Dividing the Child

Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody

Paperback

ISBN 9780674212954

Publication date: 08/19/1998

Questions about how children fare in divided families have become as perplexing and urgent as they are common. In this landmark work on custody arrangements, the developmental psychologist Eleanor Maccoby and the legal scholar Robert Mnookin examine the social and legal realities of how divorcing parents make arrangements for their children.

Praise

An important book for those concerned with family policy: it clarifies the connections among various factors involved in the dissolution process with care and concern...[It] should...assist in refocusing divorce from reform efforts toward the difficult issues of enhancing cooperation and easing adjustments to lives after divorce.

—Alice Hearst, Law and Politics Book Review
Maccoby and Mnookin have provided the first look at what the sweeping legal changes in custody arrangements since the 1970s mean for the daily lives of divorced parents and their children today. Authoritative, rich in insight, it is a report from the postdivorce front that everyone concerned about the future of the American family should read.

—Andrew J. Cherlin, Johns Hopkins University
Adds significantly to current knowledge about the roles of law, culture, and psychology in shaping the economic and parenting systems in postdivorce families...Gives a fascinating picture of divorce in process and the interplay between formal legal and informal practical arrangements.

—Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, Contemporary Sociology

Authors

Eleanor E. Maccoby is Barbara Kimball Browning Professor of Psychology, Emerita, at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University.
Robert H. Mnookin is the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Director of the Harvard Negotiation Research Project. Before joining the Harvard faculty, he was the Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation. He has served as a consultant to governments and international agencies and is the author of Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate and When to Fight.