Dear Mr. Dad: My wife and I are getting divorced, and while things are generally amicable, we’re having some major disagreements about whether it’s okay for our two young children, ages three and one, to sleep over at my house. We both want what’s best for our kids, but my wife says that because the kids are so young, they shouldn’t be separated from their mother, and that doing so would interfere with the mother-child relationship. I say that not letting them spend as much time with me as they do with their mother would interfere with the father-child relationship, which would be just as bad, and could end up causing more problems than it solves. Who’s right?
A: Assuming that there’s no history of violence or abuse in your family (specifically involving you)–and if there were, you probably wouldn’t be writing for advice—you are.
Over the past few decades, dozens of researchers have tried to answer the same general question you and your wife are asking: What type of parenting plan is best for children whose parents have separated? When you factor out the politically motivated “research” (the kind where the people conducting a study are looking for data to support their personal beliefs), the consensus is very clear: “Overall the children in shared parenting families had better outcomes on measures of emotional, behavioral, and psychological well-being, as well as better physical health and better relationships with their fathers and their mothers, benefits that remained even when there were high levels of conflict between their parents,” according to Linda Nielsen, a researcher at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
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