Harrison County Takes Giant Step for Children

Forty years of research speaks as consistently as social science research ever does about children’s well-being when parents are separated: children do best when both parents are equally involved in the day-to-day tasks of child rearing. On virtually every metric of child well-being, children whose separated parents share equally in raising them do about as well as those raised in intact marriages and much better than those raised in a sole custody arrangement. The long-term harms to children of divorce are largely the result not of parental separation but of parental deprivation.

Unfortunately, legislatures and courts have been slow to respond to this large and growing body of scientific research. Ohio still lacks a statutory presumption in favor of shared parenting and a just published study from National Parents Organization (NPO) reveals that 45 of Ohio’s 88 counties still have local parenting time rules that default to the out-dated “every other weekend and one evening a week” schedule that made sense for many families back in the 1950s but makes little sense today.