Shared custody between mums and dads – 50/50 – is found most often today among more well-off families. | Photo: Madelon Verdoorn

Fathers get two weekends a month plus part of the school holidays, while the mother gets everyday life and everything else. For many years, this was the norm for child custody when parents separated in Switzerland. But today, this model seems to be slowly on the way out. For several years now, alternating custody has been becoming more important. The federal government has also meanwhile revised the provisions in the Swiss Civil Code that deal with the responsibilities of joint care on the part of both parents. Since 2017, the Code has explicitly stipulated that one parent or even a child can request, of their own accord, that a court or the relevant authority should examine the possibility of alternating custody. All the same, egalitarian family arrangements such as this are taking their time in becoming established. Genuinely 50/50 solutions in which children live half of the time with their father and the other half with their mother remain extremely rare.

However, it’s difficult to obtain precise figures on the prevalence of shared custody. For one thing, no generally recognised, legally binding definition of the concept exists. The usual interpretation in Switzerland today is that children in shared custody should spend at least one third of their time with each parent. But surveys of the official regulations tell us little about actual, practical arrangements for it. “There is a considerable discrepancy between the custody arrangements agreed by the parents or ordered by the court and the reality in practice”, says Heidi Stutz of the Office for Labour and Social Policy Studies (BASS) in Bern.

In a BASS study co-run by Stutz, 40 percent of the parents surveyed stated that they had established alternating custody. “But in only just over a third of these cases do their children actually spend at least a third of their everyday time with each parent”, says Stutz. As for the rest of the cases, the vast majority of children are with their mother.

Nevertheless, Stutz insists that it would be incorrect for us simply to blame this discrepancy on conflict or on a lack of willingness on the part of parents. “Even if the public perception often focuses on custody disputes, such cases rarely come before the courts”. Parents normally manage to find agreement on this topic. “This is also because their life circumstances and the division of responsibilities before the separation usually don’t leave them much choice when it comes to finding a solution”.

“The biggest obstacle to more egalitarian custody”, says Stutz, “is an inability to reconcile the demands of family and career”. Shared custody is a costly, demanding solution. Not only do both parents have to earn enough for each to be able to afford an apartment where their children can go about their everyday lives, but it ought also to be equally possible for both parents to assume their childcare duties on a flexible basis.

French-speaking Switzerland is more egalitarian

This is why shared custody is most likely to be found among more well-off families today, where the traditional role distinctions between husband and wife in any case tend to be blurred. More mothers tend to remain in employment when they have been well-educated, have a greater number of working hours each week, and earn more than women from lower socio-economic backgrounds. At the same time, fathers from this segment of the population are more likely to have jobs that will allow them to organise their working hours on a flexible basis, or to reduce their workload.

This model also seems to be rather better established in French-speaking Switzerland than is the case in German-speaking Switzerland, as Stutz has also noted in a further study on the topic. “In French-speaking Switzerland”, she says, “mothers with a higher workload still remain in employment. Childcare provision is better developed there, and cheaper too”. In this, the cultural influence of their neighbouring country, France, probably also plays a role. There, it’s socially far more acceptable for mothers to remain in full-time employment than is the case in Switzerland.

“The social and political conditions necessary for the widespread implementation of shared custody just aren’t in place in Switzerland today”, says Michelle Cottier, a professor of law at the University of Geneva. This isn’t just because of gender-specific inequalities of opportunity, unequal pay in the labour market or the poor range of childcare facilities on offer. It’s also because of social norms. “The family continues to be seen as the woman’s principal area of responsibility, while having a career is the domain of men”, says Cottier in a literature review she has co-authored on the topic. Integrating mothers in the labour market and getting fathers involved in the family sphere are issues that remain of secondary importance. “Sometimes, a desire for more egalitarian custody arrangements falls through simply because the father doesn’t receive written authorisation from his employer to stay at home with his child in the event of illness”, says Stutz.

Cottier is critical of the contradictory nature of Switzerland’s family policies. Parents living together are offered hardly any incentives to share their responsibilities equally – but if they separate, the state expects a 50/50 split in their responsibilities regarding custody and finances. It is illusory to think that separated or divorced parents could be compelled to practise an egalitarian family model simply by order of a court or the authorities. “Even cohabiting couples who want to organise their lives like this are unlikely to succeed in it”.

Shared custody is rarely demanded

Stutz and her team have undertaken an evaluation of the court practices of several Swiss cantons with regard to shared custody. In the course of their work, they also investigated a recurring suspicion on their part that the courts (or, rather, court officials with an overly traditional understanding of the division of parental responsibilities) are what stand in the way of getting fathers more involved. But Stutz’s survey didn’t find any such tendencies. In fact, over the course of their evaluation, from 2021 to 2022, the courts received hardly any applications from fathers alone who wanted to examine the possibility of shared custody. “So it’s not as if fathers have been bombarding the courts with such requests since the law was revised”.

Cottier even thinks there’s a danger that shared custody is being interpreted too dogmatically by the courts. The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) conducted a study in which they presented court officials with fictitious scenarios of psychological and physical violence against a partner in a relationship. But they found that even in such a situation, the officials would sometimes order custody to be shared. “This form of custody really needs parents who are willing and able to manage conflicts appropriately”, she says. And in cases where one parent has engaged in violence towards the other, shared custody only exacerbates the situation. “There is still a lack of awareness here, and people aren’t being trained properly”.

Everyday life is crucial

“Innovations in family law are often bound up with hopes that we’ve finally found solutions to all our problems”, says Cottier. While positive experiences have been made in many cases, she believes that they have merely convinced officials that every child is best off with shared custody after a parental separation. But a glance at the research literature from other countries just doesn’t confirm such a generalised assumption.

This is why both Cottier and Stutz advise against holding up shared, alternating custody as some kind of ideal or normative model. It’s more important, says Stutz, to construct an individual solution from the broad range of possible custody arrangements available – one that best meets the diverse needs of a family (not least because those needs can also shift over time) and that also takes the wishes of the children into account. And she points out that “the custody model favoured by the parents isn’t necessarily the arrangement that best suits their child”. But she has also found in the course of her research that both parents normally remain crucial to their children as caregivers, even after a separation. According to Stutz, it’s not the exact share of custody that’s important for a child’s well-being: “What’s vital is that both parents remain actively involved in their children’s lives”.