Nov. 22, 2018-Shared parenting benefits are not tied to those who simply agreed to the regime. The benefits are visible across the board, no matter how the parents came to such resolution.

The third reason is that the beneficial effects of shared parenting do not seem to be due to better, more cooperative parents agreeing between themselves to share parenting time. Fabricius et al. (2012) examined the publicly available data from the Stanford Child Custody Study (Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992) and found that the great majority of parents with shared parenting had to accept it after mediation, custody evaluation, trial, or judicial imposition. Nevertheless, those with shared parenting time had the most well-adjusted children years later.

William V. Fabricius (2019), “Equal Parenting Time: The Case for a Legal Presumption”, Invited paper to appear in October 2019 in the Oxford Handbook of Children and the Law, edited by J.G. Dwyer, pre-publication online early 2019, Manuscript, p. 19