A model for predicting court decisions on child custody

Awarding joint or sole custody is of crucial importance for the lives of both the child and the parents. This paper first models the factors explaining a court’s decision to grant child custody and later tests the predictive capacity of the proposed model. We conducted an empirical study using data from 1,884 court rulings, identifying and labeling factual elements, legal principles, and other relevant information. We developed a neural network model that includes eight factual findings, such as the relationship between the parents and their economic resources, the child’s opinion, and the psychological report on the type of custody. We performed a temporal validation using cases later in time than those in the training sample for prediction. Our system predicted the court’s decisions with an accuracy exceeding 85%. We obtained easy-to-apply decision rules with the decision tree technique. The paper contributes by identifying the factors that best predict joint custody, which is useful for parents, lawyers, and prosecutors. Parents would do well to know these findings before venturing into a courtroom.

Child Support in Shared Care Cases: Do Child Support Policies in Thirteen Countries Reflect Family Policy Models?

Increasingly, parents in separated families equally share care of their children post-separation. In this article we extend a well-known family policy model to generate hypotheses about the level of child support to be paid by separated parents when children live primarily with their mother (‘sole custody’) in contrast to when children spend equal time with both parents (‘shared care’). We test these hypotheses with data collected from thirteen countries. In sole custody cases, countries with an earner-carer policy model do have lower child support expectations than countries with a traditional family policy model or a market-oriented model, as predicted. Countries with a traditional family policy model do have the highest orders in the shared case, as predicted. However, there is as much variation within models as there is between, suggesting new analytic frameworks for considering child support in family policy need to be developed.

PEMENUHAN HAK ANAK DI INDONESIA MELALUI PERENCANAAN PENGASUHAN, PENGASUHAN TUNGGAL DAN PENGASUHAN BERSAMA

In many countries, joint custody has replaced and is considered better than sole custody. It is also deemed more in line with the gender equality principle which demands both parents to share responsibility for the custody and care of the child post-divorce. This article discusses how judges in divorce cases decide on child custody, and the extent to which they consider the merits of joint or sole custody and demand divorcees to consider making a parenting plan in the best interest of their children. Qualitative data is collected from the District Court and Religious Court at Semarang and by analysing 4 court decisions regarding child custody. Interestingly, none of the Courts above possess or implements a policy or have some procedural ruling obligating judges in divorce cases to demand parents to consider joint custody or making a parenting plan post-divorce. Obligatory pre-trial mediation is geared more as a procedural-formalistic attempt to dissuade parties to continue with divorce.

Are “Part-Time Parents” Healthier and Happier Parents? Correlates of Shared Physical Custody in Switzerland

Changing legal and parental practices across Europe led to a higher share of parents practicing shared physical custody (SPC) upon separation, who tended to be more affluent and less conflict-ridden. Since SPC became more prevalent, profiles of SPC parents pluralized. Far from these developments, no clearly defined legal pathways toward SPC existed in Switzerland before 2017. Profiling the Swiss case, we examine the prevalence of SPC families, and its associations with parental health and well-being before these legislative changes. Among 875 separated parents of 1,269 minors, SPC (i.e., child alternates between parental homes at least 30% of the time) was practiced by about 11% of the sample. A higher share of SPC parents was highly-educated, yet more financially strained compared to other parents. Although no overall differences in health and well-being emerged between SPC and other separated parents (e.g., with sole custody), SPC-health-linkages varied by gender and education. We conclude that lacking institutional support for SPC and gender-biased employment practices reinforce traditional custody models. Because of costly childcare and more skewed time splits among Swiss SPC parents, SPC may represent more of a resource drain—at least economically—than a relief for the parent shouldering more care duties and expenses.

Who Cares? An Event History Analysis of Co-parenthood Dynamics in Belgium

Until the end of the twentieth century, child custody arrangements after separation typically continued the gendered pre-separation parenting division, with mothers taking up childcare and fathers paying child support. Recently, there has been a significant rise in co-parenting after separation, reflecting the trend towards more socio-economic, work- and childcare-related gender equality during the relationship. However, it remains unclear to what extent the organization of the pre-separation household dominates over important changes in the lives and labor force participation of parents after separation in choosing to co-parent.This study uses longitudinal Belgian register data to consider the effect of post-separation dynamics in parents’ life course and labor force participation in deciding to co-parent. While certain pre-separation characteristics remain predictive of co-parenting, our results suggest a societal trend towards co-parenting as the parenting norm. Increased time in paid work positively affects co-parenting probabilities, but we find no effect of a post-separation income increase, even though this would imply greater bargaining power to obtain sole custody. As such, the investigated post-separation changes seem to be an indication of parents moving towards supporting and attempting to gain gender equal parenting after separation.

The Socioeconomic Gradient of Shared Physical Custody in Two Welfare States: Comparison Between Spain and Sweden

This study contributes to the emerging literature on the diffusion of SPC across social strata, by comparing two national contexts, Sweden and Spain, with different prevalence rates of SPC and with diverging social and gender policies in the early XXI century. We draw on the 2006 and 2014 comparative cross-sectional data from the Spanish and Swedish Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC), to test two competitive hypotheses (diffusion and diverging destinies hypotheses) on the association of parental socioeconomic status, children’s living arrangements in separated families and their relative prevalence in a populaiton. We also examine whether such association is modified by the great increase in SPC in both countries between 2006 and 2014. We present empirical evidence that, independently from the context, SPC arrangements are more frequent among parents with higher socioeconomic status and sole-custody arrangements among other parents; however, social inequality in post-separation arrangements differ in the two countries over time. In Spain, we find evidence in favour of the diffusion hypothesis with increases in the prevalence of SPC going hand in hand with the diffusion of SPC across social strata. By contrast, the Swedish data support the diverging destinies hypothesis with increases in SPC producing no variation in its social stratification over time.

What Constitutes a Family? Investigating Who Attends Family Events in Postdivorce Families

Objective: To explain whether divorced parents’ ex-partners and current partners belong to the family, and whether they both “jointly” do so. Background: It is uncertain who belongs to postdivorce families and how family boundaries become salient in family interactions. Method: We assessed whether divorced parents celebrated their child’s birthday together with their ex-partner (i.e., child’s biological parents), current partner (i.e., child’s stepparent), and jointly with both. Dutch Data (N=2,451) was analyzed using logistic regression. Results: Most parents celebrated the child’s birthday without the ex-partner, but with the current partner. One quarter celebrated with both. The ex-partners’ presence was more likely when parents’ and their current partners’ relationship with the ex-partner was good; and less likely when parents had repartnered and when the ex-partner had sole custody or additional biological or stepchildren. The presence of the current partner was more likely in case of coresidence with the biological parent and when the ex-partner had a new partner; and less likely when the ex-partner had sole custody and when parents’ relationship with the ex-partner was good. Conclusions: Child-related family rituals mostly involve the “new” stepparent rather than both biological parents. The effects of relationship quality, co-residence, repartnering and having additional biological or stepchildren highlight the importance of (step)parents’ willingness to interact with each other, structural opportunities for parent-child interactions, and parents’ shifting loyalties from their ex-partner to their new family.

Children’s Living Arrangements after Marital and Cohabitation Dissolution in Europe

The rapid increase of the number of children being born in cohabitation appears to have an important impact on their lives, since they face a higher risk of parental breakup than children born in wedlock. This article aims to provide a cross-national overview of the living arrangements of children following breakup of cohabiting unions and to investigate whether the post-dissolution living arrangements differ between formerly cohabiting and married families. Analyzing the first wave of Generations and Gender Survey for 9 European countries shows that former cohabiters are not more or less likely to establish shared physical custody of their children than formerly married couples; however, formerly cohabiting fathers are somehow less likely to have sole custody of their children. The lower odds of sole-father custody among former cohabiters are caused by the selection of individuals into cohabiting unions (i.e., different demographic characteristics of cohabiting parents and union duration).

The Role of Public Policy in the Enforcement of Foreign Custody Judgments: An Example of Joint Custody in Turkish Law

Societies transfer their basic values to new generations through child custody within the family. Therefore, bringing up children in healthy families is beneficial to society. Despite the importance of maintaining the sustainability of the family, which is the basic unit of society, when family sustainability is not possible, a basic duty of the courts must be to provide the best custody model for the welfare of the child after the dissolution of a marriage. Studies have shown that children have a better psychological state and can more easily overcome the trauma of divorce when the courts rule for joint custody than when the courts rule for sole custody. Joint custody, provided for in many legal systems, is not regulated in Turkish law. Thus, requests for the enforcement of foreign joint custody judgments are rejected by Turkish courts for violating public policy. Turkish courts incorrectly consider foreign law, which provides different rules, as grounds for public policy intervention. In this study, it is found that Turkish courts can rule for joint custody by depending on international conventions. Within this framework, it is not possible to reject the enforcement of foreign joint custody judgments by depending on the public policy exception.