Child Custody: Legal Decisions and Family Outcomes

For too long, divorce and remarriage literature has focused only on the outcome in the personal lives of the divorcees during and after divorce. But now, in Child Custody: Legal Decisions and Family Outcomes, you’ll see that divorce is a chain reaction that begins in the courtrooms and branches out into the families of the world, changing the lives of children, parents, and grandparents alike.Child Custody is an incisive, up-to-date collection of studies that addresses both child custody decisions and the varied and often surprising outcomes for those children and their families. Divided into two main sections, one focusing on legislative guidelines and the other on family issues, this unique compilation of recent divorce and remarriage research gives you a rare view of the attitudes some judges have toward divorce. In addition, those people in both law and family research fields will have at their disposal the many aspects of the legal decision-making process and the legislative guidelines that currently hold sway over custody and post-divorce cases. Here are some of the topics you’ll read about: the evolution of three types of residential custody arrangements--father, mother, and joint--followed over a two-year period legal reforms aimed at guaranteeing parental access to children how social research has shaped New Hampshire’s child support policy divorced fathers and mothers in Greece the stigmas on lesbian mothers in custody cases how grandparent involvement shapes post-divorce familiesMeant as a catalyst for further research and study, this book begins to touch upon the intrinsic flaws in both legal and family systems that continue to exist. Too often, we think of divorce and child custody as merely legal decisions. In Child Custody, however, you’ll find that what matters in court is also a family matter.

Table of Contents:
Contents Introduction Judges’ Beliefs Dealing with Child Custody Decisions Evolution of Residential Custody Arrangements in Separated Families: A Longitudinal Study The Impact of an Educational Seminar for Divorcing Parents: Results from a National Survey of Family Court Judges Children Denied Two Parents: An Analysis of Access Denial An Evaluation of the New Hampshire Child Support Guidelines: Using Social Science Research to Shape Child Support Policy Noncustodial Fatherhood: Research Trends and Issues Why Do Fathers Become Disengaged from Their Children’s Lives? Maternal and Paternal Accounts of Divorce in Greece Post-Divorce Father Custody: Are Mothers the True Predictors of Adult Relationship Satisfaction? Stigma, Identity Dissonance, and the Nonresidential Mother The Relation of State Anger to Self-Esteem, Perceptions of Family Structure and Attributions of Responsibility for Divorce of Custodial Mothers in the Stabilization Phase of the Divorce Process Tendency to Stigmatize Lesbian Mothers in Custody Cases Young People’s Attitudes Toward Living in a Lesbian Family: A Longitudinal Study of Children Raised by Post-Divorce Lesbian Mothers Grandparent Involvement Following Divorce: A Comparison in Single-Mother and Single-Father Families Index