Choose a bill. The map shows where that kind of law has passed, where a bill is moving, and where nothing has been introduced. Double-click your state to find your representative and senators, then write them about moving family court reform forward.
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Across the full stack
Passed and in progress count every state law in the stack. A state still needs a bill when none of these bills has been introduced or signed there. Select a number to see the bills and states it includes.
We won’t see any change unless we bring a chorus of grassroots voices from people who have been affected by the family courts in their current state. If we want reform, we must reach out to our local and federal senators and representatives about making the family court system more equal.
If your state already has bills in progress to reform the family court system, please contact your state representatives and senators and ask them to support the bill.
Go to .
Double-click your state.
Click your county.
Follow the link to your rep you would like to contact.
Write them a kind, non-partisan email, or call them and quickly explain your story and why you are seeking family court reforms.
When you call or email a legislator, you usually have about two minutes. These are the rules for using them.
Keep your story to about two minutes
You only have about two minutes to tell your personal story. Don’t overload them. One clear example is enough. If you walk through every hearing and every setback, it is easy for them to lose interest before you say what you want.
Never be partisan
Do not pit one side against the other. Being hyper-partisan generally only makes you enemies of one side or the other. Talk about the problem and the bill. Leave the party fight out of the call and the email.
Be kind and professional
Speak as if you were talking to a coworker. Be polite to the legislator and to the staffer who picks up. Kind and professional is how you get another conversation.
Ask if they support your platform
Ask them directly whether they support what you are asking for. If you are asking them to take action on a bill, ask them to follow up with you. A yes, a no, or a promise to look at it is more useful than a friendly call that ends with no commitment.
Ask for a short Zoom call
Ask if they could grant you 15 to 30 minutes on Zoom to speak about the issue or the bill. A short meeting is a specific request, and it gives you more time than the two minutes you get on a first call.
Tell them you will follow up
Let them know, kindly, that you will follow up with them again. Then do it. A polite second note keeps the conversation going.
Never frame the issue as a men’s or women’s issue
Men and women, fathers and mothers, are both affected by this issue, and both are seeking reforms in the family courts.
Find the senators and representatives for your county on the map. Their profile has the phone number and email.
A short list of advocates working on family court reform. YouTube and Facebook are listed when that advocate has a public page.
Two changes in the 1970s built the family court people meet now. States dropped fault as the price of a divorce. Congress then paid states to collect child support and to fund foster care, and it told those courts which procedures to use.
How the court took shape
Courts for children came first. In 1899 Illinois opened the first juvenile court, in Cook County. Within two decades nearly every state had one. Those courts heard delinquency and neglect. They did not hear divorces.
In 1914 Hamilton County, Ohio, put divorce, support, and children’s cases in one division of the Cincinnati court of common pleas. A federal Children’s Bureau study later called it the first family court in the country to hear both. Other cities copied the idea. In 1959 three national groups published a Standard Family Court Act, a model for one court and one staff for a family’s legal problems.
Statewide family courts arrived just before the 1970s. Rhode Island’s Family Court Act became law on June 3, 1961, the first statewide family court. New York’s Family Court opened on September 1, 1962. Hawaii added a family court in 1965. Most states never created a separate family court. Divorce stayed in the ordinary trial court. What changed in the 1970s was the law those courts applied, and the federal money attached to the orders they signed.
No-fault divorce
For most of American history a divorce required proof of fault. The usual grounds were adultery, cruelty, or desertion. One spouse had to prove the other was to blame. If both wanted out, couples sometimes staged the proof.
California went first. On September 5, 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Family Law Act, Statutes of 1969, chapter 1608. It took effect on January 1, 1970. Fault grounds were replaced with dissolution for irreconcilable differences that have caused the irremediable breakdown of the marriage. One spouse can say the marriage is over. The other does not have to agree, and neither has to prove a wrong. That rule is still California Family Code §2310.
Most of the other states followed during the 1970s. In 2010 New York became the last state to add a no-fault ground. Every state now has one. Some kept fault grounds beside it. The decision to end the marriage no longer requires a finding that one parent harmed the other.
The divorce exodus
Filings surged in the same years. Through the 1950s and early 1960s the country saw fewer than 400,000 divorces a year, about 9 to 10 for every 1,000 married women. In 1965 there were 479,000 divorces, or 10.6 per 1,000 married women. By 1975 the number had passed one million. The peak was 1980: 1,189,000 divorces, or 22.6 for every 1,000 married women. That is the divorce exodus. The count of people leaving marriages more than doubled, and the cases landed in court.
The climb had already started in the mid-1960s, before California’s law took effect. Researchers still debate how much of the rise came from no-fault statutes and how much was already underway. One careful study found a sharp rise in the years after a state allowed one spouse to divorce without the other’s consent, and found that rise fading within about a decade. The statutes did something that is not in dispute. They let either spouse end the marriage without a fault trial. The door out of a marriage became a filing, and the filing became a family-court case.
A clean break
No-fault opened the door. It left the money inside an open case. Spousal support can run for years. Custody and support orders can be modified again and again. Each return to court is more of the same case.
A clean break routes that exit so it can finish. The court divides property and sets a time for the spouses’ financial claims on each other to end. England and Wales wrote the duty into law in 1984. Section 25A of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 tells the court to consider ending each spouse’s financial obligations to the other as soon as that is just and reasonable. If the court orders ongoing payments, it must consider limiting them to the time a person needs to adjust without undue hardship.
Support owed to a child stays its own order. A clean break is about the adults. It turns the divorce into a completed separation: the property is divided, the adults’ claims on each other close, and the family is off a standing docket of alimony hearings and modifications. Some American states already limit alimony to a term meant for rehabilitation. A clean-break rule would make that the question in every case. Can these two adults be finished with each other’s finances, and on what date?
Title IV-D
Title IV-D is the federal child-support program. Congress created it in Public Law 93-647, signed on January 4, 1975. The purpose in the Social Security Act is to enforce support owed by a parent who does not live with the child, to locate that parent, to establish paternity, and to obtain child support and spousal support. The services are available whether or not the family receives cash assistance.
The federal government pays the program in two ways. It reimburses 66 percent of allowable state and county spending, with no ceiling. It also pays an incentive under 42 U.S.C. §658a, a share of a national pool. Five scores divide that pool: establishing paternity, establishing support orders, collecting current support, collecting arrears, and cost-effectiveness. The dollar base under those scores is the child support the state collects. Collect more, and the base is larger, and the incentive is larger. States may contract with local courts to do this work. Allowable court costs are part of the spending Washington matches, and the incentive has to be spent back on the program.
Later statutes wrote the support order itself. The Child Support Enforcement Amendments of 1984, Public Law 98-378, required every state to adopt child-support guidelines as a condition of keeping its federal plan. Those first guidelines had to be available to judges. They did not bind them. The Family Support Act of 1988, Public Law 100-485, made the guideline amount a rebuttable presumption. The figure the guideline produces is presumed correct unless the court makes a written finding that it would be unjust or inappropriate in that case. The same act required income withholding, so support comes out of wages. State support law took that shape because the federal money depended on it.
These are bad incentives. Where a guideline counts overnights, the parent who has the child most of the time receives support, and the parent limited to visits pays it. A near-even split lowers that transfer. A court that awards one parent full custody and the other a visitor’s schedule awards the larger payment. Local courts set that order under agreements with the child-support program. When the larger payment is collected, the county’s collections base grows, and the federal incentive grows with it. The order that makes one parent the custodian and the other a paycheck is the order that brings the county more federal money.
The same arithmetic reaches the parents. The parent who holds the child, and holds the other parent to a few visits, is the parent the guideline assigns the support. A false allegation is a way to get a court to order that split and to keep the child away. The support formula counts who has the child. Withholding the child raises the order. The federal incentive then counts the dollars that order collects.
It also reaches the people who write the rules and run the calculators. County and state offices set the guidelines and work the cases. Their federal incentive grows with dollars collected, and the cost-effectiveness score compares collections with the cost of the program. A high earner with a large order moves those numbers more than a parent who is already short of money for a child. The measure points the rule makers and the calculators at the highest-paying cases. The cases where a family is having the most trouble paying for a child do the least for a county’s federal funding.
The funding mechanics, and a call to action for federal representatives, are on the Washington, D.C. page.
Title IV-E
Title IV-E is federal foster care and adoption assistance. Congress created it in the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, Public Law 96-272, approved on June 17, 1980. For an eligible child in foster care, Washington reimburses maintenance payments at the state’s Medicaid matching rate, at least 50 percent. Administration is matched at 50 percent. Training is matched at 75 percent.
The payment depends on findings a judge makes. Staying in the home must be contrary to the child’s welfare, and, in general, the agency must have made reasonable efforts to keep the child there. The federal money is tied to the placement, for as long as that child remains in paid care. In 1974 the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, Public Law 93-247, had already offered grants to states that built child-abuse reporting and response systems. Together, those laws pulled child-protection cases into a federally funded court process.
In 2018 the Family First Prevention Services Act, part of Public Law 115-123, opened some Title IV-E money to certain services while a child is still at home, and it limited federal payment for some group-care placements. Foster-care maintenance is still paid for eligible children who have been removed.
What the 1970s left in place
The court at the end of that decade could end a marriage without a finding of fault. It then set a support order under rules Congress had required, collected through a program Congress paid for, and, in a child-protection case, made the findings that release foster-care funds. State custody bills still matter. So do the federal statutes. The map shows where the state bills stand.
Your federal representatives vote on Title IV-D and Title IV-E. Their names are on your county panel, under U.S. senators and U.S. representatives.
Go to .
Double-click your state.
Click your county.
Find your federal representatives.
Contact your federal representatives and ask them to address the pain caused by Title IV-D and Title IV-E.
Or, go to capsmovement.org and use their handy contact forms to write your senators and legislators about Title IV-D and Title IV-E.
Statistics
What the research shows
Children who spend real time in both homes tend to do better than children in the sole care of one parent. The reviews below count studies, not headlines. The advantage is real. It is not huge. And it does not apply where a child needs protection.
34of 60 studies
Joint custody did better on every measure.
40earlier studies showed
Even in higher-conflict families, shared parenting had better outcomes for children.
75%of 39 studies
Shared custody matched outcomes for children in intact families.
86%in state polls
Average support for a rebuttable presumption of 50/50 custody.
Linda Nielsen, 2018
Across 60 studies, joint custody came out ahead
Each square is one study comparing joint physical custody with sole physical custody. Joint custody means the child lives in both homes.
34 Better on every measure
14 Better on some measures, equal on the others
6 Equal on all measures
6 Worse on only one measure, equal or better on the rest
The edge mostly held where researchers took family income into account, and where they took parental conflict into account.
An earlier review of 40 studies found the same pattern
Children in shared physical custody had better emotional, behavioral, and physical health, and better relationships with both parents. That pattern showed up in higher-conflict families too.
Emotional health
Behavioral health
Physical health
Relationships
Shared time meant at least 35 percent with each parent. Filled dots are the studies that used a 50/50 split.
50/50 split · 24
Shared time, at least 35% · 16
Linda Nielsen, “Shared Physical Custody: Summary of 40 Studies on Outcomes for Children,” Journal of Divorce & Remarriage (2014). doi.org/10.1080/10502556.2014.965578
Baude, Pearson, and Drapeau, 2016
A small effect, larger with more time in both homes
A meta-analysis of 19 studies found better adjustment in joint custody than in sole custody. The overall effect was small.
d = 0.109
00.2small0.5medium
The effect was stronger when children spent more time in both homes.
Baude, Pearson, and Drapeau, “Child Adjustment in Joint Physical Custody Versus Sole Custody: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Journal of Divorce & Remarriage (2016). doi.org/10.1080/10502556.2016.1185203
Vowels and colleagues, 2023
Shared custody, next to growing up with both parents
A review of 39 studies from 2010 to 2022 compared intact families, shared physical custody, and lone physical custody.
75%
In 75 percent of the studies, children in shared custody had outcomes equal to children in intact families.
Absent abuse or neglect, the evidence supports shared living arrangements for children under 4.
Overnights were linked to greater father commitment and less father dropout.
No studies showed a net risk from overnights.
Richard A. Warshak, “Social Science and Parenting Plans for Young Children: A Consensus Report,” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law (2014). doi.org/10.1037/law0000005
Researchscape polls, 2019–2023
Public support
Independent polls in about 20 states. Support held across party, sex, and income.
87–95%
0100
Said it is in a child’s best interest to spend as much time as possible with each parent after separation.
86%
0100
Average support for a rebuttable legal presumption of shared parenting.