Who should get custody in a divorce if neither is a bad parent?

Answer 1

I am concerned about the answers promoting custody on an economic basis. [The same guys that in answers to other questions state there is no wage gap-are saying men should get custody cause they earn more????] They also say women should do most of the child care cause thats their role. But not get physical custody.

I think this is totally inconsistent.

Legal custody should be joint and physical custody should be by whom has been the primary parent. Who stays home with the child when the child is sick, shops for their school clothes, reads them stories,etc.

Answer 2

This is a really tough question that my husband and I argue about constantly!!! My husband has a really good job that pays very well and allows me to be a stay at home mom. The downside of his job is that he works around 10 hours a day and has a 1 1/2 hour drive to work and usually a 2 hour drive home from work due to traffic and then 3-4 nights a week he is out of town. A guy he works with that also had a stay at home wife recently went through a divorce and he got custody of the kids. I think that the mother should've got custody because she was able to spend more time with them but the judge thought that the kids were better off with their dad because of the amount of money he made. I don't know if the judge even took into consideration the amount of time the dad wouldn't even be home so the kids would then be left with a sitter. In a case like that I think the kids would've been better off with their mom. She could've got a job too, maybe not making as much as her ex-husband but at least she probably would be with them more. So I guess it really just depends on the situation as far as who the kids would be better off with.

Answer 3

Both parents 50/50 but we all know the answer to your question as the feminist NOW.org

They would like to keep the status quo of 95% of mothers keeping full custody of the kids and dad as a visitor. They are virtually saying because some men may intimidate, be violent or stalk their former partner, that all men and children should suffer from not having 50/50 custody because of the few.

Sexist and feminist. There is no other area in life that make feminist the most discusting despised creature

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Super Ruper
Money is a very important factor, that is why it is spoken of. Your suggestion is best case, but come back to what you say not to talk about, money, how are some people going to be able to afford 3 homes when it is difficult enough to have 2 after divorce.

Answer 4

If they're both good parents then it doesn't matter. I know a lot of other people said the same thing, but I'm responding b/c I'm disturbed by some of the logic in some of the answers. A few people said the mother should always get custody, b/c of attachment and blah blah blah. Well, my parents were divorced when I was 3, and my FATHER got custody of me and my older sister. He raised us, and we visited our mother every other weekend. We didn't have "2 sets" of clothes or friends or anything...we just took what we needed to our mom's each time and brought it back home. And we played with the neighbors at our mom's like it was normal. Nothing seemed wierd to us...it was life, and we lived it, and we were happy. My mother eventually chose to fade out of our lives...I haven't seen her in 10 years. This is why I hate when people argue about mothers being attached to their children more than the fathers or when people talk about 'dead-beat dads'. Ok, my rant is over.

It doesn't matter who gets custody as long as they make the kids happy and KEEP them happy.

Answer 5

WOW - so much yap from everyone about how selfish the women are...wanting and getting custody AND the financial compensation from the poor men who just want to be good and decent husbands and fathers...but no one will give them a chance.

How bout we switch the focus to the kids. Huh? How bout the KIDS get to keep the house, and the parents switch in and out every other week? Why should the kids have to have two sets of clothes and two sets of friends because their parents couldn't make it work? Why should they have to switch back and forth and maintain two residences? I think the best solution is for the parents to leave the family home with the kids....and each one has to find another place to live - but come every other week to take care of the kids. Maybe THEN they will come to understand the mess they are making of their children's lives.

I read, daily, how awful both men and women are when it comes to custody battles...but most often, its complaints about money. Well that just shows how screwed up the priorities are....it should be all about the kids - and how messed up THEIR lives are now that mom and dad have decided to go their own ways...

Answer 6

I think the best, assuming they both have equal means and would be living in the same city would be for them to split custody until the child is old enough to decide who they want to live with on a more permanent basis.

Though, I think it's safe to assume that if they are both good parents both would want what is best for the child and would be able to come up with an adequate plan customized to their family, the current circumstances and the childs personality.

Answer 7

Divorced friends shared custody of their son until he turned 18. They both stayed in the same town so he could stay in his school and keep his friends. They lived only a few miles from each other, so the ferrying back and forth took only a few minutes. The boy lived with his mother and stepfather from Monday through Thursday, and with his father from Friday to Sunday. All three went to his school functions and sports games. It worked out well for the boy.

Answer 8

The custody should be shared. A divorce does not mean "lets have a contest to see who can hurt the children most by fighting hard to 'win'". The children MUST be considered with love and shared kindness towards them. These innocents only happened to be the issue of a bad marriage not the cause. They deserve access to mom and dad's love and care 24/7 and all the monetary support possible.

Answer 9

If both are good parents, and both would prefer to have the kids, then the mother if they're under 10-12, and the father if over 10-12. The younger years require more nurturance, bonding, and security-building; and the older years require more distinction-making, ego formation, and abstract reasoning. This isn't to say that there aren't cases where parents don't conform to sex- and gender- types, but for most cases, when one looks at the kinds of things kids fall down on statistically when they lack fathers, they are the kinds of things that kids develop after puberty.
___Of course, both parents should, ideally, remain in a child's life throughout. If there's the slightest bit of enmity or distrust between the parents, though, house-sharing is an invitation to suspicion and conflict, and having to maintain two other houses, one for each parent so that each can have a zone of privacy, gets prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthy. And there might well be some downsides to projecting to the kids that the world revolves around them, in this very literal way.

Answer 10

The parent more able to give that child their personal attention and not left with relatives and babysitters. The parent who is willing to surrender buying cigarettes and alcohol if that takes away from food and clothes for their little kids. Parents have one chance in childhood to raise their kids and prove that they are loved and cared about. I know a professional couple who let the kids stay in the home and the mom would move out for a week and live in another house, then when the next week came the dad would move to that other house and the mom would move in with the kids. That situation worked well until the youngest was in middle school where their teenage friends became the center of the kids social sphere. The parents formed households of their own after the kids had adjusted to the reality that their parents were no longer a couple. Another thing, watching parents fighting and being vindictive to each other and forcing the kids to take sides when both parents are pretty swell people is an awful stress for kids of any age.