January 5, 2015
On Dec. 21, The Milford News in Milford, Massachusetts, ran an op-ed written by National Parents Organization Founder and Board Chair Ned Holstein, MD, MS, titled “The advantages of shared parenting.”
“After decades of child development research, this year, three different groups of experts reached the same sweeping conclusion: shared parenting after parental separation or divorce has substantial positive effects on the development of children,” Holstein wrote in the op-ed.
His piece continued, “It is exciting to learn that after years of frustrating failures, there is something we can do about educational failure, substance abuse, violence, bullying, sexual assaults and diseases, depression, and a host of other problems of at-risk children. Federal statistics show that 35 percent of our children are growing up in single parent households with little input from the other parent and that this is exactly the group in which most serious behavioral problems of children arise. So the shared parenting solution targets exactly the children who are most at-risk. All we need to do is get the family courts to order shared parenting instead of sole custody as its default option, and we will have far fewer troubled kids . . . The bad news is that National Parents Organization’s Shared Parenting Report Card shows that legal obstacles must be overcome before we can make full use of what we now know.”
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