Joint physical custody (JPC), a parental care arrangement in which children live with each parent about equally after separation or divorce, is an increasingly common phenomenon in many countries. This is a major shift away from the standard of sole physical custody (SPC), in which children live primarily with one parent (usually their mother) after family dissolution. Although attention to JPC by social scientists is growing, and the effects of this arrangement on children’s well-being are the subject of highly ideological debates, there is currently little empirical evidence with statistical power on JPC. Using data from Family Models in Germany (FAMOD), a survey of postseparation families conducted in 2019, we estimated four linear regression models for children aged 2–14 in SPC and JPC families, with analytic samples of up to 1,161 cases. We investigated the association between physical custody arrangements after separation or divorce and four dimensions of children’s well-being: psychological, physical, social, and cognitive/educational. The bivariate results provided support for the hypothesis that children living in JPC families fare significantly better than children living in SPC families on all four dimensions of well-being. However, after controlling for a set of child, parent, and separation characteristics, as well as for the quality of family relationships, the differences between children from SPC and JPC families disappeared. Additional analyses revealed that the parent–child relationships fully mediated this association. In sum, the quality of family relationships accounted for the positive association between JPC and children’s well-being in this study.
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