When you’re facing divorce and custody issues in Maryland, you may be struggling to find the right custody balance for your child. Child custody is sometimes hard to decide, but now, science allegedly has the answer. According to a report from Feb. 27, physics may be able to solve custody battles.
According to the story, if you’re a person with shared custody of children with multiple ex-spouses, then physics may be able to help you plan your complicated custody schedules. This physics explanation came about simply because the lead author was struggling to arrange custody of his children with two exes to coincide with the custody of his current partner’s children. If done right, they could have all the children on the same weekends, every other weekend.
The study, which was published in The European Physical Journal B, presents a mathematical solution to the issue. A mathematical model is drawn, and when the network of families is fewer than five, you can arrange the custody times to be with the same couple or person all at the same time. In this case, it would be every other weekend. This model only works if all couples and exes can work together, of course, and the study also assumed that all people involved were heterosexual. This custody arrangement would also assume that all the children got along, which may not always be the case.
A follow-up to this study may happen if the researchers are able to get more demographic data on those with custody issues. If the findings have merit, this method could be used by judges to make the best arrangements for the children and for the parents. For now, there are no particular rules in these cases, but it’s hoped that this model could help in the future.
Source: Pacific Standard, “Can Physics Solve Custody Battles?” Bettina Chang, Feb. 27, 2014
