Center for Parental Responsibility
Minneapolis, Minnesota
March 18, 2007
Gordon E. Finley, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
Florida International University
The references for the bullet points below can be found in the list to follow.
• “The Best Interest of the Child” standard is, in reality, no standard whatsoever (Finley, 2002). Given its vacuous status as a standard, it is critical to determine who has the authority to define the best interests of children of divorce.
• Of all who assert such authority, the voices least heard - but simultaneously most impacted and most soundly grounded in the childhood “lived experiences” of divorce - are the young adult voices of the children of divorce (Fabricius, 2003; Finley, 2006b; Finley & Schwartz, 2006; Marquardt, 2005).
• More than a half dozen empirical research studies that ask young adult children of divorce retrospectively to look back on their lives uniformly replicate one other in finding that children of divorce missed their fathers when they were growing up and - if asked - indicated that they would have preferred to have had equal shared parenting, something close to equal shared parenting, or more involvement with their fathers in their lives (Fabricius, 2003; Finley, 2006b; Finley & Schwartz, 2007; Laumann-Billings, L., & Emery, R. E. 2000; Marquardt, E. 2005).
• Specifically: “Students themselves believed that the best living arrangement for children is equal amounts of time with each parent, the belief they attributed to fathers. There was impressive consensus on this question. Fully 70% of both men and women chose equal amounts of time. Most of the remaining 30% chose substantial number of overnights with dad.” (Fabricius, 2003, p. 387). Further, in a national survey of 1,500 young adults, “More than 60% of children of divorce somewhat or strongly agreed that they often missed their fathers, whereas more than 60% of children of intact families somewhat or strongly disagreed. For both children and fathers, this is the story of divorce. If there is a public policy change message in this book (Marquardt, 2005) this is it.” (Finley, 2006b).
• In sum, the empirical research cited above supports Family Law Reform favoring the presumption of equal shared parenting.
• Let us also reform family law to establish child support guidelines based on honest empirical research rather than false gender ideology (Bergmann, 2006; Braver, 1999; Braver & O’Connell, 1998; Comanor, 2004; Finley, 2007; Weitzman, 1985).
References
Bauserman, R. (2002). Child Adjustment in Joint-Custody Versus Sole-Custody
Arrangements: A Meta-Analytic Review, Journal of Family Psychology, 16 (1), 91-102.
Bergmann, B. R. (2006). The law and economics of child support payments. Feminist Economics, 12 (4), 676-677.
Braver, S. L. (1999). The gender gap in standard of living after divorce: Vanishingly small? Family Law Quarterly, 33 (1), 111-134.
Braver, S. L. and O’Connell, D. (1998). Divorced dads: Shattering the myths. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.
Braver, S. L., and Cookston, J. T. (2003). Controversies, clarifications, and consequences of divorce’s legacy: Introduction to the special collection. Family Relations, 52 (4), 314-317.
Comanor, W. S. (Ed.) (2004). The law and economics of child support payments. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Fabricius, W. V. (2003). Listening to children of divorce: New findings that diverge from Wallerstein, Lewis, and Blakeslee. Family Relations, 52 (4), 385-396.
Finley, G. E. (2002). The best interest of the child and the eye of the beholder. [Review of C. Panter-Brick & M.T. Smith (Eds.) Abandoned children.] Contemporary Psychology, APA REVIEW OF BOOKS, 47 (5), 629 - 631.
Finley, G. E. (2003). Father-child relationships following divorce. In J.R. Miller, R.M. Lerner, L.B. Schiamberg, & P. M. Anderson (Eds.). Encyclopedia of human ecology, Volume 1: A - H. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 291 – 293.
Finley, G. E. (2006a). Joint custody. In N. Salkind (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Human Development, Volume 2, pp. 745 – 747. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Finley, G. E. (2006b). The myth of the good divorce. [Review of E. Marquardt, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of the Children of Divorce]. PsycCRITIQUES--Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 51 (no. 35), Article 17.
Finley, G. E., & Schwartz, S. J. (2006). Parsons and Bales revisited: Young adult children’s characterization of the fathering role. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 7 (1), 42 – 55.
Finley, G. E. (2007). Divorce: The rest of the story. [Review of the Book by Clarke-Stewart, A. & Brentano, C. Divorce: Causes and consequences.] PsycCRITIQUES—Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 52, (no. 33), Article 155, August 15, 2007.
Finley, G. E., and Schwartz, S. J. (2007). Father involvement and long-term young adult outcomes: The differential contributions of divorce and gender. Family Court Review, 45, (no. 4), 573 – 587.
Laumann-Billings, L., & Emery, R. E. (2000). Distress among young adults from divorced families. Journal of Family Psychology, 14 (4), 671-687.
Marquardt, E. (2005). Between two worlds: The inner lives of children of divorce. NewYork; Crown.
Maldonado, S. (2006). Deadbeat or deadbroke: Redefining child support for poor fathers. U.C. Davis Law Review, 39 (3), 991-1022.
Weitzman, L. (1985). The divorce revolution: The unexpected social and economic consequences of divorce for women and children in America. New York: Free Press.