I just read a piece out of the Law Society Gazette about Kentucky changing its child custody default to 50-50 shared parenting, and then watching divorce drop.
If you want a clean lesson in how society works, there it is.
Back in 2018, Kentucky passed a reform that starts custody cases with the assumption that both parents should have equal rights and equal parenting time, unless there’s evidence that would put the kid at risk. It replaced the long-standing presumption in a lot of places where “primary custody” usually meant mom, and dad got turned into a weekend visitor.
And after that?
According to reporting cited in the Gazette (and attributed to the Wall Street Journal), divorce filings in Kentucky dropped by roughly 25 percent in the years after the law took effect.
That’s not a tiny wiggle in the data. That’s a cultural shift you can see in a chart.
Am I saying one law “fixed” marriage? No. People are complicated. Economics are complicated. Culture matters.
But incentives are real. And family court incentives have been rotten for a long time.
Family court became a custody casino
For decades, a lot of states ran on an unspoken rule: mom is the default “real parent,” dad is a “helper” who needs permission.
Now, some families choose that setup, and that’s their business. Voluntary agreement is fine. The problem is when the state rigs the starting line, then acts surprised when people strategize around it.
Because when the state hands out a default winner in divorce, you create a prize fight.
If one parent believes divorce means they “win” the kids, win the home base, win the support structure, and reduce the other parent to a visitor who pays for the privilege, you’ve basically turned a family breakup into a legal jackpot. It’s like putting a slot machine in the kitchen and acting shocked when somebody pulls the lever.
And the divorce industry knows this. The lawyers know this. The system runs on conflict.
So when Kentucky changed the default, they changed the payout.
When the rules change, behavior changes
The Gazette’s summary gets to the point: clearer expectations around custody outcomes can reduce incentives for prolonged legal disputes, and reduce the perceived “reward” of divorce when kids are involved.
That’s not romance, but it is reality.
Libertarians say it all the time, and we keep getting proved right: people respond to incentives.
The Fed “stimulates” with cheap money, and surprise, you get asset bubbles and malinvestment. Welfare programs penalize marriage, and surprise, you get fewer intact families. Family court rewards custody warfare, and surprise, you get more warfare.
So Kentucky removes a big part of the custody advantage game, and divorce filings drop.
Tell me that doesn’t make you wonder how many divorces weren’t really about “we grew apart,” and were more like, “I can do better in court.”
This is a lesson for society: stop normalizing family destruction
I’m not here to shame everybody who got divorced. Some situations are unsafe. Some relationships are genuinely broken. Life happens.
But as a society, we’ve spent decades pretending divorce is always “just a new chapter,” like it’s switching gyms or changing phones. That’s insane. Kids aren’t furniture you split down the middle. A family isn’t an app you delete when it gets annoying.
And here’s the bigger point nobody wants to say out loud.
When families fall apart, the state moves in.
Not because the state is loving. Because the state is hungry.
More fractured households means more dependency, more bureaucracy, more caseworkers, more court dates, more “programs,” and more taxes. It’s like hiring the fire department to mow your lawn: expensive, slow, and you’ll probably lose your house in the process.
Keeping families together isn’t just a moral point. It’s a freedom point.
Strong families are a shield against the state.
Why shared parenting matters, even if you hate the court system
I don’t like the government being in the family business at all. I’d rather adults handle adult problems, voluntarily, with community and faith and friends, not court orders and threats.
But if we’re going to have family courts, the default should not be “pick a winner and sell the loser a visitation schedule.”
Kentucky’s law built a rebuttable presumption: joint custody and equally shared parenting time is treated as the starting point. If that presumption shouldn’t apply in a given case, the court can rebut it with evidence. That matters, because it shifts the system from “fight for the prize” to “show why this case is different.”
That’s a healthier baseline than a setup that silently assumes one parent is more important just because of gender, tradition, or vibes.
And it sends a signal to married couples too: if you split, you’re not going to “win” the children. You’re going to share them. Like you should have been doing all along.
“But what about abusive situations?”
This is where the conversation has to be honest.
A shared parenting default raises a serious concern: what if a parent is violent or controlling? What if the other parent fears leaving because they think the court will still force a split custody arrangement? That’s not a hypothetical. Domestic violence is real, and the state has a long history of failing to protect the vulnerable while pretending it’s doing exactly that.
The reporting referenced by the Gazette includes criticism from domestic violence advocates and social workers who worry about a one-size-fits-all presumption.
They’re not crazy to worry.
But here’s the thing. The solution is not to keep a biased default that treats one parent like a secondary citizen. The solution is to do what courts claim they do already: evaluate facts, demand evidence, and protect kids when there’s actual danger.
Kentucky’s framework still allows the presumption to be rebutted. The law also directs courts to consider domestic violence and child welfare factors. Safeguards on paper only matter if they work in practice, so if states adopt shared parenting, they should also tighten up enforcement against proven abuse and make sure protective orders and evidence actually get weighed.
Libertarian view here is simple: due process matters, and individualized facts matter.
A default of equal parenting time makes sense when both parents are fit and loving. It does not mean we play dumb about violence. It means we stop treating one sex as the automatic parent and the other as the automatic risk.
The deeper point: incentives shape culture
The part that hit me wasn’t even the policy detail. It was the outcome.
A 25 percent drop should make every serious adult pause.
Because it suggests something uncomfortable: a lot of couples were one custody advantage away from pulling the plug.
And that means we’ve trained people to think marriage is a vibe, not a vow.
Shared parenting laws might reduce the weaponization of divorce. They might cut down the legal blood sport. They might lower the temperature.
But they can’t rebuild the habits that keep a marriage alive. A statute can’t teach forgiveness. A judge can’t teach patience. A custody presumption can’t teach commitment.
That part is on us.
If you want to keep families together, you need a few things that government cannot manufacture:
- A sense that vows matter, even when you’re mad
- Community support that isn’t a state program
- A willingness to work through problems before lawyers get involved
- A culture that respects fathers and mothers as equally necessary
And yeah, I’ll say it plainly: kids need both parents, when both parents are safe and present. That shouldn’t be controversial. The controversy comes from a system that profits when families turn into opposing legal teams.
My bottom line
I’m not pretending Kentucky is perfect. I’m not pretending every case fits a neat 50-50 split. Life is messy.
But Kentucky’s shift is a reminder that policy incentives shape behavior, even behavior as personal as whether people stay married. If you reward conflict, you get conflict. If you remove the jackpot, fewer people pull the lever.
If that nudges even a slice of couples to pause, get help, and stay together for their kids, then yeah, that’s a lesson worth learning.
Because keeping families together is not just sentimental. It’s social stability. It’s mental health. It’s the difference between raising confident kids and raising kids who feel like they got traded in a legal settlement.
Electing a new politician to “fix the family” is like swapping deck chairs on the Titanic and calling it a rescue mission.
But changing the incentives that turn divorce into a prize fight?
That’s at least a move in the right direction.
Sources
- Shared custody law is followed by other US states (Law Society Gazette)|https://www.lawsociety.ie/gazette/top-stories/2025/september/shared-custody-law-followed-by-other-us-states/
- KRS 403.270 (Kentucky Revised Statutes)|https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id=51299
- 18RS HB 528 (Kentucky General Assembly bill record)|https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/18rs/hb528.html
- Divorce Plunged in Kentucky. Equal Custody for Fathers Is a Big Reason Why. (Wall Street Journal)|https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/the-equal-custody-experiment-41e1f7a6
- Shared Parenting (National Parents Organization)|https://www.sharedparenting.org/shared-parenting
- State incentivized custody in Ireland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdmZKK8E81U
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