What parenting problems occur during joint custody?
Joint custody can be a challenge because parents have very different parenting styles usually. The child goes to one family, or one parent, and that parent is likely to be more of a disciplinarian or coming from an authoritarian model. "I make the rules and you got to obey the rules". This is a common occurrence, and at the other parents home it's anything goes. So the former parent is - you got a bedtime and this is what you're going to eat and when you're going to eat it, and the rules are all very laid out. At the other parents home the child goes to bed when they fall asleep in front of the television, they eat anything they want to eat, they don't have normal healthy boundaries. Now, this is a child that's coping, this isn't a child that's adapting particularly because both of them by my standards are very poor parents. Now we have modern parenting styles that avoid the rigidity of the authoritarian parent, that's one of the poorest ways of parenting. But what lot of parents have done is the pendulum has swung way over into permissive parenting, where they permit and allow the child to do all kinds of things that are not developmentally appropriate for them, and they don't have boundaries. The parent has gone into a permissive style where whenever the child is upset with them they feel that they're not being loved, and so on. It's a crazy thing.
