Michigan vs. Germany: Why American States Are Passing 50/50 Custody While Germany Can't Even Count

A Hearing That Went Viral — And a Country That Stayed Silent

On April 29, 2026, Michigan's House Judiciary Committee convened to hear testimony on House Bill 5211 — a bill that would establish a rebuttable presumption of equal parenting time following separation or divorce. The room was full. The livestream was watched by thousands. Representative Mike Harris (R-Waterford), one of the bill's chief sponsors, directly confronted opposition witnesses who argued the presumption would harm children, pressing them to cite specific research. Most could not.

Among those who testified in favor was The Dadvocate, a family law content creator with over 555,000 YouTube subscribers, whose appearance lent the hearing a viral dimension unusual for state committee proceedings. The testimony was blunt, data-driven, and personal — a combination that resonated far beyond Lansing. Within 48 hours, clips from the hearing had circulated across every major social media platform.

Meanwhile, 6,500 kilometers east, Germany remained exactly where it has been for the past two decades: no presumption of shared parenting, no automatic joint custody for unmarried fathers, no national data on custody outcomes, and no legislative momentum. The contrast is no longer merely notable. It is damning.

The American Movement: From Kentucky to Everywhere

The modern shared parenting movement in the United States has a precise origin point: Kentucky, 2018. House Bill 528 established a rebuttable presumption of equal parenting time and passed with zero negative votes in either chamber. Not a single legislator voted against it. The law took effect that July, and Kentucky became the first US state to presume that children benefit from substantially equal time with both parents after separation.

What followed was not a trickle but a wave. Arizona codified a "maximize time" standard. Arkansas passed its shared parenting presumption. West Virginia followed. Missouri enacted its own version. By the end of 2023, at least five states had some form of equal parenting presumption on the books.

Then 2024 happened. In that single legislative year, every one of the fifty US states saw the introduction of a shared parenting bill. Every one. The number of states with active presumptions or near-presumptions tripled in roughly twelve months. Bills that had languished in committee for years suddenly found sponsors, co-sponsors, and floor votes. The political calculus shifted because the research had become impossible to ignore and the constituency — fathers and mothers who had lived through the old system — had become impossible to silence.

Michigan's HB 5211 is the latest front in this movement, and its progress through the Judiciary Committee signals that the wave has not crested. If anything, it is accelerating.

What the Research Actually Says

The legislative momentum is not built on sentiment. It is built on an evidence base that has grown remarkably consistent over two decades.

Linda Nielsen's landmark 2018 review examined 40 studies comparing children in shared physical custody arrangements with those in sole custody. Her finding: 34 of the 40 studies showed better outcomes for shared custody children across measures including academic performance, emotional well-being, behavioral problems, physical health, and quality of relationships with both parents. The results held after controlling for parental conflict and income — the two variables most frequently cited by opponents as confounders.

In 2025, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Bergström and colleagues provided further confirmation using large-scale Scandinavian population data. Children in joint physical custody exhibited better well-being outcomes than children in sole custody, and the association persisted across socioeconomic strata and conflict levels.

William Fabricius's research at Arizona State University addressed one of the most persistent myths in custody litigation: that increasing a father's parenting time necessarily comes at the expense of the mother-child relationship. It does not. Fabricius found that equal parenting time strengthened father-child relationships without degrading the quality of the mother-child bond. The relationship is not zero-sum.

Perhaps the most significant document in the field is the consensus report led by Richard Warshak, signed by over 110 researchers and practitioners from multiple disciplines and countries. The paper concluded that the social science evidence supports a presumption of shared physical custody for children of all ages, including children under four — a demographic long treated as categorically unsuitable for overnight stays with fathers, despite an absence of supporting evidence for that position.

Sixty-plus studies. Multiple meta-analyses. A signed consensus of 110 experts. This is not a contested evidence base. This is a field where the science has spoken and the law has not yet caught up — at least not everywhere.

Germany's Position: Frozen in a Previous Decade

German family law operates on a framework that was progressive in 1998 and is now archaic. The Kindschaftsrechtsreform of that year introduced joint custody as the default for married parents upon divorce, but it left unmarried fathers in a remarkable position: they cannot obtain joint custody without the mother's consent unless they petition a court. The mother holds a unilateral veto. In a country where over a third of children are born to unmarried parents, this is not a marginal issue.

The Bundesgerichtshof addressed shared physical custody — the Wechselmodell — in its 2017 decision (XII ZB 601/15), ruling that family courts have the authority to order alternating residence arrangements even over one parent's objection. The decision was hailed as a breakthrough. In practice, it changed almost nothing. German family courts continue to default overwhelmingly to the Residenzmodell, in which the child resides primarily with one parent — almost always the mother — and the other parent receives standard visitation, typically every other weekend.

There was, briefly, a prospect of reform. In January 2025, Justice Minister Marco Buschmann circulated a draft reform of custody and parenting law that included provisions for strengthening shared parenting arrangements. The draft was ambitious by German standards. It was also dead on arrival: the governing coalition collapsed in late 2024, and with it, any legislative vehicle for the reform. The draft sits in a ministerial drawer. No successor government has signaled intent to revive it.

Belgium — a country with comparable legal traditions, a federal structure, and two major language communities — enacted a presumption of shared physical custody in 2006. That was twenty years ago. Germany is not slightly behind. Germany is a generation behind.

The Data Blackout

There is something more troubling than Germany's failure to reform its custody law: its refusal to measure the consequences of the current system.

Germany does not collect or publish national statistics on custody arrangements following separation. It does not track how many children live in shared physical custody versus sole custody. It does not record how much parenting time non-residential parents actually receive. It does not measure outcomes for children under different arrangements. The data simply does not exist — not because it cannot be collected, but because no institution has been required to collect it.

France, by contrast, publishes routine statistical reports on custody arrangements through its Ministry of Justice. The data is public, it is granular, and it allows researchers, legislators, and advocates to assess whether the system is functioning as intended. This is not exceptional. This is what a functioning legal system does.

In 2018, the European Parliament passed a resolution (by a vote of 307 to 211) calling on member states to collect and publish data on custody and parenting arrangements. The resolution was non-binding, but its intent was clear: you cannot evaluate a system you refuse to measure.

Eight years later, Germany has produced nothing. No dataset. No report. No pilot study. The European Parliament's call was not rejected — it was simply ignored. Germany's family courts operate in a statistical void, making consequential decisions about children's lives based on judicial intuition and untested assumptions, while the rest of the Western world moves toward evidence-based standards.

The absence of data is not neutral. It is protective — protective of a status quo that cannot survive scrutiny. If Germany collected the data France collects, it would have to confront how many children have been functionally separated from a fit parent by default rather than by design. The refusal to count is, in this context, a policy choice.

The Irony

Consider the distance between these two debates. In Michigan, the question before the legislature is whether equal parenting time — genuine 50/50 — should be the rebuttable presumption, the starting point from which courts deviate only when evidence justifies deviation. The default would be equality. The burden would fall on the party seeking to restrict a parent's time.

In Germany, the debate — to the extent there is one — is still about whether an unmarried father should automatically share legal custody of his own child. Not physical custody. Not equal time. Legal custody. The right to make decisions about education, healthcare, and religion. Germany has not yet resolved a question that most Western democracies settled in the twentieth century.

Michigan is arguing about the ceiling. Germany has not yet built the floor.

The American system is far from perfect. Rebuttable presumptions can be rebutted for bad reasons. Implementation varies by county, by judge, by the quality of legal representation each parent can afford. Passing a law is not the same as changing a culture. But the direction is unmistakable: the United States is moving, state by state, toward a legal framework that treats both parents as necessary, and the science as relevant.

Germany is not moving at all. And until it starts counting — counting the arrangements, counting the outcomes, counting the children — it will have no basis to claim that its system serves anyone's best interest. You cannot optimize what you refuse to measure. You cannot reform what you refuse to see.

Michigan heard testimony on April 29. Germany heard nothing. That is the gap, and it is widening.