Data-devoid WSJ article on 50/50 presumptions is a relic of yesteryear
Hundreds of comments in support of equality, dads and common sense carry the day
Friday the Wall Street Journal published Kentucky’s Equal-Custody Experiment: A law setting 50-50 shared custody as the state’s standard was hailed as a victory for fathers, but critics say it puts mothers and children at risk.
Summary
The Wall Street Journal 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.
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 written in a time machine dialed back 20+ years
After being interviewed by reporter Rachel Wolfe for an article now entitled Divorce Plunged in Kentucky. Equal Custody for Fathers Is a Big Reason Why, I worried the writing would be a vintage throwback overview of the issue, over-influenced by domestic violence advocates who traditionally opposed 50/50 parenting presumptions on the premise it endangers women and children. I was right.
The WSJ article on 50/50 parenting is just sexist
Ultimately, the comments on the article and social media vindicate this article’s shortcomings: Readers are overwhelmingly in favor of common sense, gender parity and recognizing the value for children of equal time, responsibility, care and yes, rights for and from from fathers and mothers.
That reader sentiment is so favors of equal parenting presumptions only highlights the blatantly sexist overtones of this article that paints men as violent and obsessed with their entitlements and women as unilateral, helpless victims.
Times have changed. This cartoonish caricature of genders is no longer acceptable to the masses — especially from a respectable newspaper.
Most of us understand that mothers commit more child abuse and there is a growing recognition of similar rates of male and female victims and perpetrators of intimate partner violence. Mothers — married, single, divorced — are uniformly begging for more equal caregiving and fathers are more involved in care work than ever before. Science — and human intuition — tells us time and again that mothers and fathers are equally important to child development.
The zeitgeist has matured from a second-wave feminist narrative (women are one-dimensional victims of the patriarchy!) that dominates this article. Now, thankfully, there is a robust movement afoot that recognizes the humanity, needs and struggles of men and boys. Fatherhood is essential to all of us — and we, the reading, voting, parenting public, get it.
“Father’s rights” and “custody” have not been mainstream terms for years
First, no one who seriously studies separated family policy or outcomes sees the issue through the lens of “father’s rights” vs domestic violence victims.
The most effective equal-parenting advocates do not prioritize father’s rights, including Matt Hale, my friend who is cited in the article as the lead in passing Kentucky’s equal parenting law along with National Parents Organization. Matt was raised without an involved dad and was motivated to advance his state’s laws after seeing how his own daughters benefited from a 50/50 schedule following his divorce — details left out of the Journal article.
Similarly, Dr. William Fabricius, the Arizona State University child psychologist instrumental in both producing foundational research on the subject and advocating for judicial change in his state, approaches his work solely as a child welfare matter, just as the majority of those who research the topic do. My work of course has historically highlighted the value that equal parenting has for gender employment and wealth gaps (which Wolfe did grant me a couple sentences). I can go on about how none of the active equal-parenting advocates or academics in the past decade have lead with arguments about father’s rights.
Yet Wolfe’s headlines and language throughout names equal parenting presumption as a “father’s rights” issue. She called out National Parents Organization’s former name — Father’s and Families — which was changed in 2012 and for which the only online record is Wikipedia.
This tells me Wolfe is so overly influenced by the domestic violence community who frequently frame the issue as a “father’s rights vs. family violence victim” binary that made its way to a WSJ.com homepage headline.
Another comment on vernacular: All headline versions for this article include “50/50 Custody.” This is confusing, inaccurate and dated.
Family law 101: Legal custody and physical custody must be established. A presumption of equal legal custody (for decisions related to health care, education, religion, etc.) has been law in nearly every for decades. This article is examining physical custody — how time between parents is shared.
“Custody” has not been used for years in relation to time-sharing. Criminals are in custody — not children. Parents, law and judicial systems have long used terms like parenting time, time-sharing, co-parenting time and infinite numbers of more precise vernacular in keeping with contemporary spirit of amicable co-parenting — which is the goal and increasingly, the norm.
This vocabulary lesson is not inside baseball. Half of U.S. families with children — tens of millions — navigate these waters and we are all familiar with the lingo, as are our friends, neighbors and and family. Getting the fundamentals wrong on such a mainstream topic destroys reader trust.
Kentucky is far from a 50/50 “experiment”
Thanks to the widespread practice of 50/50 parenting schedules and mushrooming body of research, the now-revised headline that Kentucky’s 50/50 law is an “experiment” chafes as sorely out-of-touch yet again.
Equal parenting for separated families has been growing organically throughout the United States and developed world for decades and has been the cultural norm in Arizona and northern Europe for 20 years. Six states have passed 50/50 rebuttable presumption laws in the past few years. Weekly headlines feature celebrity 50/50 parents. Five years ago I estimated that about 15% of U.S. parents who live separately shared time 50/50 — and that number is much higher today.
There are now scores of high-quality studies and meta research on equal parenting and effects on child outcomes, child abuse, intimate partner abuse, femicide and gender equality overall in communities (not just for separated parents — whole regions) where 50/50 schedules are presumed. No study has found that these laws lead to negative outcomes.
These articles were shared with the Journal and none of the research or sentiment contained therein made its way to the article:
Equal parenting means less family violence
Three decades of equal parenting research
Laws aside, parents choosing 50/50 parenting schedules is so common now that many assume rebuttable equal presumptions are the law in their state — or even nationally, as I detail in this post: Is the 50/50 movement obsolete?
Some comments on the WSJ post and related social media:
WSJ ignores domestic violence trends
The essence of this article asks the question: Do equal parenting presumptions hurt intimate partner violence victims?
I expected to read in this article substantiated claims of physical, emotional or sexual violence in a custody case that came with a judge’s orders requiring 50/50 timesharing. Abuse — whether substantiated, prosecuted, falsified — is always messy and nuanced and could have made for a compelling, complex discussion on parenting schedules and the laws that guide them. A fine writer could certainly poke and challenge one’s assumptions about safety, false allegations, uni- vs bilateral abuse, about the value of a deeply flawed parent in a child’s life, about mental health and forgiveness and redemption and healing and grace and the role the state has in shaping families.
These are forces at play in family law, all day, every day. The answers are rarely clear.
After all, today even substantiated family violence rarely means permanent zero-contact sole custody. It is prioritized to reunify abused foster children with parents. Typically, substantiated family violence for separated families means time with one parent is reduced. If a parent is safe to be alone for two weekends per month, how can we possibly argue they are not safe to parent 50% of the time?
As Kentucky law dictates, such scenarios are among the 17 exceptions to the 50/50 presumptions a court may consider. I anticipated a story unpacking scenarios questioning whether the law is operating as intended. Are judges following the law? Is law enforcement effectively addressing family violence? Are social services educating clients about the facts of the new, 50/50 law? Wolfe’s article did not address any of these questions.
Instead, Wolfe cites a handful of unsubstantiated anonymous anecdotes from domestic violence shelter directors and clients, and one named client who said she reported her ex’s abuse to police and family court, the latter of which ordered 50/50 timesharing. The article does not say whether there was any abuse after time-sharing was established.
Wolfe also relays mothers’ allegations of physical abuse of children, though it seems these were not reported to authorities — failures that that would make the mothers susceptible to neglect or abuse charges themselves.
“One mother who shares custody with her ex-husband said her son has returned to her with a dislocated shoulder and admits he doesn’t feel safe with his father. Both her son and daughter, she said, have recently come back distraught after their dad started throwing rocks at cats and wanted them to join in.”
How was the shoulder dislocated? Sports injury, bike accident or being beat up by the dad? If the latter, why weren’t protective services called? Was the kid taken to the doctor or hospital? Why didn’t doctors file abuse reports? The allegations of animal cruelty are alarming but unsubstantiated. Without validation one cannot argue to destroy a parent-child relationship. If a parent does not file a report because they do not trust law enforcement or CPS, that speaks to challenges with those agencies, not an equal parenting law.
I’m not the only one dismayed. Wall Street Journal readers begged for stats to quantify abuse allegation trends in relation to family court filings:
Good news is that we have such data — very fresh data, straight from the state of Kentucky. These were not mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article though I shared them with Wolfe and her editor:
Between 2010 and 2025, the number of domestic violence claims filed alongside family court filings fell by 80%, even as Kentucky’s population grew. But this is not the whole story. Rates of family court filings involving claims of violence picked fell faster in the years since the 50/50 law was enacted.
Before Kentucky’s equal parenting law was passed in 2017, family law cases co-filed with domestic violence cases fell an average of 5% each year. After the law was passed, those numbers have been falling by 16% each year, on average.
Those who observe these issues recognize these trends as good news: take the fight out of divorce and family law, family conflict dissipates and and false claims drop off.
Beyond Kentucky, studies point to 50/50 presumptions making people safer from intimate partner violence, femicide and child abuse, just as family and intimate partner violence rates have been dropping for years.
While Wolfe focused on the fact that divorce filings fell faster in Kentucky compared with the rest of the country after the 50/50 law was enacted, that does satisfy the question she set out to answer:
Is Kentucky safer or more dangerous after its 50/50 law passed?
Wolfe ends the piece with a cute quote from a kid who is happy about the “three Christmases” her divorced family affords her, and not going too long between seeing either parent. This is the first mention of the effects of 50/50 schedules on child well being. Yet another anecdote, unsubstantiated by data.
What the WSJ article got right
The best thing to come out of this exercise was the 600+ comments on the article, and many more on social media, that overwhelmingly echo what I have been seeing, anecdotally, for several years:
Equal parenting is past the tipping point.
The public gets it.
Common sense prevails.
Kids, moms, dads, gender equality and family safety win in the end.
Solutions for Kentucky and beyond
The challenge in fine-tuning 50/50 parenting presumptions is not in reversing the laws, but ensuring the domestic violence industry, courts and law enforcement understand the new laws and are serving victims. Some are concerned this is not happening, according to the article.
Let’s talk about it and do better.
I’m over here doing my best to bring media projects to market that shine light on the many positive aspects of equal parenting after separation, quantify the very real positive trends in the space and include people besides the white men who have indeed dominated the narrative. The vintage tone of this article proves we still have a lot of work to do and I want to call on others to join me to bring our work into the future.
Bias and background
I come to this post with my own bias and chip on my shoulder.
I have been a journalist for 25 years and interviewed probably thousands of people, written hundreds and hundreds of articles. I have also been interviewed hundreds of times as an expert and anecdote on myriad topics, mostly single parenthood. I am confident in what makes for good reporting and good writing and I know when an interviewer is not up for the job at hand.
I was interviewed by Wolfe, who seemed to have done no research on the topic when she called, kept interrupting as I answered her questions, and I strongly sensed had already come to conclusions about topics at hand and was just solicit quotes to plug into her narrative — which I called her out on. She said several times: “I agree that equal parenting is good 85% of the time, but I am worried about domestic violence victims” who don’t feel safe to divorce. I am not familiar with any research that finds equal parenting presumption outcomes positive 85% of the time.
When I challenged her assumptions about gender, divorce and violence, Wolfe said she was only writing about female violence victims because “women file for divorce 70% of the time.” I offered to send her studies on Spain and Arizona where 50/50 has been the rebuttable presumption for years and introduce her to experts in Virginia, Colorado, Canada. No, she said. She is only writing about Kentucky.
Astonished, after the call I immediately googled Wolfe’s name and this X thread by a frequent New Yorker contributor criticizing her competence and detailing his experience that largely mirrored mine.
I emailed her editor, Tammy Audi, to express concern about the above and that Wolfe’s LinkedIn profile includes domestic violence advocacy work — a clear conflict of interest that she did not disclose in the interview or article. Audi called the same day and we had a thoughtful conversation, and I felt Audi seriously considered my concerns and said she’d discuss Wolfe’s failure to disclose her domestic violence advocacy with the paper’s ombudsman.