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The 50/50 Solution: The Surprisingly Simple Choice that Makes Moms, Dads, and Kids Happier and Healthier after a Split (SOURCEBOOKS) hit Amazon bestseller lists and won a National Parents Organization research award.
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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 language to speak with others about the value of 50/50 parenting time.
Shouldn’t the child spend more time with the better parent?
Children are not entitled to “good” parents. They are entitled to safety, love, and the parents they have. There is no evidence that more time with one parent, even if it can be determined that person is an objectively better parent, benefits the child or even influences the child more. However, there is evidence that equal parenting schedules benefit children.
Our current system is rooted in incentivizing parents to duke it out and prove they are the “better” parent—which leads to much trauma, expense, and undue drama for the whole family, while there is no evidence that lopsided schedules benefit anyone.
After all, think back to your own childhood and what memories, people, experiences changed your life most. Were those influences correlated with sheer hours of time?
Today, my teenage daughter probably spends an hour per day with me but many more with her friends at school and hanging out. I may believe I am a better influence than those friends, but that doesn’t mean that those hour calculations should be reversed, and a fifteen-year-old should spend ten hours daily with her mom. That would be bananas. Instead, I accept that my child is not mine to control in that way. She is her own person entitled to many influences and experiences. All I can do is my best to influence her, give her a good home, some guidance, love, a vegetable, and a stern word here and there, and hope for the best.
What about when he only wants equal time so he doesn’t have to pay as much child support? Or What if she’s advocating for equal parenting time only she will get more child support?
I am lumping these two common arguments against a presumption of equal parenting into one item, because the nut of them is the same, and I believe, based on my own anecdotal observations, both men and women leverage child custody in family and divorce court for their own financial benefit.
Our twenty-first-century family court system has put a financial price on children. As appalling as that may seem at first glance, children have long been considered chattel—boys were valuable for inheritance purposes (keeping land and wealth in the family) and as workers, girls for marrying off (and earning the family a dowry) and providing heirs—up until as recently as the twentieth century, when marriage for the first time became borne primarily out of love instead of economic survival. Child labor laws, a rise in the middle class, universal education, and other advancements meant that children became a protected class rather than a source of cheap labor or economic security by way of inheritance. It is only our modern notion that child-rearing is a spiritual endeavor, one designed to cultivate the miracle of life into the fullest expression of its magical self, that makes us bristle at the suggestion that children are financially valuable to their parents.
But they are.
Based on my numerous conversations with women who respond to my email newsletters and comment on my blog, many who are angling for more parenting time have higher child support and/or alimony as a significant motivator. I have sympathy for these women: this is the game they have been taught to play. It’s likely what their attorney, family, and friends urge them to do and what their own conceptions of life as a single mother make to seem inevitable. These are all very real and human feelings.
In some cases, having more custody means a mom can stay in the family home and not have to face the very terrifying prospect of getting a job or a better job or advancing her career enough to support herself without a spouse. It is hard to blame her for trying to maintain the status quo.
I also have sympathy for fathers who really don’t care to have their kids more than a few days per month but are financially strapped and argue for 50/50 time-sharing to reduce their child support obligations (but don’t have plans to actually show up 50 percent of the time).
If a dad chooses not to spend time with his kid, that is a symptom of the chronic sexism that has told men they are not important as fathers and that their presence in their child’s life is not meaningful. These are the men who were not engaged parents at any time of their child’s life. Perhaps they did not have a say in whether the child was brought to term or were never in a serious relationship with their kid’s mother or otherwise did not bond deeply with the child because of a lack of time, opportunity, or a trusting relationship with the mom.
It is easy to say that money doesn’t matter when it comes to the love you have for your child, but it matters enormously. For dads who struggle to pay child support—especially low-income men of color—back child support can mean loss of a driver’s license, garnished wages, and even jail time in some states. Barely getting by because of unaffordable child support means that you may not have stable housing or that you have to rely on gig work or other jobs that come with unstable and inconsistent hours—both of which are hugely detrimental to a regular custody schedule.
But the story is not just that girls won and boys lost. The story is complicated and nuanced. While men struggle to gain equity in private life, with equal access to their children and equal flexibility in carrying the burden of breadwinning and leading, women still struggle to close the damn pay gap.
As previously discussed, it’s not as simple as straight-up sexism that prevents the wage gap from closing. It’s also the giant discrepancy in parenting responsibility and the tough decisions that women make under the pressure or necessity to care for others.
The caretaking cleave that prevents the wage gap from closing can be fixed by equal caregiving by fathers—including single dads who never lived with their kids’ moms.
As such, it is time to dismiss any argument against a 50/50 parenting schedule under any premise of financial gain or loss. In 2023, men and women are capable of and have the opportunity to work and earn equally, given equal access to childcare. This is where equal rights and equal responsibility meet—with 50/50 shared parenting, both parents are now equally responsible for paying their own rent, securing childcare, and taking on the time, logistics, and emotional labor of child-rearing.
If I agree to an equal parenting schedule, I will receive less child support. What if I can’t afford that?
Child support is supposed to be for the children—not to subsidize your lifestyle. In reality, it doesn’t work that way, and even the best-intentioned father advocates, including researchers from the University of Colorado, authors of a 217-page report on the net result of child support, conclude that child support may have helped lift women and children out of poverty, but it drove hundreds of low-income dads into poverty.
Here’s a quote from that report:
Since its establishment in 1975, child support has achieved tremendous scale and accomplishment. In FY 2020, it served 13.8 million children and collected $34.9 billion. Child support payments are credited with raising 790,000 children and 593,000 adults out of poverty. Among poor custodial families who receive child support, it comprises 41 percent of income, and among deeply poor families, child support comprises 65 percent of family income.
However, the reduction in poverty for the one million recipients of child support has been coupled with the impoverishment of 200,000 low-income fathers and their new families due to the burden of paying child support to their prior families. One-fourth of noncustodial fathers are estimated to live in poverty, with an income of less than $12,760 for noncustodial fathers living alone.
When men go into child support debt, the results can be lost driver’s or professional licenses, which can hurt their ability to work (less money for you) or be involved with the kids. In some states, men can be sent to jail for unpaid support (less money for you) and come out with insurmountable debt (still less money for you). Plus, this money becomes a source of tension for you, for him, for your co-parenting relationship—and the kids suffer.
Child support debt has been shown to be an enormous stressor in men’s lives, and the elimination of the debt and its associated stress contributed to more work opportunities, improved credit scores, more secure housing status, and feelings of control over the finances. Men also reported improved relationships with their children, their co-parents, and the child support system.
A 2021 study found that fathers’ child support arrears but not other types of parental household debt are associated with worse socioemotional outcomes among children who do not live with their dads. I think the real question here is can you afford the costs of more child support?
Who pays when one parent can’t afford activities or a big bill?
Basics like health expenses, childcare, clothes, and school supplies should be split equally. After all, should one parent die or otherwise fall off the face of the earth (hypothetically), the remaining parent would face 100 percent of these expenses. Equal rights mean equal responsibility—including for basic financial obligations.
If parents disagree about expensive camps or music lessons, then the pro-expense parent should pay—especially if their income is greater. Many parents find a way to split these differences in an equitable way, with the higher-earning parent paying more, whether through their own negotiations or with the help of a therapist, mediator, or, worst-case scenario, a judge.
My kids’ dad refuses to do his share of the physical and logistical childcare, which costs me time away from my business. What can I do?
We are in the middle of a revolution, and things will not be equal today. Doing your best to model a better, fairer family by way of nudging your kids’ other parent to do the right thing and bringing up the issue in negotiations with attorneys and in front of court employees are tiny stitches in a larger tapestry of a better reality for everyone—moms, dads, and kids.
In the short term, I will share this strategy that a mom posted in my Facebook group. Frustrated during her marriage with the burden of taking on nearly all the scheduling and driving to school, activities, and doctor appointments for their four kids (two of them who had high medical needs), Carrie wrote into her divorce agreement a true 50/50 schedule and an even split in childcare costs, including this clause: “Each parent logs hours spent each year on transporting kids around, at $20 per hour. At the end of the year, the sum is tallied, and the difference is paid to the other parent. If the logistical labor is equal, no money changes hands.”
In the first year after Carrie’s divorce, the sum of the value of the hours she spent chauffeuring the kids was close to $1,000—a total that sent the dad reeling (even though he was only responsible for paying his share, which was $500). “He was so mad, accusing me of charging him to be a parent,” Carrie said. But he paid it.
The next year? He did his share of parenting, and they each spent the exact same number of hours driving the kids around town.
What if one parent has more money than the other? Shouldn’t the state aim to make the households equal?
It’s true that income disparity can breed resentment, bitterness, and jealousy between parents—not to mention a sense of entitlement. But there is no study that I know of that shows that equal home size or discretionary income has any effect on child well-being in separated families, as long as a child has a reasonably comfortable and safe place to sleep at both homes.
For low-income families, the answer to poverty is more government support, which, thankfully, is working. The answer is not strapping poor men with unreasonable child support payments.
For middle- and upper-class families, the idea that one parent owes the other support to equalize homes is simply sexist and keeps women locked into the dependent, caretaker role—the very essence of any financial gender gap.
The argument in favor of child support to equalize standards of living is moot, in part because people of all classes overwhelmingly date, marry, and have babies with people of similar education levels. Thankfully, the pay gap between spouses is fading. Also, more and more women are becoming their home’s breadwinner by way of true equality as well as the rise of single-parent households. While male doctors used to marry female nurses, today, doctors are more likely to marry other doctors (or similarly educated peers), nurses have children with nurses, retail workers couple with similar income partners, etc. The likelihood of a child growing up between two homes headed by parents with dramatically different earning potentials is slim.
One trend that bucks this fact is Black women, who tend to be higher educated and have higher incomes than their Black male peers. In 2015, the Brookings Institution reported 41 percent of white women had husbands who had similar educations, while only 32 percent of married Black women could say the same. About 48 percent of white women reported having husbands with lower education levels, while nearly 60 percent of Black women had married someone with less education under their belt. Brookings estimates these discrepancies could mean Black households earn about $25,000 less each year.
This discrepancy is important, as Black men face the biggest obstacles to work, earning, saving, and getting out of poverty than any other U.S. demographic yet face fallout from the broken child support system far more than any other part of our society. Nonetheless, as shown above, poor Black dads are eager to contribute financially to their kids, especially in ways outside the government’s child support system.
A focus on children and a sense of grace and kindness can go a long way—and often do. I have heard many stories of co-parents who, no matter how they did or do feel about one another, take turns caring for the kids—and sometimes the other parent—financially and logistically when one gets sick, loses a job, steps away to care for an ill parent, or is faced with other crises of life. One mom I know, Susan, divorced when her husband transitioned to being a woman, which was personally devastating for her but really struck the whole family in the heart when the now-female ex retreated from the children. Within a few years of the breakup, the ex was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Susan moved her back into her home to nurse her until her passing, which created space for some healing and forgiving moments for the whole family.
What if the dad has a big corporate job and travels all the time?
Why does the father get the freedom to squeeze his parenting duties around his career, presumptively leaving any of his unmet parenting responsibilities to the child’s mother?
It is often assumed more money makes for better parenting, especially for men whose value as a parent has been tied to breadwinning. This means that professional opportunities trump parenting responsibilities, and the parent with the higher income or more prestigious job is entitled to take opportunities that take them away from their children, because more money, the argument goes, is always more important than parenting time.
Throughout history and still today in many parts of the world, true financial necessity has required one or both parents to be away from their children. War, extreme weather, and dire economic hardship often leave relocation as one of the few options for survival. But for the most part, parents in the United States, Canada, and western Europe thankfully do not need to relocate to avoid starvation or violent death.
In the real world, life is not perfect. There are times when parents are deployed, have to travel extensively for work, or have another reason why they can only spend a minimal amount of time caring for their children. In a culture that defaults to 50/50 parenting, co-parenting relationships become more amicable, or at least functional, because they must continue to collaborate on their children’s upbringing. An equally shared responsibility facilitates more flexibility between mothers and fathers to equitably accommodate the needs of one another as well as their children and not view any request for flexibility as an opportunity to pounce on a costly and punitive legal battle to re-right the ship.
That said, a culture that presumes equal parenting time and equal parenting responsibility means there is an expectation that both parents have to build their lives around their children. In this example, we cannot assume that any one parent’s career must be worked around but rather that each parent is responsible for coordinating childcare or making professional and financial sacrifices in order to take responsibility for the kids. It becomes unacceptable for a dad to shrug his shoulders and dump the kids with his co-parent because he has to travel for work. He has to figure out who can care for them while he’s away or negotiate for a job with less required travel. Again, we are challenging these assumptions for the sake of all, including the gender norms that thus far have given men permission/pressured them to abandon their childcare responsibilities in the name of breadwinning.
What if one parent lives too far away to house the kids equally?
Why is it OK for one parent to move far from their parenting responsibilities? If I, as the primary, majority-time parent of my kids, picked up and moved out of the country, leaving them with a neighbor without making any arrangement, that would be considered child abandonment, and I would be criminally charged as such. We don’t charge fathers with abandonment when they move away from their children because, as a society, we don’t believe they are important as parents. However, we do believe they are financially responsible and are happy to send them to jail or face other legal penalties for not paying child support that they may or may not be able to afford.
I argue we change laws to make it unacceptable for parents to abandon their kids physically and help parents understand how valuable both of their regular, active involvement is to their children.
If this applies to you, please consider a way to live close enough to kids that they can spend equal time at your houses. Remember that the closer it is to 50/50, the better it is for kids. Yes, it would be inconvenient to move, but it’s also inconvenient to experience the outcomes that become statistically more likely to happen when kids aren’t parented equally. Even though culture does the most to reinforce a presumption of 50/50 parenting, it’s worth it to pass laws that require it so that kids don’t have to experience growing up without one of their parents when that parent is alive and well.
What if I want to move two hours away from my ex to live with my new husband/be near my parents?
If you’re planning on bringing the kids with you, you are kidnapping your children. That is illegal and unethical. If you’re planning to leave your kids with their other parent, you are abandoning your children. They need you. Please find a way to stay. It will be so worth it—now and in decades to come.
How is a man supposed to build a career if he has his kids 50 percent of the time?!
Mari, thirty-three, has two kids with two different men. One is in jail for embezzlement. The other lives in the town next to hers and sees their child occasionally despite a custody order that the visits amount to about 30 percent of the time and her urging for 50/50 time-sharing. Mari enjoys a close relationship with her siblings and their families and welcomes their support in caring for and loving her kids while she continues to grow her career in the construction industry, date, and generally have a full life. But she learned that even the most caring of loved ones can be unconsciously sexist.
One evening while enjoying a family dinner, Mari’s brother-in-law and sister asked her about her dating life. Mari shared some ups and downs and funny stories and then lamented, “It’s tough to find what I’m looking for, especially since I won’t get involved with a man unless he has a 50/50 custody schedule or at least has fought hard for one.”
The brother-in-law became incredulous. “That is unreasonable!” he said. “How can someone build a career and have to take care of his kids half the time?!”
“I didn’t even say anything,” Mari recalled later. “I just looked at him. You could see the cogs turning, looking at me with my kids 100 percent of the time, with 100 percent financial responsibility for them, and I am able to build my career, even though he knows it’s hard. I could see his attitude change right there in that minute.”
That is one of my favorite stories of all time, not only because it illustrates how powerful social change can and does happen organically, in everyday interactions between everyday citizens taking common yet radical action. But it also illustrates how we are all such complicated and nuanced people, each of us plagued by unconscious bigotry rooted in long-standing norms—without us even having a clue that their powerful presence holds all of us back. Here, the loving and supportive relative pooh-poohed equal parenting schedules because he couldn’t personally imagine succeeding professionally while also being so responsible for his kids—a notion informed by his assumption that it is a man’s job to be the breadwinner. A wonderful person with horrifying presumptions that were undone in one silent exchange.
This interaction is loaded with yet more layers.
In social justice movements, there is often expressed a mantra that for one unrepresented group to have more of the pie, others do not necessarily have to get less pie. In other words, there is no reason for privileged white people to fight against social programs that give people of color more access to good schools or good jobs because there is no threat to those white people’s schools or jobs.
Related to custody, in order for men to have more access to and more meaningful relationships with their children, mothers have to have less time with their children. Though—again!—less time with our kids does not mean we have less of a bond or less of a relationship with our children. And by some measures, a mother with more time to earn, relax, recharge, exercise, and enjoy the support of an equal parent is a better mom who is more emotionally and energetically available to her kids, not to mention has more for the other parts of her life. If we measure parenting and personal success only in hours, we limit ourselves. Taken holistically, sharing parenting time means more love, energy, and cooperation for everyone involved.
For women and men to work and earn and have public power in business, government, and our communities in equal measure, men must have less earning and less power. The pie simply is not infinite—at least in the short term. Eventually, it is possible, with equality at home, for men and women to occupy the public sphere in equal measure, as those jobs and admissions seats and public offices expand, just as has happened throughout modern history.
What if he doesn’t want to parent 50 percent of the time?
It is very true that many men do not want to parent any more than a minority number of hours each week, and their children often see it. Shared parenting activists bristle when I say this, but it is true, and I have seen it in people I know personally and from many, many moms, some of whom have asked judges to make him parent more. (A typical response from the judge is “I can’t make a person parent if they don’t want to,” to which millions of primary-time single moms silently scream, “No one asked me if I wanted to be a full-time single mom! Make him step up!”) This story is also one that is complicated and human and rooted in old, sexist models that linger on. After all, if men have been raised to understand that parenting is inferior women’s work and that their worth is as a breadwinner—and they feel they are mediocre parents at best—why would they step up into the role of equal parent? Especially if they are not experienced in daily parenting and they believe, like most people do, that kids fare best with but one primary parent?
I challenge my fellow activists to start implementing language into legislative bills to use the terms enjoyed in other countries: “equal care” and “equal responsibility” in addition to protections over time and rights.
I’m not used to having my kids half the time. They stress me out, and I don’t do everything as good as their mom. Can’t I let her take the lead on this?
Many men come to parenthood with the assumption that they are not the primary caregiver. This does not mean that they do not love their children, are not devoted to them, are a bad dad, or are a lousy person. This just means that these men are a product of our time—a human on a journey that was largely informed by a culture that tells all of us that mothers are the superior parent.
Whether you lived with or were married to your kids’ mom or are currently on an unequal parenting schedule, most dads spend minority time with their children, which makes it harder to parent when you do spend time with them. Kids are inherently stressful and often irritating. Little ones need constant attention, medium-sized ones are weird and can be hard to discipline and entertain, and the big ones can be moody, bratty, or worse. You love them, you’re committed to them, but they can suck.
On top of it, you may believe that their mom is a good parent and she has a better grip on the kids’ needs. She has all their schedules down pat, knows what foods they like and dislike, has the bedtime routine on lockdown, and has all the doctors/coaches/teachers/friends’ parents organized on her phone. Plus, when you were a couple, she may have let you know regularly that you weren’t doing it right. The criticisms were real, they hurt, and you likely accepted them as truth.
Now some advocates, your new girlfriend, a judge, or your own desire or even guilt is asking you to reconsider this every-other-weekend schedule. But can you handle it? Do you want it? Shouldn’t she just do it since she’s better at it? Wouldn’t that be better for the kids? Do you have to?
As for the notion that “you can’t make a person parent,” I argue that you absolutely can make a person parent. Many of us have taken on far, far more of the parenting duties than are fair or just or reasonable because the other parent refuses to do their share.
Here is what I want dads to know about equally shared parenting time.
In these pages, I have laid out how important it is for you to be not only involved but equally involved. Your child is entitled to a meaningful relationship with you, just as you are entitled to a meaningful relationship with them. Adherence to bedtime routine or deep connections to your kids’ friends are important but not as important as them knowing that you want to, can, and do show up equally.
Once you have the kids equal time and take on daily routines and school pickups and get to know their teachers and friends and classmates, all the parenting becomes easier. More time, especially more daily time, requires you establish routines—your own routine. Many dads report feeling more confident as a dad after their divorce. Without having to negotiate with or answer to their spouse, these men can step into being the dads they are capable of being. They also have to take responsibility for the inevitable parenting mistakes we all make. In other words, they grow and evolve and rise to the occasion.
I often remind my kids that parenting is the dumbest job in the world: you are handed this enormous responsibility of raising a human with zero qualifications or training, and as soon as you start to figure out one parenthood stage, you are faced with another. The only difference between men and women in this wacky endeavor is that one half of us grow up assuming we have the inherent ability to figure it all out, while the other half of the population is raised to think that they don’t.
It is your responsibility to care for your kids equally. Countless fathers around the globe are currently fighting to spend quality sums of time with their children but are denied this right because of vintage, sexist norms. Most of us agree that men and women should have equal rights to their children and have the right to spend equal time with them. With rights comes responsibility. A call for an equal parenting presumption is rooted in equal sums of equal rights and equal responsibility. In fact, in some parts of the world, family courts use terms like “care sharing” and “responsibility sharing” instead of the parenting rights-centric terms used in the United States: custody, parenting time, and visitation.
There is also a larger responsibility at play. By stepping into an equal parenting role, you are changing the world. Your kids will grow up to understand the importance of fathers and equality between men and women. People in your community will see you and understand that this parenting schedule is normal, possible, and positive. And you can do it by taking care of your kids with what will likely be just a couple more days each week.
When we were married, I did most of the parenting work, so I should be rewarded with more parenting time, right?
Parenting is not a community soccer league in which you put in hours and get a participation trophy. Parenting is hard and unfair and heartbreaking. It is also not about you. The research is there: parenting time split equally is what is best for children. While it can be a difficult transition from having your time and identity tied to being a mom and hard to see what life can be like for your whole family after this change, rest assured that an equal schedule is very much the place you want to land. Instead of fighting for more time in court or pushing back against a judge’s orders, save yourself the time, energy, and upset. Work on accepting that you are no longer the primary parent. You, your kids, and your kids’ other parent will be better for it.
When we were a couple, I was home more and spent more time with the kids. Wouldn’t a 50/50 schedule be too traumatic of a change?
To put into context why less time with you and more time with their dad in his house will not be a traumatic change, remember that childhood—like the rest of life—is full of transitions and changes, large and small. Tiny children in day care transition from one room and set of caretakers to another every morning and afternoon and continue to swap out classrooms and teachers every year for the rest of their educations. Families move, grandparents pass, pets die, and kids continue to thrive at every stage. Throughout history, the species has survived despite plague, war, natural disasters, mass rapes, and systematic abuse. Yet orphaned, abandoned, traumatized, and abused children did survive and ultimately thrive—usually because of some informal care from adults.
What empowers children to overcome hardship and heartbreak isn’t sleeping in the same bed every night; it’s having a safety net of loving adults to catch them. What could be more loving than having two equally involved parents—plus each parent’s network of family, neighbors, and friends?
Won’t my child feel rejected if we move from majority time with me to 50 percent with her dad?
I have heard this genuine concern from mothers many times. Worries in this vein include “Today, our custody agreement includes the kids staying with me the majority time. If I push for or even readily agree to 50/50, I worry my kids will feel like I’m pushing them away or otherwise rejecting them.” Or “All the other divorced families we know have an every-other-weekend schedule. Won’t my kids feel like I’m a bad mom who doesn’t want them as much as the other moms?”
A single-mom girlfriend and I were discussing my equal parenting advocacy work and her current time-sharing arrangement: her daughter stayed with her the majority of time, though she saw her dad frequently for overnights, both on weekends and during the week, as both parents lived in the same New York City neighborhood. My friend was sharing the typical struggles of parenting—she had little personal time, and she could use some extra hours to invest in her career, working out, and her new boyfriend. She knows me well enough that I didn’t even have to suggest an easy solution: encouraging or even demanding more parenting time with the girl’s father. Or really, in her case, allowing it, as her ex was pushing for just that.
“But won’t Celia feel like I’m rejecting her?” was her honest worry. “We’re so close. It’s been primarily the two of us for all of her twelve years.”
On a practical note, I pointed out that the girl already spent something like 40 percent of her time with her dad, and she and her ex had recently agreed that Celia would spend afternoons at her paternal grandmother’s home after school most days. Celia also spent lots of time with her maternal grandparents, often spending the night with them, as they lived in the same apartment building. I pointed out that Celia had an abundance of family love and care. And all the time she spent with other family members—including her dad—combined with the hours she spent at school and sports were far fewer than 50 percent of her waking hours with her mom. In other words, the girl already had close relationships and lots of time with other people other than her mom, so the risk of feeling rejected by her mother, while understandable, was not in play.
Those practical (math-based!) points punctured the presumptions about the superiority of maternal care, which landed with my friend. Soon after, she and her kid’s dad moved to a 50/50 schedule.
What will people think of me as a mother if I agree to give her up 50/50 of the time?
My friend Tyler, who lives in a rural town in Michigan, went through a very difficult custody battle with his son’s mother, even though they co-parented very amicably and equally for the first three years of the kid’s life. Then, when child support disagreements arose, Tyler found himself embroiled in a nasty family court battle in which he was accused of neglect and abuse. “One day after yet another family court appearance, I took my son’s mother aside and asked her what the heck this was really about,” he told me. “She said, ‘Don’t you see? What will people think about me as a mother if I don’t have him the majority of time?’”
While Tyler was shocked and you may be too, it is important to hear where this mother is coming from and how subjected to sexist norms she is. This mom, who clearly had proven her capacity to co-parent amicably with her son’s dad, found herself subject to the scrutiny of her community because she had challenged gender-typical norms by giving up mother-martyr status. Until it was too much and she acquiesced.
Many moms—single or otherwise—derive enormous pride from their role as mother. And most of us, no matter our marital status or parenting schedule, are proud of our kids and want the world to know about these miracles we helped to create, whether we can rightfully take credit for their accomplishments or not.
Depending on where you live, your family culture, where you worship, or any number of other pressures, a mother who willingly gives up a minute of time with her children is considered the lesser mother—a pressure men simply do not face. Yet. Despite all the progress we have made toward gender equality, we see these pressures express themselves in the helicopter parenting movement, in the pressure for mothers to homeschool their kids and of course to give up or downscale their careers—all in the name of spending more time with the damn kids. And I do say the damn kids because I know that the vast majority of you reading this find your kids exhausting, mind-numbing, and superbly annoying a lot of the time. Let us liberate each other from this pressure to derive our identities and cultural worth from a relentless activity that may not bring us much joy and cripples other parts of our lives: incessant parenting.
All the back-and-forth between homes is too much for kids.
First, it is nearly always annoying, if not really upsetting, for kids to go back and forth between parents’ homes. We can’t minimize that, but we can put it into perspective.
Second, a week-on, week-off schedule is far less chaotic than typical divorced family schedules. My kids go to their dad’s Friday after school, then my house the following Friday after school—just one switch per week. A typical every-other-weekend, Wednesday dinner requires far more switch-offs.
Here is the most traditional separated family schedule, with the number of back-and-forths, during a four-week period:
Week 1
Wednesday dinner with dad (pick up and drop off from mom’s house)
Friday pickup
Sunday drop-off
Week 2
Wednesday dinner with dad
Week 3
Wednesday dinner with dad (pick up and drop off from mom’s house)
Friday pickup
Sunday drop-off
Week 4
Wednesday dinner with dad (pick up and drop off from mom’s house)
Total handoffs: 12
Here is the most common 50/50 schedule, in which kids go to the other parent’s house after school Friday:
Week 1
Change house Friday
Week 2
Change house Friday
Week 3
Change house Friday
Week 4
Change house Friday
Total handoffs: 4
Winner? Math.
It is too hard on the kids. They don’t have a real home.
Kids may not feel like they can settle into one home when they share their time between two homes, and this can be hard. I worry about this for my kids and other kids, and here is where I land:
You can spend your whole childhood—heck, your whole life—in a place and never feel at home.
It is possible to feel at home in more than one house. People can feel at home in their own house plus that of a loving relative or a second, summer home. As an adult, you may feel at home in your primary home as well as your parents’ home.
When kids do feel unsettled by a weekly back-and-forth, that upset is less disruptive than the alternative: living primarily with one parent while losing the second one mostly or entirely.
There are many, many benefits to children who are raised in a separated family where care time and love are equal: the benefit of learning from two different ways of life, a larger orbit of friends, family, love, and family customs and traditions. I often think about how my own children benefit from having stepparents on both sides and their unique talents, love, and spheres. What better gift than to expose children to as many different ways to live? For example, at our house, we belong to a liberal church, and at their dad’s house, they do not attend church. However, my daughter sometimes attends a conservative church with her friends. As a parent, I hope to expose her to many different experiences so she can find her own meaningful path in life, and I welcome the different experiences she can only get outside one parent’s home.
It’s so hard to bring all the stuff back and forth. Doesn’t one primary home make it easier on kids?
It can be hard on kids to be living between two places, and the daily rhythm of life can get muddled when your viola or hockey gear or essay always seems to be at the other house. This is primarily about parents working together to come up with common-sense solutions.
Some practical advice on this topic includes acquiring multiples and duplicates of as many things as you can: diapers, pajamas, car seats, socks, underwear and clothes, electronics chargers, sports gear, and art and school supplies.
Another important part of easing this particular type of stress is for parents to live close to each other. This brings up big, ethical issues about parents’ rights to live where they want, pursue professional opportunities, and be near a new lover, but if we agree now that the priority is to successfully parent these shared kids, living as close together as possible (though on the same street may be asking too much for many exes!) is an incredible benefit to all parties involved. Not only are parents not spending so much time shuttling kids in the car but that inevitable last-minute exchange of the dress pants for the honors ceremony becomes less of a trigger, which reduces conflict with the co-parents and children alike. Life is just so much easier on all levels when you live within a walk or short bike or car ride.
The other important way co-parenting can reduce the everyday friction of raising kids between two homes is to reject current parenting trends.
First of all, I urge you to downgrade any economic expectations you may have had when parenting. The realities are that most people in the United States live with consumer debt while also housing far more items than they need or can even use, as evidenced by our overflowing landfills, the rise of Facebook Marketplace, and mini storage facilities mushrooming around the country. We shop too much, buy too much stuff, and cannot afford the stuff we buy. Divorced and separated families are poorer than other families. It is always more expensive to maintain two houses than one.
Be the change you want to see: buy your kids only what they need, and reject the urge to indulge them in new and fancy products—especially when kids are little and cycling through clothes and toys monthly.
Second, resist the pressure to helicopter parent, and lean into free-range parenting. My friend Lenore Skenazy has been working on this issue for fifteen years, wrote the book, hosted the TV show, and now runs the nonprofit Let Grow to promote more free play and more independence and help parents and educators understand that the world is safe to let our kids do what decades of social science and millennia of history have proven out: kids need independence, free play, and time away from adults in order to grow up healthy and well-rounded. They don’t need more stuff.
Though it is a wise and simple investment to duplicate items in order to minimize the stress of having something your kid needs at the other parents’ house, there’s a limit to everything. Better to buy four pairs of pants instead of two than to splurge on every high-tech gadget your kid could ever want.
This fits into an argument for equal parenting for separated moms and dads by first freeing us from the notion that kids need maximum time with their parents and also asserting that, starting at even age four or five, kids can become responsible for their belongings at each parent’s house, move between the homes alone to fetch a needed homework assignment (given they live within a reasonable walk or bike ride), and otherwise be empowered to be independent on these practical matters. This is good for the kids, good for co-parenting tensions, and good for parents!