Another “shared parenting initiative” is up for consideration, this time in North Dakota.

Shared parenting means different things in different states and to different people.

Florida has adopted shared parenting and, here in Florida, shared parenting refers to legal parenting responsibility and decision-making authority.

Physical custody or residential parenting is not bundled up in shared parenting in Florida.

The initiative in North Dakota appears to require equal timesharing between parents as the default arrangement.

And it just may be a first.

Florida calls that equal timesharing arrangement by the termrotating custody – because the child rotates between his or her parents’ homes at regular intervals.

The interval may be a week, a month, a year – or any regular interval that works for the parents.

Sometimes the parents live close by each other, other times far away. That may bear on the interval chosen.

In Florida, at least until recently, rotating custody was only implemented in cases where both parents agreed to it.

North Dakota, by contrast, appears to be adopting rotating custody, at intervals determined case-by-case basis, as the standard – unless one of the parents is unfit.

An editorialist at the Bismark [ND] Tribune, in the piece ‘Turn down initiative on child custody’ weighs in on the initiative with:

[T]here are flaws. There is a mechanical approach toward custody, a calculation of so much time the children must spend here, an equal period of time there. If the parents want the period to be a six-month bloc, what kind of life is that for the kids?