The post-separation well-being of children and parents. What roles do physical custody arrangements and stepparents play?

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the relationships between different types of post-separation families (physical custody arrangements x stepfamily status) and parents’ and children’s well-being. Using data from waves 3–12 of the German Family Panel, random- and fixed-effects regression models were estimated for two analytical samples of 1,199 resident parents and 1,129 children aged 7–17. No statistically significant relationships between physical custody arrangements and parents’ depressiveness and life satisfaction were found, but living with a partner was shown to be positively related to parental life satisfaction. Neither physical custody arrangements nor stepfamily status were related to children’s mental and physical health.

KEYWORDS:

• Child well-being
• German Family Panel
• joint physical custody
• parental well-being
• post-separation families
• sole physical custody
• stepfamilies

Acknowledgments

This paper uses data from the German Family Panel pairfam, coordinated by Josef Brüderl, Sonja Drobnič, Karsten Hank, Franz Neyer, and Sabine Walper. Pairfam is funded as a long-term project by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Pairfam was approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Cologne.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at GESIS Data Archive https://doi.org/10.4232/pairfam.5678.12.0.0