By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Something is shifting in American family law, and it’s moving faster than the courts would prefer.
This week alone: Mississippi’s governor has until Monday to sign a bill making 50-50 custody the default in every divorce case in the state. Rhode Island’s House Judiciary Committee heard testimony Thursday on its own equal parenting bill — introduced by a Democrat. South Carolina’s Equal Parenting Act is working through the Senate Judiciary Committee. California, Alabama, and Ohio all have active bills in various stages of progress.
This is not a fluke. It is a movement, and it is winning.
How We Got Here
For decades, the default outcome in American custody cases has been functionally the same regardless of the state, the judge, or the circumstances: one parent gets primary custody, the other gets every other weekend and a Wednesday dinner. Call it the standard arrangement — a relic of an era when mothers stayed home, and fathers were the sole breadwinners, preserved long past the point when either assumption remained true.
Family courts never formally decided this was the right outcome. They just kept doing it, dressed up in the language of judicial discretion and the elastic standard of “best interest of the child” — a phrase capacious enough to justify almost any outcome a judge preferred.
The equal parenting movement is a direct challenge to that inertia. Its argument is simple: if both parents are fit, the child’s relationship with both parents matters. The burden should not fall on a parent to prove they deserve equal time with their own child. Courts should start from equality and require documented justification to depart from it.
The States That Have Already Moved
Kentucky led the modern wave, establishing a strong equal parenting presumption that has now been in effect long enough to study. The data is favorable — litigation rates dropped, conflict declined, outcomes for children improved. Arkansas followed in 2021, West Virginia in 2022, Florida in 2023, Missouri in 2023. Oklahoma strengthened its provisions in 2024.
Mississippi would become the sixth state with a full mandatory joint custody presumption if Governor Reeves signs HB 1662 by Monday. The National Parents Organization’s 2025 Shared Parenting Report Card found that while a handful of states have made significant progress in recent years, most legislatures still haven’t moved — meaning the map is still mostly blank, and the momentum is still building.
What’s Moving Right Now
The breadth of current activity is what makes this moment different from prior years.
Mississippi’s HB 1662 passed both chambers with strong Republican support. It creates a rebuttable presumption of equal parenting time, requires courts to document their reasons in writing when they deviate, and replaces the old child support formula with an income-shares model that reflects what shared parenting actually looks like financially.
South Carolina’s Equal Parenting Act goes further than most — it packages the equal parenting presumption together with Guardian ad Litem accountability reforms, explicitly requiring GALs themselves to presume equal parenting is in the child’s best interest. That’s a meaningful addition. GALs are often the single most influential actor in a contested custody case, and their recommendations frequently drive outcomes. Binding them to the same presumption as the court closes a major loophole.
Ohio’s Senate Bill 174, which passed the state Senate in November 2025, would require parenting plans and establish a policy favoring continuing roles for both parents. It’s currently awaiting action in the House Judiciary Committee.
And then there’s California’s AB 1978, the Equal Shared Parenting Act. California introducing this bill is worth pausing on. This is not a red-state phenomenon. The argument for equal parenting — that children benefit from relationships with both parents, that judicial discretion produces arbitrary and inconsistent outcomes, that a structured presumption reduces conflict and litigation — is crossing ideological lines because the evidence supports it regardless of politics.
Rhode Island’s equal parenting bill was introduced by a Democrat. That’s the tell.
The Resistance Is Running Out of Arguments
The standard objections to equal parenting legislation are well-worn: it endangers children in domestic violence situations, it ignores the “best interests” standard, it strips judges of necessary flexibility.
These arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny, and the bills themselves rebut them. Every equal parenting bill currently active includes explicit carve-outs for documented domestic violence. Every one maintains judicial discretion to deviate — it simply requires judges to explain why, in writing, on the record. The “best interests” standard is not abandoned; it is structured. The presumption is rebuttable.
What the resistance is actually defending is unchecked discretion — the ability of a judge to award whatever custody arrangement they prefer, for whatever reasons they prefer, with no obligation to justify it. That’s not a feature of a fair system. It’s a bug.
The equal parenting framework doesn’t eliminate judgment. It anchors it. It says: start from equality, and if you’re going to depart from it, tell us why.
What Comes Next
The legislative map will look different a year from now. Mississippi may sign this week. South Carolina, Ohio, Alabama, and Rhode Island are all in play. California’s bill — if it passes — would be the most significant development in the movement’s history, both in terms of population affected and symbolic weight.
The National Parents Organization and allied groups have been building state-level infrastructure for this fight for years. The research base has accumulated. The political coalition — parents, primarily, across party lines, who have been through the system and know what it costs — is growing.
Family courts have operated for decades behind a veil of closed hearings, sealed records, and deference to judicial discretion that insulated them from the kind of accountability applied to virtually every other institution in public life. The equal parenting movement is, among other things, a demand that family courts produce consistent, explainable outcomes — that the rule of law mean something inside a courtroom that decides how much time a father or mother spends with their child.
That demand is not going away. The wave is here.
Father & Co. covers family court policy, parental rights, and the legal systems that shape American families.
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