Beyond the Binary: Rethinking Shared Parenting in Kinship Care

Background and Purpose

Shared parenting, where adults collaborate to support childrearing, has been identified as a promising practice in child welfare to strengthen familial social support networks and, by extension, outcomes. However, little empirical research has explored how family members understand or practice shared parenting or how social workers and other child welfare workers can facilitate shared parenting. The few available studies on shared parenting have primarily explored family members’ viewpoints on shared parenting, which, while valuable, is limited in its understanding of how child welfare workers’ own perspectives may affect their case practice. We present new data and theorization of the concept of shared parenting, developed through collaboration by social work researchers and practitioners.

Methods

The current analysis is part of a broader study of a kinship care intervention being implemented in Macomb County, Michigan. This project uses enhanced kinship caregiving and shared parenting supports to improve child outcomes.

Our study engaged both staff (n=19) and kinship caregivers (n=4) in in-depth interviews to understand how they define shared parenting, their experiences with shared parenting, and perceived barriers and facilitators to successful shared parenting. Authors analyzed interview transcripts using iterative content analysis and thematic mapping to develop a novel understanding of shared parenting definitions.

Results

Three major findings emerged through this analysis. First, our findings identify that a key barrier to the practice of shared parenting is its binary construct; that is, that most participants’ definitions categorized shared parenting as either possible or impossible. To explore the potential for a “middle path” of “partial shared parenting,” where parents facing common barriers to participating in childrearing could be offered creative solutions to contributing to parenting, we analyzed participants’ operationalization of the term. We found in some cases creative solutions were developed collaboratively by child welfare workers and families to respond to the specific needs and contexts of families.

Finally, definitions of shared parenting were mapped onto a spectrum ranging from “mechanistic” to “relational” where definitions varied primarily by how the participants conceptualized responsibility for shared parenting (i.e., whether it falls on parents, kinship caregivers, or both).

Conclusions and Implications

These findings show that (1) even among a relatively small group of staff and service recipients involved in a single intervention with training and active engagement in shared parenting, a wide range of definitions of the construct can be found; and (2) that the varying factor across the spectrum of definitions was who (parent or kinship caregiver) was ultimately responsible for childrearing. These findings reveal that the social work practice necessary to support shared parenting, particularly in the face of barriers common in “partial” shared parenting, may be undermined by an over-focus on who is responsible for parenting rather than how parties sharing responsibility collaborate to raise children. Further study of the operationalization of shared parenting is necessary to match practice recommendations to real world conditions and the experiences of families involved in the child welfare system, which can best be done when researchers and practitioners collaborate.