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Two houses, one home? How children navigate shared custody

Increasing numbers of divorced parents split childrearing duties, yet little is known about how this living arrangement affects children. The EU-funded MobileKids project sought to explore how children adapt to life in multiple homes. The findings are already informing family policies, but also offer insights into how adults can face a more unpredictable world.

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The number of children living in shared custody arrangements is growing in Europe, although the rate varies widely from one country to the next. In Belgium, one in three children of divorced parents alternate between both households, while in Italy, only around one in 20 children live this way. 

“Countries are increasingly encouraging arrangements that allow both parents to get involved in the life of their children after separation. But at the same time, there’s quite a negative vision of the impact on children of that kind of custody arrangement,” says project coordinator Laura Merla, a professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

Currently, we know very little about how children are socialised in this environment, how they accommodate this mobility, and what kind of role they play in the daily organisation of their lives. 

Life in an archipelago

Supported by the European Research Council, the MobileKids project carried out a range of investigations into the impacts of multilocality. This included a policy analysis of multilocality in Belgium and Italy, interviews with children’s parents, and a qualitative, in-depth study of the lived experiences of children who have lived in these arrangements for at least a year. 

Of particular interest was how children living in these arrangements create a sense of stability for themselves. Children may take familiar objects with them from one household to another, or develop rituals such as changing into a new set of clothes upon arrival. 

Merla’s team found that symbolic objects left in communal spaces were important to children, allowing them to feel that their membership of the household persisted even when they were away. “Something very important, especially with teenagers, is that they need to have their own space. But the challenge is that they are never sure if these spaces are respected when they leave,” adds Merla. 

MobileKids also revealed how children manage a home environment composed of two differently managed households. “We’ve used a metaphor in the project, something that we borrowed from social geography, the idea that children are living in an archipelago, and each of their residences is an island that may be very different from one another.”

Children must navigate these different spaces, which can have different rules and restrictions. Children may have to smuggle favourite possessions if a parent doesn’t permit objects from the ex-partner to be brought into the home, a situation Merla refers to as a “fortress island”. 

Informing family policies

The results of the MobileKids project are now being disseminated through a range of efforts, including seminars, conferences, and a virtual exhibition space, helping to enrich our understanding of this growing family pattern. Merla adds that lawyers and judges are starting to use the vocabulary of islands as a way of understanding the living arrangements sought by separated parents, and the impact that a closed or open island might have for children. 

“I’ve actually been contacted a couple of times by parents who were in the process of divorcing, asking me to advise them,” notes Merla. “Which is not something that I do, but that’s a sign that my research results are really coming into public consciousness.”

With support from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Ministry of Youth Support, a comic book developed by the project on the dynamics of multilocality will be shared with family practitioners working with children. 

The lessons learned can be applied even more widely, says Merla, as we increasingly live with greater mobility in our adult lives – no longer expecting to live in one place, to partner with one person, or to work for a single employer our whole lives. “Mobility has become kind of a normative, and we have children who from a very young age live in mobility,” she explains. “So this is an interesting case to understand the kind of resources that they use, the difficulties that they may face, and how they respond or react to those difficulties.”

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Project details

Project acronym
MobileKids
Project number
676868
Project coordinator: Belgium
Project participants:
Belgium
Total cost
€ 1 499 312
EU Contribution
€ 1 499 312
Project duration
-

See also

More information about project MobileKids

All success stories