Thank you very much for inviting me.
I'll say a couple of words about my background. I have a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Michigan, obtained in 1984. I'm an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, as you mentioned, and I've taught child development for over 30 years at the university level. Before that, I was a preschool teacher.
My research includes basic child development research. I'm principal investigator on a 10-year longitudinal study of the role of fathers in adolescent development funded by the National Institutes of Health, and I also do applied divorce research on parenting time, parent relocation and overnight parenting time for infants.
My experience with the practice of family law includes service as a board member of the Arizona Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, a governor's appointment to the Domestic Relations Committee at the Arizona State Legislature for 10 years, and expert witness testimony in parenting time cases.
I have also spent a considerable amount of time working with others on translating research into child custody policy. I chaired the committee at the Arizona State Legislature that wrote the major reforms to the Arizona child custody statutes in 2010 and 2013. I was an invited participant in two international working groups: Senator Cools' round table and symposium on family dynamics there in Ottawa in 2011, and the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts think tank on shared parenting in Chicago, Illinois in 2013. I've given over 30 presentations of research to family law associations.
By way of personal disclosure, I am a divorced father of two. Their mother retained legal custody, but we had shared parenting time and we always lived in the same school district.
In my brief, I review four sources of evidence that equal parenting time is in the best interests of children. First, the evidence now strongly suggests that equal parenting time causes benefits to children. Second, there is widespread public endorsement of equal parenting time. Third, the 2013 equal parenting law in Arizona has been evaluated positively by the state's family law professionals. Finally, examples from Canadian case law show that the courts are responding to the new cultural norms by crafting individualized equal parenting time orders, often over one parent's objections and even in cases of high-parent conflict, accompanied by well-reasoned judicial opinions about how that is in children's best interests.
In my brief, I conclude that the overall pattern of evidence indicates that legal presumptions of equal parenting time would help protect children's emotional security with each of their divorced parents, and consequently, would have a positive effect on public health in the form of reduced long-term, stress-related mental and physical health problems among the children of divorce.
As others have pointed out, the current child custody statutes were written in the absence of evidence of how well they promoted children's well-being. The evidence that is now available is, in my opinion, compellingly in favour of legal presumptions of equal parenting time.
In the remainder of my remarks, I will touch on four additional points.
One problem with not having a legal presumption of equal parenting time is that many parents are likely to make parenting time decisions under the impression that the family courts are biased toward primary parenting time for mothers. We have found that this impression of maternal bias was universally held in Arizona before the law was passed. The mere impression of bias encourages parents to settle out of court for less parenting time with fathers, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A legal presumption of equal parenting time is needed in most places to overcome this perception of bias among parents who bargain in the shadow of the law.
Two, some researchers repeat the line that the quantity of parenting time is less important than the quality of the father's parenting, but they count things like helping more often with homework, working on more projects together and putting the child to bed more often as higher-quality parenting. However, clearly divorced fathers who do more of those things necessarily have more parenting time in which to do them. Higher-quality parenting requires more parenting time. That's what the data in figure 1 in my brief shows. I do not have a good explanation for why some researchers continue to argue about which one is more important—the quality of parenting or the amount of parenting time.
Three, oddly, most researchers have not focused on what parenting time means to the child. Spending time together in and of itself communicates to the child that he or she is important. We were struck by this in interviews with about 400 adolescents about their relationships with their parents. They spontaneously talked about whether their parents spent enough time with them. We then used state-of-the-art longitudinal analyses and confirmed that the more time each parent spent with the adolescent child in daily activities, the more secure the child felt one or two years later that he or she mattered to that parent. For divorced fathers, this requires having enough parenting time to be able to spend enough time doing the things together to protect children from doubts about how much they matter.
Four, oddly, researchers have traditionally not realized that father-child relationships are just as important as the more traditional child outcomes of depression, aggression and school performance. The potential public health benefits of improving divorced father-child relationships could be substantial. An estimated 35% of children of divorce have poorer relationships with their fathers as a consequence of the divorce. Children who are less close to their divorced fathers have worse behavioural adjustment, worse emotional adjustment and lower school achievement. Evidence from the general health literature going back 50 years shows that poor relationships with either parent contribute in later life to accumulating risk for mental health disorders, major chronic diseases and even early mortality.
Our latest study in this line of work found that adolescents' perceptions of how much they matter to their father were actually more important than their perceptions of how much they matter to their mothers for predicting their later mental health. I'll stop there.