The Development of Children Endangered by Their Own Biological Parents within the Context of Joint Custody Arrangement after Divorce
From Firenze University Press Journal: Rivista Italiana di Educazione Familiare — RIEF
Lenka Šulová, Department psychology Charles University Prague
The new phenomenon named “joint custody”, which is beginning to massively appear also in Czech society, demands deeper thought by the expert public that works in the interest of the child and their healthy development. Joint custody is the tendency of parents to enforce a quasi-democratic division of parenting of the children who grew up during their marriage. Joint custody can take on many forms. It can be the true co-ordinance of mentally mature adult parents who are able to cooper-ate in the child’s interest in a way that the child cannot tell that they are in some disagreement. Some parents are even able to take care of a very small child who is left in their own stable domestic environment and the parents take care of them according to their abilities and the child’s needs. However, this text is not about this kind of functional joint custody. Instead, the focus is on joint custody where the parents themselves are not able to come to an agreement in the interest of their child, searching for specialised help of lawyers, social workers, psycholo-gists, teachers, experts, all of whom are supposed to help them reach an optimal system of post-divorce care over their own child. I suppose that it is necessary to not only think about whether their parental role fulfilled in this fluid arrangement is satisfactory in consideration to the people involved in the divorce proceedings, but also about what this very artificial and unnatural “division” of the child’s time and namely the unnatural quality of their daily life brings to the affected child and what are the possible developmental risks.
General thoughts about joint custody as the most common post-divorce arrangement today
It is necessary to highlight in this introduction that joint custody can be perceived in various ways. First viewpoint is how it satisfies the parents in their parental roles, expectations, rights, feeling of life quality and life continuity. Then, how does it immediately affect the child’s life and what risks it can potentially bring into their future roles as a partner and parent during adulthood. Lastly, what stance does society as a whole take towards this arrangement (legislative system, social system, education system).
In the Czech Republic, especially clinical and developmental psycholo-gists (including this paper’s author) warn of the need to pay attention to joint custody as a potential development risk for children that live in it. However, their warnings are not based yet on research, but fractional ex-amples from their practice. The possible negative influence on the child’s psychological development is not obviously shown and it is very important to research internal apparitions that take place in the family system in the sensitive post-divorce situation. Hopefully for the purpose of this text we can limit to the basic presumption that post-divorce arrangement in which the child regularly switches between two homes, value systems, environ-ments as well as two communication systems or social contexts will not provide the ideal developmental and educational environment.Deeper analysis and methodically correct research are very rare in this area. If they do exist, only very few of them are dedicated to the child and their needs. This is understandable as it is difficult to formu-late research hypotheses that would involve a topic that is hard to grasp such as the family system and additionally the joint custody phenom-enon that is relatively new and specific for each family. Research from abroad is useful to support our conclusions, but ac-cording to my judgement they cannot be applied generally as the so-cial context of the given country (history, values, discipline principles, legislative system, economic status) that without question influence the whole process is connected to the given culture. Right now, most of the research focused on joint custody are con-ducted by sociologists who mainly quantify the situation. A specific ex-ample of this is Fučík who is concerned with the stances taken towards shared custody within the frame of EVS (European Values Study). The author states that the results show there is a substantive distinction be-tween the attitudes of men and women and the acceptance of shared custody is higher in the younger age group (Fučík, 2020). Expert discussions of psychologists bring up more interesting stimuli that affect the real life of the people involved (therefore also children to whom this text is dedicated). During specialised forums, the following questions are addressed: is there persuasive evidence that shared par-enting provides real benefit to children of Divorce? Should shared par-enting be a legal presumption, and if so, what factors should make for exceptions? Should high parental conflict or one parent’s opposition to shared parenting be grounds for an exception? Should parental aliena-tion dynamics preclude shared parenting? What should happen when one parent wants to relocate? (Braver, Lamb, 2018).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/rief-14434
Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/rief/article/view/14434
