Who Gets the Kid? Child Custody and the Status of Women in Taiwan

Yen-hsin Alice Cheng , Academia Sinica

The status of women in Taiwan has been rising since the 1980s, which can increase positive assortative mating, as empowered women often partner with men who are closer in age and education. This can substantially affect couples’ power dynamics and post-divorce child custody arrangements. While the impact of assortative mating has been studied for a number of family outcomes such as union formation, the division of labor in the home, fertility, relationship quality, risk of divorce, and child development, there has been little exploration as to how it shapes child custody outcomes upon divorce. Along with the 1996 legal reform abolishing the paternal presumption of child custody, there has been limited investigation on the impact of maternal and spousal characteristics on child custody outcomes. Besides, research on child custody arrangements often analyzes court records that exclude a substantial share of consensual divorces. This study aims to analyze the entirety of 661,186 divorce registration records involving children in 2002–2020 that includes consensual, judicial, mediated, and settled divorces. The findings show that child custody arrangements have been changing, and that higher maternal age and education are generally associated with more mother-sole and joint custody decisions. Age and educational hypergamous marriages tend to opt for or be assigned father-sole or joint custody more than hypogamous ones. While women are having more say in post-divorce arrangements, traditional patriarchal practices still have an impact. The findings also rebut the myth that custody rights nowadays have mostly been awarded to mothers after the 1996 reforms.

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 Presented in Session P1. Fertility, Family, Life Course