According to Ned Holstein of the National Parents Organization shared parenting should be implemented as a rebuttable presumption in a manner that creates incentives for parents to cooperate in raising a child.
He believes that, “Mental health professionals can play a very positive and satisfying role in this transition. They should already be counseling their patients in troubled relationships that their children will more likely do better with shared parenting, as hard as that may be for the parent to accept given the anger and hurt during separation and divorce. Professional efforts currently devoted to identifying a sole custodial parent on the basis of small differences in parental abilities may instead be used to help parents navigate cooperative parenting or parallel parenting. It will be far more satisfying to help families make the adjustments that result in more harmonious post-nuclear-family relationships, and to see happy children as a result, than to assist the court in picking winners and losers. Any shared parenting legislation should provide for the financing of post-court family counseling services, which in one way or another can replace the funds currently used for custody evaluations.”