Do women really want 50-50 childcare?

[Truckrelented]

I'll be open from the outset I am a man, who used to post regularish but I've been off here for a while.

I am a father that has shared residency of our children, but with the threads I've read recently and conversations in real life I don't see a lot of interest in this.

Now I would have thought this was the way to equality as it enables both parents to carry on working and be independent and to have equal involvement in their children's lives.

But it seems that would be preferred is the father to see the children every-other-weekend, pay his maintenance (in whatever way it was agreed) and pretty much be a McDad.

Is that really what people want?

It wouldn't be what I would want.

In the hypothetical, cos I am very keen on DH and I staying together, I think what i would prefer is that our son stays in the family home, we get a studio flat in town and whoever is currently "on" as the parent stays in the family home, going on to swop with the partner in the studio flat at hand over.

We have the space that would allow each parent to have their own room in the house, and the studio could be a sort of shared crash pad.

That way DS gets the continuity of staying in the home and no shuffling him about required. If at all possible i'd also like to keep the routine we have now, where i am primary in the mornings, DH is primary in the afternoons. So the only diff for DS would be that instead of both of us being there evenings and nights we would take it in turns.

I am aware that the above wouldn't be practical for very many people, but it would be my preference if our relationship went belly up.

sorry, my post was confusing, when I said "it wouldn't be what I'd want" I was referring to this

But it seems that would be preferred is the father to see the children every-other-weekend, pay his maintenance (in whatever way it was agreed) and pretty much be a McDad.

As a man it's something I would insist on and make it a priority to ensure with any children I had in case things went south with the mother.

fastweb - That sounds great until one of you meets someone else (possibly with children themselves) and wants to live with them. Things can get very complicated very fast in separations/divorces.

In response to the OP, in my case I cannot imagine anything other than 50:50 in our case. DH would be absolutely devastated to lose DS. DH has put in a lot of work and effort to build a good relationship with DS , often at the expense of his career. He is an excellent dad, and does many of the things other mothers complain their partners don't do such as the thinking ahead and making sure Ds has all he needs for school etc.

the reason cafcass probably suggested so many handovers is that there is research which points to the fact that pre-schoolers shouldn't be separated from their primary carer for more than 2 nights or 3 days at a stretch. this is because of attachment issues. so this may have informed their decision.

the handovers are the worst part though. that's where all the anxieties and distress are evident. having to prise a crying child off you to put them in a car (in my case in the nanny's car as X is at work when handover takes place) is the worst feeling. standing on the pavement with a huge fixed grin waving goodbye to them pretending this is what i want, when all i want to do is gather them in my arms and hug them forever.

the whole thing is hideous. divorce and separation with kids is truly the worst thing ever. to be honest, there are many days when i just wish i was dead because i do not want my kids going through this, and they must because their father and i cannot live together. if i had realised the extent to which the whole residence / custody thing would devastate their lives and mine, i don't know whether i would actually have left X in the end. i was suicidal and depressed when i was with him. but somehow living out this perpetual hell of separation from the kids feels worse.

and no - X does not feel it the same way that i do. sure he misses them, but he does not feel the grief and devastation that i feel when i am not with the kids. he manages to get out there, socialising, going away at weekends and making the 'most' of his free-time. i sit at my dining room table looking at the photos of my kids on the wall and the pictures they have drawn and i cry. i lie on my son's bed, hugging his blanket and cry. i know this is of no use to the kids and means nothing. but this is how i feel. X on the other hand can happily ask me to have the kids when it is his time for contact because he has arranged a business trip abroad. this means that, unless i suggest reshuffling the days and giving him a night before he goes away, he won't see them for a whole week. he does this without any trace of anxiety or distress. i could NEVER do that.

When it looked like DP and I would split a few months ago we discussed 50-50 and came to the conclusion it would be too hard on everyone. DP would either have to change jobs and take a reduced wage to be around for his days or pay for child care morning and evening as he works long hours. Presuming that I would then have a job I would have to do the same. Neither of us would be able to afford a home with enough room for 3 children.
So we are staying together as housemates for the children. Thats not easy either and takes a whole other lot of negotiating but it seems to be the logical solution for us.....atm.
As others have said it comes down to individual situations. However I think it will become the expected set up in future.

i think 50/50 is a nice idea and brilliant if it's practical and feasible but in my experience and among my friends it's a total non starter... my exh lives 2 hours drive away as we both moved back to our 'home towns' when we split... and even if he lived very nearby, he is commuting or at work from 6am - 6pm so he would have a lot of extra childcare to sort out.

also to echo what an earlier poster said, exh has always been perfectly at ease with seeing ds1 every other weekend, and sometimes makes social plans that disrupt the routine so that 3 weeks goes by instead of 2 without seeing him.... i would be distraught at going so long without seeing my own child, but exh obviously isn't (though he absolutely loves him, i'm not suggesting he doesn't, but he feels differently about ds1 than i do)

That sounds great until one of you meets someone else (possibly with children themselves) and wants to live with them

But at least by the time that happened it would have given a good chunk of time for our son to adapt. So if DH then wanted to either stay elsewhere rather than crash pad on his off days, or even have DS over to stay at his new home it wouldn't be so dramatic a transition, with everything changing at once.

I'd stick with the crash pad. This is my second marriage and frankly if this one ever goes up the spout too, I'm done. I think it would be simpler to stick to my cats.

Of course the above is all based on a fairly amicable separation of us going our separate ways by mutual agreement, not DH turning into a git and running off with somebody.

Don't know what I'd do then, my instinct would be to run back to the UK where I'd have some support, but that would cause terrible problems in terms of making sure DS had regular access to his dad. I think I'd be a bit screwed really and just have to stick it out here until he was grown. Which is a horrible prospect.

i wish i too could run back to where i am from, which is only 2 hours drive away, but i can't. i am stuck living in a shithole of a town, where i don't work (i have never worked here - i work from home or travel hundreds of miles to clients and there will never be any local work for me). i have no friends other than those with kids whom i met through baby groups, and when i don't have my kids, i don't want to spend time wiht other people's.

so i have no friends, no family, no work colleagues. i could join a group or something but i don't want to. i don't want it to be 'ok' when the kids aren't around. i don't want to go out socialising and meeting people because i want to be with my kids. i have been separated for 10 months now and it has not got any easier. the separation is as horrific every time it happens as it was the first time. i miss the kids more now because i know how good it is when they are with me. i have more confidence in my parenting abilities and i see how much fun we all have together. unlike when i lived with X and was cowed in a corner feeling useless. and selfishly i want more of it - which i can't have.

I think 50/50 is only appropriate in cases where the childcare split was 50/50 before the separation. Even in a relationship that has gone badly wrong where there is an instant relief brought about by separation, it is a huge adjustment for a child to make. Two of the main ways that can help a child make the adjustment is (1) to continue to live in the family home (not always possible because of financial circumstances) and (2) to continue to have the same time ratio to each parent as before the split. In other words for life to continue as much as possible as it was before the parents separated.

I also think that 50/50 does not have to mean 50/50 sleeping arrangements. Surely it must be possible for a parent to spend 50% of the time with a child without them having to spend 182.5 nights a year sleeping at another address. I think that can be very unsettling for a child, especially a young child.

Unless the 50/50 arrangement was in place before the split, I see 50/50 as being all about the rights of the NRP rather than the needs of the child.

The cynic in me also believes that if more men were involved 50/50 with their children when still with the mother, quite a few relationships would avoid breakdown in the first place.

What I would like to see before the rights of fathers are addressed in this way, is a concerted attempt to address the right of a child to have it's non-resident parent (male in 92% of cases) pay maintenance (60% do not).

However, in cases where abuse does not apply and the father can prove he is a fit parent and the mother consents, I would also like to see a situation where a male parent can be exempt from looking for work and can claim benefits so that he is free to look after his DC while his XP works. That would help a lot to go towards 50/50 care with young children that doesn't involve separate sleeping arrangements.

DH would have to change job or i would have to be happy with being my SDCs main carer during our 50% of time (I would be happy with that for the record) or if I wasnt on the scene DH would have to hire a nanny for 50% of the time. Can't imagine many nannies would be happy with that kind of contract.

It would be a major upheaval if a family works on the premise that one parent works long hours and the other shorter hours to do childcare.

Otoh I would be bloody unhappy with handing my kids to Disney dad every weekend whilst I got stuck with homework, school runs, chores and the like.

Also it massively penalizes women who have to either work fewer hours or pay for childcare whilst dad (or whoever has the kids for the majority of the time) gets to continue along with career progression without having to take sick days to care for sick children or leave early etc

yes sunshineandbooks - it is very ironic in that, if my X had demonstrated anywhere near the interest in the children and their activities / needs when we were together that he does now, i wonder whether i would have left. every decision on everything was left to me. X didn't even know where the school was that DS was due to start in september. now he expects to veto every activity, down to whether the children get their feet measured / hair cut and whether DD sleeps in a sleeping bag or has a duvet at my house.

unfortunately all the way along it has seemed to me that his 50:50 obsession has been about him not being seen to miss out. he doesn't want me to have something that he doesn't have. so demanding that the children are in his house (10 miles from school) being looked after by the nanny for 3 hours before he returns from work, when i am working from home 2 mins from the school and could see them for an hour after school before they return to his house. it is specifically about me not having something that he can't have. he even said that the reason he was adamant that there had to be equality of care (when there never had been before when we were together) was that he didn't want the children to have more exposure to me because then they might decide on that basis that they wanted to live with me.

up until the point when i left him last august, the longest period of time he had spent with both of the kids on his own was a morning when i ran the cardiff half marathon. he had never had them for a whole day on his own.

WishIWasRimaHorton Sorry you're having such a hard time.

I think if 50/50 is what both parents want, they can be civilised about it and it suits the children then its a good thing.

IME every other weekend is more than enough for my EX, i think what someone said about how the division of care was prior to the split is key.

As a child of divorced parents i had every other weekend and a week night visit [with dad] and for me it was enough. I knew my dad was there if i needed him.

I think that the arrangements being completely consistant is the main thing.

Sunshine.

Do you have a link to the 60% of NRP don't pay maintenance statistic please as it seems very high.

We have quite a few friends who do 50/50 and it works well for them and the kids are happy. In all cases however both partners have moved on and have new partners. That being said I also know men who fight and struggle to even get the weekends but in all these cases the wife has not moved onto a new relationship and lives for the children (therefore becoming very distressed and lonely when separated from them).

I do indeed

Figures are taken from DWP Report, so accepted by government. Of those cases that make it to the CSA, I think the figure is 40%, which is better but still pretty poor.

It is one of the reasons I am so and about the proposals to charge parents for using the CSA. All this will do is encourage a rise in the number of NRPs paying nothing, while the government is effectively taxing the most financially vulnerable children.

I agree sunshineandbooks. It's all very well the government saying that they want parents to sort out arrangements between themselves, but that only works when both parties are reasonable. There are many cases where NRPs will avoid paying at all costs, and also cases of abuse, where the CSA is the only safe or viable way of securing maintenance. I had to use the CSA to get £5 per week from my abusive ex. Had I been charged for it, I wouldn't have been able to afford it and the paltry sum wouldn't have been worth paying for. It's ridiculous.

It depends on the parents. If one parent is having a "jolly" when the kids are around and the other is left to do all the mundane letter filling in for school trips, shopping for uniform, generally running errands, doing homework etc. then I don't think it's fair at all because the parent doing the donkey work doesn't even have the rest of the week to have fun with the kids.

As a child, I would have hated living 50% of the time in one place and 50% in another. I would have much preferred the majority of the time with one parent and to "visit" the other. I think my own DS prefers this too although his Dad is not capable of much more than looking after a "visiting" kid, to be honest.

DP and I have his children 40% of the time and DP and his ex have a terrible relationship and we get all the mundane tasks on "our" time. Kids never talk about "home" just Mum's house or Dad's house and that makes me a bit sad for them.

This is what the report says.

'15 Child maintenance

15.1 Child support receipt and type of agreement

Over half (58 per cent) of families where there was a non-resident parent had an
order or agreement for child support at the time of the study (Table 15.1).
Just over two-thirds (68 per cent) of these families had received some child maintenance payments.

Where an order or agreement was in place, no payment had been
received by just under one-third (32 per cent) of families (Table 15.2).

Over two-fifths (45 per cent) of all families with a child support agreement had
a voluntary agreement only and just under two-fifths (37 per cent) of families
received a Child Support Agency (CSA) assessment only.

Families who received
a CSA assessment only were more likely to be social tenants (52 per cent) than
private tenants34 (39 per cent) or living in owned (or mortgaged) accommodation
(26 per cent) (Table 15.3).'

I still can't see where 60% comes from.

Gingerbread: "Only two-fifths of single parents receive maintenance from their child?s other parent.(14)"

If you don't agree with Gingerbread drawing that conclusion I suggest you take it up with their number crunchers. Given that Theresa May as Equalities Minister has had various dealings with Gingerbread and signed up to a couple of their initiatives (in word, if not in action ) I don't think the government are disputing that figure either.

I would suspect the 60% is made up from adding the 32% (100-58) of families with a NRP who did not have an order or agreement for child support + the 32% of families with an order or agreement that was not being honoured, although as this adds up to just over 50%, so the other 10% must come from elsewhere (32% of 58%,is 19%, and 32+19=51).

also I wonder what the definition of a NRP is, becasue when dh and I had a 50:50 split we each paid for expenses and so no money exchanged hands. If either of us had been defined as a NRP then presumably one of us would have been considered not to be paying our way.