ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Americans think about and make postdivorce child custody arrangements beginning with a certain discomfort at the use of the word custody in this context at all. Child support usually represented only a small fraction of the custodial mother's total post divorce household income. Children in loving single-parent families, gay or lesbian families, or families made up of three generations also develop a sense of their own agency in the world. It is the child's relationships with intimate others, not residence in a sentimental household, that conveys this and the other benefits of family life. The chapter aims to approximate the sentimental family in post-divorce arrangements is badly misguided, as it is based on mistaken views about both the perils and the promises presented by family reconfiguration. It claims that standard custody arrangements foreclose the possibility of seeing the post divorce family as a source of special benefits for children.
