The dynamics of shared care in the UK

1. International Society for Child Indicators Conference 2011 Children’s Well-Being: The Research & Policy Challenges The dynamics of shared care in the UK Stephen McKay Professor of Social Research School of Social Policy University of Birmingham, UK

2. Structure • Background • Cross-sectional estimates of how care is shared after relationships break down • Longitudinal analysis of care arrangements • Effects of care arrangements on child outcomes • Work in progress – all suggestions welcome

3. UK (England & Wales) context #1 • On separation: ‘legal custody’ of children, through parental responsibility, is usually shared/joint • ‘physical custody’ [residence] and ‘access’ [contact] on separation is usually determined by the parents by agreement. Courts prefer not to make an order. • courts may make orders, including ‘[shared] residence orders’ in disputed cases, applying test of ‘best interests of the child’ • Relating to residence and contact (‘physical custody’ and ‘access’) • Individual cases, not presumptions: • e.g. ‘The Court of Appeal held that there was no presumption against contact simply because domestic violence was alleged or proved’. Re F (A Child) (Contact Order) [2001] 1 FCR 422

4. Not all are impressed …

5. UK context #2 • Concerns that • Orders not ‘fair’ • Biased towards mothers / resident parents • Ignoring past division of responsibilities • Orders not met • Hostile mothers preventing contact and going unpunished • Uninvolved fathers not taking up contact • Some discussion of a legal presumption of shared care as being in child’s best interests [Australia] • Are English courts moving in this direction in practice? • Few large-scale studies, even fewer longitudinal in Britain (Amato and Gilbreth (1999) 'Nonresident Fathers and Children's Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis‘)

6. Early estimates of shared care

7. More recent estimates

8. Data • Families and Children Study (FACS) 2002-2008 • ‘Rotating panel’, built from Child Benefit recipients • Questions asked at child-level regarding contact with non-resident parent • Same questions asked each year – hence may track over time at child level • Later waves are low-income and lone-parent biased, corrected by weighting

9. Arrangements: average ages of children (red line = avg age all children)

10. Few differences in incomes [of the resident family] by arrangement

11. Relationship between resident and non-resident parent

12. Overview of longitudinal data • 23,500 children with average of 3.7 years observed [87,500 ‘observations’] • 13,500 some experience of being apart from parent (lone parents are over-sampled) with 27,000 observations • Considerable change over time: • 9% see absent parent daily in any given year; 17% say this at least once during their survey involvement • 26% never see absent parent; 34% say this at least once

13. Annual changes in contact [row %]

14. Measures of child outcomes • Parental assessments of school work, bullying, contact with school, police. • For 3 years, child self-completion (if aged 11-15): TV viewing, contact with friends, use of alcohol and drugs, parents setting limits, …

15. Who feels ‘extremely happy’ with:

16. Models of outcomes outcomeit= x′itB + cCit + rRit+ vi + uit x characteristics of child, mother [father] C contact arrangements R parental relationship vi child effect (random intercept or fixed effect?)

17. Preliminary regression results (random intercept models; ‘random effects’) Sig means statistically significant at the 5% level.

18. Conclusions • Arrangements for care after parental separation change over time, • on average becoming less frequent, but • some ‘no contact’ cases start to have contact • Infrequent contact seemingly associated with worse outcomes than no contact, or frequent contact • (multivariate) Some child outcomes related to both contact frequency and parental relationship, though latter is more common

19. Ends – questions? s.d.mckay@bham.ac.uk