Does Shared Parenting Hurt Mothers Financially?

By Don Hubin, PhD

One concern that has been raised about presumptions of equal shared parenting is that they create financial hardship for mothers. Most states’ child support guidelines have parenting time adjustments—that is, they adjust the amount of child support ordered based on the amount of time the child has with each parent. Many of these states have seriously flawed parenting time adjustments, of course, as the 2022 NPO Child Support and Shared Parenting Report Card documents.

Parenting time adjustments make sense, of course, because child support is for the children and, so, it should follow the children. But what does the reduction in child support ordered mean for the financial situation of the recipient? Since the majority of child support recipients are mothers, we can ask the question this way: because of its effect on child support orders, does shared parenting hurt mothers financially?

This question isn’t as easy to answer as one might think. First, we need to consider both short term and long term effects. While an increase in child support will obviously provide immediate increase in income, if it’s accompanied with a disproportionate share of child care responsibilities, it can have adverse economic effects in the long run by limiting that parent’s ability to advance their career. When the child support ends, that parent might find themselves worse off economically than if they’d had more time to devote to their career.

But let’s focus here on the short term. Surely the answer here is simple: less child support received means a lowering of the recipient parent’s standard of living.

Right?

Wrong!

It’s wrong because this simplistic analysis focuses only on income, completely  ignoring expenses. To determine the effect of shared physical custody and the consequent parenting time adjustment most states afford, one needs to look at both the income and the expenses. This is what economists call the “net adjusted income”. The idea is to adjust the income based on the needs of the household given the size and composition (for example, the ages of the members).

And, as researchers Judith Bartfeld and Trisha Chanda—both of the University of Wisconsin, Madison—conclude:

[W]e find no evidence of any net impact of shared placement on mothers’ needs-adjusted income, using our preferred measure [Income-to-Poverty ratio accounting for parenting time]. Controlling for extensive demographic, economic, procedural, and geographic characteristics, we find that mothers with shared placement—whether equal or unequal and whether coming from higher-income or lower-income predivorce households—have needs-adjusted incomes that do not differ systematically from their sole-placement counterparts.

(“Economic Outcomes of Shared Placement among Divorced Mothers in Wisconsin,” Social Service Review 97(4), December, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1086/726593.)

The results were based on data from Wisconsin, not national data. But Wisconsin has a pretty good parenting time adjustment. (It got a ‘B+’ in NPO’s report card, faulted primarily for its high threshold—92 overnights, and the corresponding cliff effect.) And this provides the best evidence we have that, with a well-designed parenting time adjustment, the benefits to children of shared parenting don’t come at cost to the mother’s standard of living.