Falken Richter — Rechtsermittlung.de

May 2026 · 10 min read

Across the Atlantic: The Shared Parenting Reform Germany Doesn’t Have

For three decades, the United States has been quietly running the world’s largest natural experiment in shared-parenting legislation — with statutes, peer-reviewed meta-analyses, and a documented civil-society coalition. Germany, the country that invented the cooperative Cochemer Modell, has working groups.

Two Continents, Two Trajectories

If you want to understand why German family law has stalled, look across the Atlantic.

The United States is, in family-law terms, a federation of fifty-one separate jurisdictions. There is no national family code. Each state writes its own custody statute, runs its own family courts, and produces its own data. This sounds like a recipe for chaos. In practice, it has produced something Germany cannot point to anywhere in its own system: thirty years of legislative experimentation in shared parenting, openly documented and openly debated.

While Germany has been holding Fachtagungen (specialist conferences) on whether the Wechselmodell (shared-residence model) might one day be considered as a default, US state legislatures have been writing it into statute — and measuring the results.

The Statutes

The legislative record is concrete and verifiable. It is not advocacy literature. It is black-letter law on the books of US states.

Arizona enacted Arizona Revised Statutes §25-403.02 in 2013, requiring courts to adopt a parenting-time order that “maximises” each parent’s time with the child, consistent with the child’s best interests. The statute does not create a strict 50/50 presumption, but it imposes an affirmative obligation on courts to justify any deviation from substantial shared time.

Kentucky went further. In 2017 the legislature enacted a temporary-custody presumption in HB 492, and in 2018 enacted House Bill 528, codifying a rebuttable presumption that joint physical custody and equally shared parenting time serve the child’s best interests. Kentucky thereby became the first US state to write an explicit equal-time presumption into permanent custody statute.

Arkansas followed. Act 604 of 2021 amended Arkansas Code §9-13-101 to establish a rebuttable presumption that joint custody is in the best interests of the child — a structural change to the state’s default legal posture in custody disputes.

Florida, Missouri, Virginia, and others have weighed similar bills. Florida’s 2016 attempt was vetoed by Governor Rick Scott; the underlying policy debate has continued. Missouri SB 14 (2018) imposed planning requirements designed to encourage shared parenting outcomes. Virginia’s §20-124.2 was amended to direct courts to assure “frequent and continuing contact” with both parents.

This is not, in any sense, a fringe legislative agenda. It is a thirty-year, multi-state, bipartisan record of statutory experimentation.

Germany’s parallel record is: zero states. Zero presumptions. Zero statutes.

The Research

The American legislative push has been accompanied — and in part driven — by a body of peer-reviewed research that German policy debate has largely ignored.

Robert Bauserman’s 2002 meta-analysis in the Journal of Family Psychology aggregated thirty-three studies comparing children in joint-physical-custody arrangements with children in sole-custody arrangements. The finding: children in joint custody were “better adjusted” across multiple measures — behavioural, emotional, academic — than children in sole custody, and were no worse adjusted than children in intact families.

“Children in joint physical or legal custody were better adjusted than children in sole-custody settings, but no different from those in intact families.” — Bauserman, R. (2002), Journal of Family Psychology 16(1).

Linda Nielsen’s systematic review, published in the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage in 2018, examined sixty independent studies of shared physical custody. Across measures of mental health, behavioural outcomes, and parent-child relationships, shared physical custody was associated with equal or better outcomes than sole physical custody — even after controlling for parental conflict and family income.

The Warshak Consensus Report (2014), published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, was endorsed by 110 international researchers and clinicians. It concluded that shared parenting (including overnight time for young children) supports children’s development and that there is “no compelling evidence” for restrictive policies that limit children’s contact with one parent after separation.

None of this research originated with advocacy organisations. It was produced in peer-reviewed psychology and family-studies journals, by university-based researchers, and reviewed under standard scientific protocols.

The German policy debate cites very little of it. The Bundesministerium der Justiz reform discussions of 2023–2024 produced background papers that engaged primarily with German-language commentary — ignoring three decades of English-language meta-analytic evidence.

The Coalition

Beyond statutes and studies, there is a third element of the American picture that Germany has no equivalent of: an organised, multi-stakeholder civil-society coalition.

The National Parents Organization (NPO), founded in 1998, has produced biennial Shared Parenting Report Cards grading every US state’s family law statutes and practices on shared-parenting metrics. The 2019 Report Card found only one state (Kentucky) earning an “A” grade; twenty-two states received a D or F. The methodology — transparent, sourced to statutes and reported case data — has become a reference document cited in legislative hearings.

The International Council on Shared Parenting (ICSP), founded at a Bonn conference in 2014, has held regular international scientific conferences in Boston (2017), Strasbourg (2018), Vancouver (2020), and elsewhere. Its proceedings are published. Its 2017 Boston Declaration, signed by sixty researchers and practitioners from twenty-five countries, articulated an empirical and ethical case for shared parenting as a default starting point.

And in 2026, more than fifty US-based shared-parenting organisations — including state-level affiliates, fathers’ rights groups, mothers’ rights groups, joint-custody nonprofits, and academic researchers — have begun convening as a national coalition. Whatever one thinks of the politics, the infrastructure of shared-parenting reform in the US is real, organised, and unmistakably visible to anyone watching.

The German equivalent does not exist. Väteraufbruch für Kinder is the largest German fathers’ organisation; it has approximately 4,000 members. There is no equivalent of NPO’s state-by-state legal scoring. There is no German shared-parenting research consortium publishing meta-analyses. There is no annual scientific conference. Doppelresidenz Deutschland exists, but operates on a fraction of the resources of comparable US organisations.

A coalition of fifty organisations versus a handful of underfunded NGOs is not a difference of opinion. It is a difference of civil-society capacity.

The Council of Europe Already Said This

None of this is a partisan argument. The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, in Resolution 2079 (2015), addressed the same question for its forty-six member states — including Germany.

“[The Assembly invites member States to] introduce into their laws the principle of shared residence following a separation, limiting any exceptions to cases of child abuse or neglect, or domestic violence.” — Resolution 2079, §5.5.

The resolution was adopted unanimously. It is non-binding. Belgium had already implemented a shared-residence presumption (Loi du 18 juillet 2006). The Netherlands followed with strong default expectations of shared parenting. Sweden has long operated with shared physical custody as the modal post-separation arrangement — reaching approximately 35-40% of separated families with shared physical custody, compared to Germany’s estimated 5% (see our companion article on the Wechselmodell).

The American statutory record — Kentucky, Arkansas, Arizona — converges, by a different route, on the same policy direction the Council of Europe recommended to Germany eleven years ago.

The convergence is not coincidental. It reflects the same underlying empirical evidence base: that children, on average, benefit from substantial continued contact with both parents after separation, absent abuse or neglect.

Why Germany Hasn’t Followed

The structural reasons for German stagnation are documented and identifiable.

Institutional path dependency. The German Jugendamt exercises a degree of practical authority in custody proceedings that the European Parliament has described as “practically binding” (Resolution 2018/2856(RSP), §4). A statutory shared-parenting presumption would constrain that authority — and the institution that benefits from the current arrangement is also the institution consulted on reform.

The continuity principle. The Kontinuitätsprinzip, as applied by German family courts, structurally favours whichever parent has established de-facto residential custody — usually the mother, given pre-separation caretaking patterns and the practical realities of who leaves the household first. Statutes that introduce a shared-time presumption from the outset would disrupt this default.

Data opacity. Unlike US states, which publish custody outcome data through state judicial administrations and Census Bureau Current Population Surveys, Germany publishes effectively no granular data on custody outcomes (see our companion article, What Germany Won’t Count). Without data, comparison is impossible. Without comparison, reform is unattackable from a policy-evidence standpoint — and equally, undefendable.

The reform that wasn’t. The Bundesministerium der Justiz reform proposals of 2023–2024, under former Justice Minister Marco Buschmann, were tabled, debated, and effectively shelved before the coalition collapsed. The Wechselmodell as a default never made it into the draft. As of mid-2026, no comparable initiative is on the legislative calendar.

What This Means

The transatlantic comparison matters because it dispenses with two convenient German excuses.

The first excuse is that shared parenting is “ideologically loaded” or culturally specific — a Nordic peculiarity, perhaps, or an Anglo-Saxon individualist quirk. The American record demonstrates the opposite: shared parenting reform has been pursued by red and blue states, by Republican and Democratic legislatures, and by coalitions that include both fathers’ and mothers’ rights advocates. It is not ideologically aligned; it is empirically grounded.

The second excuse is that the evidence base is insufficient. The Bauserman, Nielsen, and Warshak meta-analyses, taken together, represent one of the most robust empirical findings in family-psychology research. The German policy debate has not refuted this evidence. It has simply not engaged with it.

Germany is not waiting for the evidence. The evidence has been waiting for Germany.

The Real Question

If a federal system of fifty-one jurisdictions can produce, over thirty years, a documented record of statutory experimentation, peer-reviewed evaluation, and organised civil-society coalition-building — what does it say about a unified federal republic that, in the same period, has produced none of these things?

It says that the inertia is not accidental. It says that the institutions that benefit from the current arrangement are the same institutions consulted on reform, and that the data which would allow public scrutiny is the data which is not collected.

It also says that the German public, and the German Parliament, are owed a substantive answer to a question that has been postponed for a generation: why does Germany, alone among major Western democracies, refuse to even debate shared parenting as a starting default?

The Council of Europe asked this question in 2015. The European Parliament asked it in 2018. American state legislatures have answered it, in their own way, thirty-three times. Germany has not.

Falken Richter is an investigative journalist covering institutional transparency in European family law. This article is part of a series examining systemic issues identified by the European Parliament and the Council of Europe.