Father Custody and Child Development: A Review and Analysis of Psychological Research

This 1986 journal article begins with a discussion of three different strategies used by social scientists to study father-custody families, and analyzes the benefits and drawbacks of each approach.

The next section reviews the results of research comparing children’s functioning in father-custody and mother custody homes. Children’s reactions to the separation are examined as well as their attitudes about the divorce, their personality, their emotional and social development, and their relationships with their parents.

The article then examines some factors associated with better outcomes for children in father-custody homes. Such factors include the sex of the child, the quality of the parents’ relationship with each other, the parenting style of the custodial parent, the child’s relationship with the non custodial parent, and the reliance on non parental child care.

This article integrates the findings of the Texas Custody Research Project with the results of other studies of divorce. Because it is a review article, it does not provide detailed descriptions and results of the studies. (Such details are available in The Impact of Divorce in Father-Custody and Mother-Custody Homes: The Child’s Perspective.)

The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of custody research for judicial policy and calls for an end to an a priori preference for mother-custody. A reference list is included with complete citations of divorce research (including 28 father-custody studies).

 journal article
This item is included in the Child Custody & Divorce Collection.