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Supreme Court of the United States · 2000
530 U.S. 57 (2000)
Fit parents have a fundamental due-process right to direct the care, custody, and control of their children; a court reviewing a fit parent's decision (e.g., on third-party visitation) must give it special weight and may not override it merely because a judge would decide differently.
Some later courts have distinguished or questioned it — read before relying.
Treatment last confirmed July 18, 2026. Case-wide subsequent treatment; human-set. Not specific to any one passage.
Children in joint physical custody (living roughly 35% or more of the time with each parent) tend to show equal or better behavioral, emotional, academic, and relational outcomes than children in sole physical custody, and outcomes similar to children in intact families; but the evidence is observational and subject to selection, so joint custody is not established as beneficial for every family — particularly under severe ongoing conflict or family violence.
Whether frequent overnight separations from a primary caregiver affect attachment security and adjustment in infants and toddlers is genuinely contested: some studies link frequent overnights to greater attachment insecurity and dysregulation in the youngest children, but the effects are small, inconsistent, and better explained by parental conflict and caregiving quality than by overnights themselves — so the science supports neither a blanket pro- nor anti-overnight presumption.
Involved (non-custodial) grandparents are associated with modestly better grandchild adjustment — fewer emotional and behavioral problems and more prosocial behavior — with the protective association strongest in single-parent, divorced, or high-adversity families; the evidence is correlational and confounded, effects are small, and custodial grandparent care shows the opposite association, driven by the adversity that necessitated it.
The relationship between young children's screen media use and development depends far more on content, context, and co-use than on screen time alone: background and non-educational TV are associated with weaker language and cognition, while educational programming, co-viewing, and later onset are associated with neutral or positive outcomes; raw "screen time" is a weak and inconsistent predictor, and most evidence is correlational.