This book challenges the emerging consensus that equally shared living arrangements (shared parenting) are generally in the best interests of the child (BIC) whose parents are not a couple.
In a lawscape where joint custody is deemed to serve the best interests of the child, shared parenting arrangements have emerged as the gold standard for parental involvement, purporting to ensure both the child’s welfare and substantive parental equality. This book argues that such arrangements conflate full co-parental involvement with shared living arrangements, obscuring the central role that shared decision-making for the child (joint legal custody) plays within joint custody. Combining legal-dogmatic analysis with comparative, socio-legal, and law-in-action perspectives, the book draws on over 800 judgments to expose how this conflation produces ‘dis-joint’, rather than joint, custody. It investigates three distinct legal approaches to the best interests of the child in Europe (exclusive, integrative, and pluralistic), analysed through selected representative jurisdictions (Italy, England and Wales, and Belgium). The book argues that the contemporary favour for shared parenting is a family-law manifestation of a broader mechanistic paradigm in private law, producing what it identifies as the post-monistic legal family: a legal framework that formally abandons patriarchal and adult-centric hierarchy while reproducing its distributive logic beneath a neutral, egalitarian surface. The book delivers a crucial warning: shared parenting prioritises formal equality over the substantive best interests of the child, undermining child-inclusive joint custody in favour of parental interests.
This book will be of interest to researchers in the field of child welfare law, divorce law, custody and family law.
