad powerful examples of how co-parenting culture was changed intentionally without any laws at all.

It is amazing what we can accomplish when you don’t care who gets credit.

Educate the judiciary

For years Arizona State University child psychologist William Fabricius educated court employees in his state about the benefits of equal parenting time. By the time activists proposed a 50/50 law in 2012, Arizona lawyers and judges had already adopted equal parenting schedules the norm. The bill sailed through, formalizing what was already commonplace.

How can we replicate Fabricius’s success?

A personal experience: a few years ago, I was invited to give a continuing education session to the local bar association in rural Pike County, Pa., by a friend who is a practicing lawyer there. “Yeah, judges and lawyers around here still mostly give the mom the majority of parenting time, but what you’re saying makes total sense,” he said when I told him about my work.

There were about a dozen of us in a room at the county courthouse, including lawyers and a custody magistrate who worked closely with the judges. My focus was on the benefits of equal time for kids, of course, but we also spent a lot of time discussing why shared parenting is good for women and gender equality and for stemming the male crisis. I told them that equal parenting is quickly becoming the norm and that everyone in that room really needed to get on board, like it or not.

A couple years later, I caught up with my friend, who confirmed that at least one judge in that county now strongly defers to a 50/50 parenting schedule when custody is in debate—a shift that has dramatically affected the counsel he and other local lawyers give clients. “We tell them that the judge works from a presumption of 50/50, so unless there is real abuse or a serious scheduling issue, they should work it out with the other parent. Usually, they do,” he told me. “The notion that the child benefits from permanence in one home has been dispelled.”

Hitch 50/50 co-parenting to larger trends

Younger men, women, and families inherently understand the benefits of equal parenting. After all, parents minor kids are now the product of a society that has struggled through at least three generations of mainstream divorce. We have a pretty good idea of what we want and what we don’t, and what we want is to avoid the fighting, missing our dads, and broke moms of our own childhoods. Even when people aim for a two-parent, heteronormative, married, and cohabiting home, it still looks very different than just one generation ago. Mainstream media is obsessed with dissecting gender norms for married parents.

Fifty-fifty parenting also aligns with other larger social trends at play: gender equality, family equality, love, and an inherent sense that kids and parents simply belong together.

For example, nearly all adoptions in the United States are open adoptions, keeping kids at least somewhat connected to their biological families—and those families connected to their children—to the benefit of all involved, studies find. Similarly, foster care today focuses on keeping kids with parents or relatives opposed to permanent placement with foster parents or in group homes.

Collectively, we agree that children and parents should not be separated at national borders (67% of all Americans find the practice unacceptable). The huge surge in popularity of genetics networks like 23andme.com and Ancestry.com has connected millions of biological relatives who yearned to know the deep tentacles of their family of origin. And finally the work of Richard Reeves and his American Institute for Men and Boys has unleashed a pent-up swell of attention for male struggles.

50/50 parenting fits naturally into a growing collective acceptance that genetic connection is primal, that male and female parents have equal responsibilities and rights and children benefit from both male and female parents.

Let’s be a thoughtful, productive part of these conversations that dominate much of our media and thoughtful conversations.

Everyday 50/50 conversations

I’ve learned that when you lay out the arguments in neutral, fair terms, skip your own sad story, and cite the research, 50/50 parenting is an easy sell. For example, my friend Hanna has heard me talk about my shared parenting work for years and had adopted my stance through osmosis. Recently, she told me about counseling a friend who was going through divorce:

Everyone around her—her mom and sister, her friends, her lawyer—all urged her to really take this guy down, get as much money as she could, and get the kids most of the time. He’d cheated, and everyone wanted to support her. And that meant to make him pay.

I told her, “Look, I know he’s a shitty husband, but you always say what a good dad he is. Why don’t you just do 50/50? I know you can’t see it now, but you’re going to want to date, and you need to get back to work now.” She ultimately agreed to a 50/50 schedule. That was a couple years ago.

She recently told me, “I’d never considered 50/50, and everyone but you encouraged me to do the opposite. Now, I can’t imagine parenting any other way.”

Rewriting the 50/50 parenting movement’s legacy

When, in 2020, I began my journey to focus on 50/50 parenting advocacy, I spent a lot of hours speaking with activists and academics and listening to the experiences of hundreds of moms, dads, and adult children contending with unfair and painful parenting situations. The more I learned, the harder it was to believe 50/50 was not widely accepted and enforced.

In addition to the heaps of research and common sense, the game of passing an equal-parenting law seemed to be ours to lose: National Parents Organization polls across genders, races, political beliefs, and geographic areas have found that more than 80 percent of those surveyed believe it is not only in a kid’s best interest to spend maximum time with each parent but they’d vote for a political candidate who supports equal parenting. How could we not pass more laws?!

What I found in these conversations was that for the more than 50 years since divorce became mainstream, mostly white, mostly politically conservative men worked to do away with sexist family laws and replace them with laws promoting a presumption of equal parenting time and fairer child support calculators. If you ask these activists today how the issue looks, most will decry a persistently unjust system that robs children of their fathers and punishes men. They blame greedy lawyers, corrupt politicians and judges, malicious women, and an absurdly woke culture that ignores facts in lieu of a dogma of female victimhood. Feminism is a leading enemy.

This angry rhetoric has tainted the movement. The anger and narrow demographic has certainly repelled many thoughtful people who could have been our allies. Very often when I talk about equal parenting, the very first response I get, even in casual conversations with strangers, is “Isn’t that the work of the men’s rights movement? Those guys who use the courts to abuse women?” Noses scrunch and mouths frown.

On one hand, I get the disgust. Attend a state legislative hearing about any family law matter and you will hear blathering testimony from belligerent parents. This is understandable, given the trauma of losing your children, yet plays poorly in the public theater. There is a dire lack of humility to acknowledge the skill and resources needed to get laws passed (lobbying and PR are bazillion-dollar-per-year industries populated by skilled experts, not DIY projects, guys!).

These activists are also usually tone-deaf to the fact that for the past twenty-plus years, media, politics, and our culture has clamored to—largely successfully—equalize the economics of gender in favor of women and racial minorities. White guys screaming about their victimhood simply has not played well before a state legislative hearing, no matter how right they may be. And speaking of victimhood, most of us are adults and realize that when it comes to personal relationships, there are at least two sides to every story. A public rambling narrative about how your ex did you wrong begs more questions about your role in the matter than it automatically damns the other party.

Such ham-fisted tactics only give megaphones to the powerful domestic violence activists and deep-pocketed bar associations who routinely oppose such laws with horror stories and misquoted studies—and win.

Time and again, they win and we lose.

It is time to turn this around. Let’s create a new legacy — one in which we do not amplify our suffering, but shine a light on the very beautiful, positive stories about whole communities where parents, lawyers and judges have organically moved to promote equality, good parenting and common sense. With these everyday normal parents no longer clogging the courts, struggling families can now be better served. These families are now the exception, and no longer the mainstay of our movement’s narrative.

But to tell that story we need the facts.

Poll: How many people do 50/50?

Let’s also get a taste of what you see in your community. Please take this poll:

What is the most common schedule in your community when parents separate TODAY?

A glimmer of hope!

National Parents Organization’s president Don Hubin agreed to include in a survey they often employ to include a question about citizens’ assumptions about parenting time when parents split up today. Thank you, NPO!

The debate arose between Jessica Grose, a New York Times columnist, and Richard Reeves, a leading men-and-boys advocate who wrote Of Boys and Men. Their back-and-forth centers on whether male teachers benefit boys — and if we should care.

Both miss the bigger picture: We need more male teachers from early childhood through high school for two reasons:

1. Everyone, including men, benefit when males are embraced and supported in caretaking and leadership of young people.

2. This is because men bring unique qualities to the world — including the classroom. Equality contributes to better outcomes far beyond grades.

• Background: Is the male teacher shortage real?

• Everyone wins with teacher gender equality

• More male teachers = improved U.S. education

• More male teachers = gender equality

• Solutions for increasing male teacher rates

  • Study male educators

  • Rebrand e…

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