Divorces are generally never easy on the children, especially if things turn a little nasty and mom and dad throw some choice words around.

Then there’s all the shuttling and shunting from house to house, shared custody meaning the young’uns became well-versed in the art of packing an overnight bag.

The tide is beginning to turn however, as something called bird’s nest custody becomes increasingly popular. The Telegraph runs through the basics:

[It is] a shared custody arrangement for divorced and separated couples. The children live in one house, while their parents move in and out around them. It is thought to have originated in 2000 in the US, when a Virginia court agreed that the best solution for two young children involved them staying in their family home…

With bird’s nesting, parents do the moving and have to experience the inconvenience instead.’ There are no statistics available to indicate how many UK families have adopted this child-centred approach,  as parents agree on it out of court, but [family lawyer Margaret] Hatwood knows of several families with bird’s nest custody arrangements  and predicts it could be on the rise, as  more divorced couples move away from ‘traditional’ set-ups.

Of course a set up such as this requires a degree of trust and understanding between the parents, something Hatwood stresses:

‘Parents would need to draw up a list of boundaries and set out quite clearly in emails what the rules were before they started. They’d need to be respectful with the other person’s private information as well.

‘There would have to be a fair degree of trust, because the person whose full-time home it is could find it quite intrusive to have the other person in it.’

I suppose as long as you have two mature and willing parents this could work well, although I imagine if one parent enters into a new relationship it could result in some uneasiness.

I wonder if the ‘birds nest’ approach will ever take off here in SA?

[source:telegraph]