Decisions regarding child custody and other parenting arrangements occur within several different legal contexts, including parental divorce, guardianship, neglect or abuse proceedings, and termination of parental rights. The following guidelines were developed for psychologists conducting child custody evaluation, specifically within the context of parental divorce. These guidelines build upon...

As a result of the relatively high rate of divorce in this country and the increasing awareness that many parents (an estimated 1.5 million) are homosexual, the courts, as well as divorce mediators, have become actively involved in child custody placement decisions involving homosexual parents. While custody decisions have tended to reflect stereotyped beliefs or fears concerning the detrimenta...

The author meta-analyzed studies comparing child adjustment in joint physical or joint legal custody with sole-custody settings, including comparisons with paternal custody and intact families where possible. Children in joint physical or legal custody were better adjusted than children in sole-custody settings, but no different from those in intact families. More positive adjustment of joint-c...

guardianship of children and observation over their education and various issues until they reach the age of puberty and development has been studied in shi’ite jurisprudence under the title of custody (ḥiḍānat). due to the importance of the above matter, different debates have been done with regard to the time of granting the custody of a child to one of the parents. having been done with desc...

Family membership and household composition do not always coincide. Joint legal custody after divorce formalizes the relationship between fathers and children who live apart. Policymakers hope that explicit acknowledgment of nonresident fathers' rights and responsibilities will increase their involvement with their children. I use prospective data from the National Survey of Families and Househ...

The author meta-analyzed studies comparing child adjustment in joint physical or joint legal custody with sole-custody settings, including comparisons with paternal custody and intact families where possible. Children in joint physical or legal custody were better adjusted than children in sole-custody settings, but no different from those in intact families. More positive adjustment of joint-c...

How to integrate the problem of partner violence into a child custody evaluation is analyzed within a risk-assessment approach. The research literature on partner violence is reviewed to examine the issues of establishing a base rate for partner violence and its relative frequencies for both genders. Theoretical typologies of partner violence are reviewed and anew typology presentedthat is more...

This paper develops a model of child custody based on an incomplete-contract approach to the allocation of property rights. Because of the presence of transaction costs in marriage, altruistic parents cannot contract upon the investments they make into their children, but can reduce the resulting inefficiencies by determining ex ante the parent who would be allocated custody in case they divorc...