Is the 50/50 movement obsolete?

Social evolution is changing norms faster than activists can change laws

Excerpted and adapted from The 50/50 Solution: The Surprisingly Simple Choice that Makes Moms, Dads, and Kids Happier and Healthier after a Split (Sourcebooks)

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?

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?

Photo by Brayden Prato on Unsplash

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), and courts do not track or report time-sharing orders. An estimated 97% of custody arrangements are decided outside court.

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. 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:

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!