ASU psychologist wins lifetime achievement award for shared parenting research

For over two decades, Arizona State University Associate Professor William Fabricius has studied the well-being of children from divorced or separated parents, as well as examined shared parenting practices and the involvement of fathers in child-rearing.

Recently, Fabricius was honored for his work with the 2024 Ned Holstein Shared Parenting Research Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Parents Organization.

“Bill’s work not only advances our basic knowledge about shared parenting and child development but also directly impacts policy and community advocacy efforts,” said ASU Department of Psychology Chair Tamera Schneider. “He demonstrates ASU’s innovative integration of institutional goals, effecting meaningful societal impact and change through his research.”

Fabricius spoke with ASU News about his research and how he translated his findings into family law.

Question: What led you to study shared parenting, and how has your background as a developmental psychologist influenced this research? 

Answer: When I started this work with a paper published in 2000, there wasn’t any other research on shared parenting. Up until then, everything that was known about divorce and its effects on children suffered from a glaring problem — it was all based on data collected from only one member of the family, the mother. 

As a developmental psychologist, my primary research is on how children’s minds develop during the early years, using methods that reveal their unique ways of thinking. I could see that the missing perspective of the child was also a glaring problem in research on the effects of divorce. 

For children of divorce, when one parent suddenly becomes an infrequent visitor, it can threaten their security with that parent. To probe this, I submitted survey questions to ASU Psychology 101 students with divorced parents about their living arrangements after their parents separated.  

Very few ASU students from divorced families had equal parenting time with both parents, most wished they had more time with their fathers, and an overwhelming majority endorsed equal parenting time as the best arrangement for children. Over the next four semesters, I repeated the assessments. There was no mistaking the perspective of the children of divorce; their endorsement of equal parenting time bespoke the threat to their security that I had anticipated they would have felt from the loss of time with their fathers.

Q: Can you summarize your research findings about the importance of parenting time on the parent-child relationship and effects on the child’s physical and mental health?

A: In over 35 publications to date, I have worked with many colleagues and students to test the what, when, how and why of the effects of equal parenting time. We use multiple methods in different populations, including 400 ethnically diverse families whom we recruited from the community in a 10-year longitudinal study funded by the National Institutes of Health, and in different family contexts, including high parent conflict, domestic violence, children under 3 years of age, children separated by custodial parent relocation from the other parent and court-ordered shared parenting. The correlational findings consistently replicate and support the hypothesis that equal parenting time protects the security of children’s relationships with both parents.

Our current study uses social science methods that can provide real-world evidence of causality comparable to controlled experimental evidence. Across all 10 years of our longitudinal study, the results show that year-to-year changes in the amount of parenting time with the father lead to parallel changes in subsequent years to the child’s security in the father-child relationship.

When I linked our findings to the broader public health literature, which shows the harmful effect of insecure parent-child relationships on long-term mental and stress-related physical health, it became clear that translating equal parenting time research into family law was more than a matter of legal policy. It was a matter of public health.

Q: This research has real-world implications. How do you get your findings out of the lab?

A: As new findings emerged, I continually shared them with family law communities in more than 40 state and national conferences and invited continuing legal education workshops. I soon discovered that shared parenting could be a fiercely political issue. In early presentations, I was sometimes heckled; in early publications, my scientific integrity was sometimes attacked. Early on I got a good piece of advice: Be dispassionate. It worked, and before long I was trusted enough for the Arizona Chapter of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts to award me their Science and Research Award in 2010.

Q: How has your research informed child custody laws in Arizona?

A: When I was convinced that the evidence for equal parenting time was firm enough, and when we had also found that public opinion across all demographic lines in Arizona was strongly in support of equal parenting time, I convened and chaired a family policy advisory committee at the Arizona Legislature. I brought all sides together to produce a comprehensive reform of the Arizona child custody statutes. Our two bills passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2010 and 2012, making Arizona the first state to do away with the centuries-old custodial parent standard and embrace equal parenting time. The reforms have since stood the tests of time and appellate review.

Q: How have your efforts influenced change at the international, national or (other) state levels?

A: From the beginning, the research had an impact on family law. Our study on relocation influenced the California State Supreme Court in 2004 to reverse its previous lenient policy of allowing relocation of children by custodial parents. The new California policy in turn reversed a national trend that had begun toward leniency in allowing relocations.

In the 12 years since Arizona passed its law, five other states so far have enacted equal parenting time laws, and similar bills are proposed in most states every legislative session. Equal parenting time is a worldwide issue. For example, the government of Japan sent a representative on a fact-finding trip to Arizona in 2019, and he reported on the enthusiasm in our family courts for the new law. On the other side of the globe, policymakers in the Scandinavian countries have invited me on two occasions to speak about the “progressive Arizona equal parenting time law.”

I am now focused on bringing the scientific evidence and the lessons learned by the Arizona family law community about how to make equal parenting time legislation work to policymakers around the world.

Q: Can you explain the significance of receiving the Ned Holstein Shared Parenting Research Lifetime Achievement Award and what it means to you?

A: This award from the National Parents Organization is particularly meaningful to me because it recognizes that the different aspects of my work are all interrelated. I am most proud that it came full circle here in Arizona: Twelve years after I heard the voices of ASU students from divorced families, Arizona courts began presuming that equal parenting time was in children's best interests, just in time for their children to be born into the new paradigm.

Q: What other research contributions are you most proud of?

A: My primary research, which continues in parallel with the equal parenting time research, focuses on how young children develop what is termed a theory of mind. This concept refers to the understanding that people have unseen, internal mental states — desires, intentions, perceptions, beliefs, etc. — that can differ from one person to the next and that cause them to act in predictable ways. The development of theory of mind lays the foundation for children’s healthy social, emotional and cognitive development.

The traditional research methods had led everyone in the field to conclude that children grasped the basic concepts of theory of mind by the time they entered kindergarten. In 2000, I published a theoretical paper that showed how a flaw in the traditional methods could have obscured a crucial, intermediate stage of development, which would mean that children did not understand mental states until several years later and would put the field back to square one in understanding how theory of mind develops. I constructed a new theory of how and when children conceive of mental states, and with a different set of colleagues and students, I set about systematically testing the predictions of the theory, all of which were confirmed. Major publications in 2021 and 2023 formally presented the theory, the comprehensive set of tests, and a new method of assessing theory of mind.

I am proud of the advance in developmental theory that this work contributes, and also of the practical message it sends that we should be careful not to overestimate young children’s social understanding and expect too much of them before they are developmentally ready.