America Isn’t Ready for the Two-Household Child

For most of American history, when parents separated, their kids almost always ended up living with just one of them. But recent studies have confirmed a new era: Joint physical custody, in which a child resides with each parent a significant portion of the time, has become dramatically more common in the U.S.

The trend was first documented in Wisconsin, where court data revealed that the percentage of divorces leading to —in which time with each parent is split 50–50—rose from just 2 percent to 35 percent . Even among Wisconsin couples who came to court to establish child support—a group in which the prevalence of shared custody is, perhaps unsurprisingly, low—shared arrangements doubled from 2003 to 2013. And a 2022 found that, nationally, the share of divorces resulting in joint custody jumped from 13