Pick-A-Parent

In the era that followed the 1967 legalization of interracial marriage in the United States, family courts across the U.S. and Canada struggled to account for the racial composition of multi-racial families involved in custody disputes. A number of U.S. court cases from the mid- to late-1970s and the early-1980s dealt with questions about mixed race families and child custody disputes. These cases and those that followed in more recent decades are largely notable for their diversity and inconsistency. In particular, these cases demonstrate the issue of whether to consider race in family court and, if considered, how to consider it fairly (Bratter & Campbell, 2023; Maldonado, 2017). Family arrangements post-divorce are important to study given this often involves dramatic changes in children’s lives. An extensive body of work demonstrates the public’s perception of a bias favoring mothers when assigning custody to children of heterosexual parents post-divorce (e.g., Braver et al., 2011; Dotterweich & McKinney, 2000), a relatively accurate perception of custody case outcomes in recent years. That is, in nearly 80% of U.S. custody cases in 2017, primary custody was assigned to the mother (Grall, 2020), and similar trends are reported from the last decade (Braver et al., 2011). Researchers hypothesize several factors that contribute to this disproportion, specifying gender stereotypes of warmth and competence towards women as well as rates of domestic violence and substance abuse among men (Costa et al., 2019; Pederson & Nielsen, 2020). Importantly, while much work exists to document clear gender biases when predicting child custody decisions, less work exists to clarify the impact of parental race in child custody considerations (Bartlett, 1999; Donohue, 2019; McElroy, 2002). Given the rule of hypodescent, many often predict biracial children to be better adjusted in the primary custody of the parent of a non-White racial background (Kottak et al., 2010). However, custody statutes in the United States and Canada generally do not expressly authorize courts to consider the parents’ racial, ethnic, or cultural background (Maldonado, 2017; Richeson & Nussbaum, 2004). Instead, many scholars agree that courts should focus on the child’s best interests without regard for the parents’ racial or cultural background. The American Psychological Association’s (APA) Guidelines for Child Custody Evaluations in Family Law Proceedings advise psychologists (who often make custody recommendations to the court) to be “aware of their own biases, and those of others, regarding age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language, culture, and socioeconomic status.” Due to this precedent, there is a dearth of research documenting the explicit impact of race on judges’ decision-making processes. Among the general population, however, some recent work demonstrates that members of racial minorities are often actually viewed as better-equipped for teaching children about race-related life struggles compared to White parents (Bunting, 2004; Maldonado, 2017). Participants’ own racial and ethnic identity may also interact with their assessment of each parent when assigning child custody, such that perceivers will prefer awarding custody to members of their own racial group than outgroups due to ingroup favoritism (see Dasgupta, 2004 for a review). Literature addressing ethnic identity’s correlation with ingroup bias in decision-making, especially in judicial settings, is mixed (e.g., Gazal-Ayal & Sulitzeanu-Kenan, 2010; Shi & Tang, 2015), though some evidence suggests that participants with high ethnic identity scores demonstrate implicit ingroup bias when considering personal attributes by categorical race, while participants with low ethnic identity scores did not (Sidanius et al., 2004; Smurda et al., 2006; Verkuyten, 2003). The present study seeks to understand the racial and ethnic factors that may influence custody allocations for biracial children.

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