Shuttle Diplomacy : When parents split, what’s best for the kids? Once, joint custody seemed the answer. Now comes the backlash--because making it work is a tough job.

Loni Austin’s boys have different fathers, each of whom wants to stay involved with his child. But where one boy is happy shuttling back and forth between his mother’s and his father’s homes in the Sacramento area, the other is miserable.

Austin said her 11-year-old has gradually increased the time he lives with his father in a friendly, flexible and informal arrangement. The 8-year-old, the object of a seven-year custody dispute, has been court-ordered to change houses every two days until the case is settled.

“He says, ‘Who will pick me up?’ Can I come home today?’ ” Austin said. “It’s just heartbreaking.”

Hundreds of thousands of children are growing up in divided homes, a result of two decades of widespread divorce and joint-custody arrangements. Laws allowing shared custody--sometimes over the objections of one parent--were adopted by most states before research data was firmly established.

Since then, Austin, hundreds of thousands of other parents and social scientists have come to learn, joint custody can either be the best or the worst situation for children depending on how their parents handle it.

Counselors say fighting adults often can’t separate what’s best for children with what’s best for themselves. Not only are they fighting over their most precious gift with someone they frequently can’t abide, California law uses a complex formula that in part reduces the amount of child-support payments for increased time spent with the children.

“The hard part is, what’s best for the child may not be best for the parent, emotionally or financially,” said psychologist Stan J. Katz, a member of the psychiatric panel for the Family Law Court of Los Angeles. “I’ve had parents say, ‘If you give my wife or husband more time, it will kill me,’ ” he said.

Each year since 1972, a million children have seen their parents divorce. Until the past few decades such children almost always lived with their mothers. A recent study by the National Center for Health Statistics of 19 states showed that as of 1990, 71% of children of divorce were living with their mothers, compared to 15.5% who were shared by parents and 8.5% who were living with their fathers. (The remaining 5% live with other relatives.)

In California, the Office of Family Court Services reports that 58% of mothers retain physical custody; 21% of children spend substantial time with their fathers, and 18% live with fathers.

The greater the antagonism, the greater the insistence by parents on a detailed, 50-50 split, some experts said. “I had a couple want to calculate the percentage of time down to the exact dollar,” Katz said.

Two embattled Los Angeles parents have been granted temporary joint custody while continuing to fight for sole custody of their 3-year-old daughter. “If one person wants to call the shots, what is joint custody? It’s meaningless,” said the ex-wife. “He doesn’t know how to do things unless he gives orders,” she said of her ex-husband.

He said she is so immature he would never consider giving up. “Not in a million years. . . . When she left, she thought I wouldn’t care. Her worst nightmare was me becoming a great parent.”

Meanwhile, transitions are hard on their little girl. “She went through a long time of crying. Now she’s a little bit better,” the father said. The mother said: “She cries, she screams. She has like two personalities.”

In the ‘70s, both fathers and mothers who wanted to share child-rearing burdens after divorce latched onto the findings of psychologist Judith Wallerstein at the Center for the Family in Transition in Corte Madera, which indicated that children felt pain in losing contact with one parent or not having enough time with each.

Moreover, early studies of joint custody looked positive. The reason, said Janet Johnston, the center’s research director, is that the pioneers were often highly educated, committed to making joint custody work and affluent enough to afford two homes.

California’s pioneering 1980 legal standard gave preference in custody disputes to the divorcing parent who encouraged “frequent and continuing contact” with the other. Joint custody soon became more widely implemented, but often for different reasons: to resolve work schedules or the parents’ own conflict, Johnston said. In California, money also has become a frequent factor, experts say.

By the late ‘80s, fathers’ rights activists still favored joint custody, but many women were disillusioned. Not only did mothers see a drop in their standard of living, they sometimes ended up with total responsibility for the children anyway. One-third of children originally in joint custody are often back in sole custody after four years, Johnston said.

Researcher Eleanor Maccoby, a Stanford University psychologist who has studied 1,000 divorced families, said: “We find joint physical custody is an unstable form of custody. It doesn’t last.” Even many of the pioneering couples re-evaluated their arrangements after children entered school, one or the other parent remarried, got a new job or had to move away.

In 1988, California retreated from a position that appeared to favor joint custody, directing judges to first consider the best interest of the child. This year, several bills affecting custody, including one that would bring back a preference for joint custody, were being considered by legislative committee. Several have been tabled until next year.

Meanwhile, courts are still struggling with trying to determine what’s best for children.

Some judges may order joint custody for warring parents, much like exasperated teachers tell squabbling children to take turns regardless of who started it, what may be fair or without knowing how it will work out.

Said Judge Richard Denner, supervising judge of the family law departments for the Los Angeles Superior Court: “The longer I get here, the less confident I get that I know [what best interest means]. . . . We’re not becoming shrinks. But we get exposed to the literature and it is very confusing.” What is more harmful, he wonders, parental absence or exposure to fighting?

Experts talk about heart-wrenching court orders: mothers ordered to hand over breast-feeding babies to violent fathers; school-age children ordered to attend two schools, where they must adjust to new peer groups every week; infants flown across the country for three-month time shares.

“A [very young] child can’t remember the other parent for two or three days, let alone three months,” said Johnston.

Until age 2 or 3, children need at least one uninterrupted primary attachment to develop trust, Johnston said. At 5 or 6, she said, they fall in love with the opposite gender parent and need a loving attachment with both parents. During school age and early adolescence, children often drift toward the same gender parent but don’t want to lose contact with the other.

If children cannot observe a loving relationship between parents, she said they at least need to see “a respectful one, or perhaps a loving relationship with a new husband or wife.”

Johnston, who just reviewed six recent studies of children of divorce, said that at any age, high conflict is worse for children than losing time with a parent.

The type of custody arrangement actually makes very little difference in how children adjust to divorce in 90% of the cases, she said. “The only differences we find are in very high-conflict families where the order was imposed by recommendation or order of the court. Where families continue to dispute, the children look worse with more frequent visitation.

“They are four or five times more likely to be in mental health clinics for emotional disturbances,” Johnston said.

“The worst thing is when parents put kids in the middle of the conflict, asking them to carry messages--’You just tell your dad he’s not going to see you if the child-support payment is late’--or asking them to spy--’Who is at Dad’s house? Did she spend the night?’ ” said Maccoby, of Stanford University.

When parents explode at information such as, “Dad’s got a new car,” children learn not to bring things up. “You get a loss of openness on the part of children,” Maccoby said. For others, powerlessness is an issue.

Some children who have grown up in two homes concede that as long as their parents had to get divorced, two homes are perhaps in their best interests. Others call it a no-win situation.

Said one 10-year-old whose parents have spent more than $400,000 fighting for custody over the past nine years: “You can’t really win when your parents are separated. I want to live with my dad right now, but I know in six months I’d probably want to live with my mom again.” He said the only good thing about shared custody is the frequent-flier miles he’s collecting by traveling from California to New York for summers and holidays.

He wishes his parents lived closer to each other, but knowing that they might fight, “I wouldn’t recommend living right next door,” he said.

He has picked out an apartment building two miles from his mother’s house where his father could live. “I could ride my bike down there. That would be excellent,” he said. So far, though, “No one’s really asked me much what I think of it.”

A brother and sister, who shuttle daily between Mom’s house in Sherman Oaks and Dad’s house in Van Nuys, said they can barely imagine any other way to live.

Raised that way for 11 years, “Jimmy,” 18, has become accustomed to two sets of clothes, two sets of neighborhood friends and two sets of house rules. The same behavior that would cause his father to shrug might cause his mother and stepfather to schedule a visit to the psychologist, he said. “It’s good because I get two different ways to look at every situation. But it’s bad because then I don’t know which way to act. I get confused inside.”

Yet, he said, “If I just lived with my dad, my mom or my stepdad, I wouldn’t have the other piece of me. That’s who I am.”

His sister matter-of-factly described her complex schedule: “I go back and forth every day and Fridays change. If it’s my mom’s weekend, I go to my dad’s on Friday. And if it’s my dad’s weekend, I go to my mom’s on Friday. We switch off on weekends.

“I don’t know what it’s like to have one house. Thinking about being in the same house every day is weird now.”

When she is grown with her own children, she said she wants to see her kids every day. “I don’t think it’s as hard on me as it is for my parents,” she said.

Some parents said they were taken aback by the formidable logistics, the expense and the emotional effort joint custody required.

One Los Angeles father said he still gets upset when he picks up his children, 4 and 6, at his old house, where his ex-wife lives with a new companion. “I get physically ill when I see this guy there mowing my lawn knowing that my children are calling him Daddy.” But he plans to continue the hard-won joint-custody schedule--Monday, Tuesday and every other weekend--until the children are 18, partly to combat whatever negative opinions he believes his ex-wife has about him.

The man also said he lost his job because of his preoccupation with his divorce. He now lives with his parents. Most of all, he said he hadn’t realized that he would still need to be communicating with his ex-wife for so long.

“It’s really bizarre,” he said. “It’s like dealing with someone you don’t know anymore and they’re raising your kids.”

Many divorcing parents need to appreciate the benefits of a good divorce, said family law specialist Ronald M. Supancic of Woodland Hills. “You may have to live longer with the divorce than with the marriage,” he said.

Many ex-couples have managed to devise creative arrangements for the sake of their children.

USC professor Constance Ahrons, author of “The Good Divorce” (HarperCollins, 1994), said one ex-couple bought a duplex and the kids shuttled back and forth. In an arrangement between parents who worked different shifts, the father saw the children after school and three times a week for dinner.

Some parents share the same day--Dad picks the kids up after school, mom feeds them dinner, then they trade off weekends.

A Fullerton ex-couple has devised three joint-custody arrangements so far.

Paul Lusby said he insisted on joint custody after he and Mary Ann Olson divorced two years ago, even though he knew very little about child rearing.

At first, the children stayed with Lusby only 30% of the time while he adjusted to domestic life--switching jobs to find a daddy track, renting a four-seater to replace his RX7, and learning child-care techniques and homemaking from a new companion. He borrowed money to pay his ex-wife more child support than she would have been legally entitled to, he said.

Watching him change, Olson said she became more comfortable relinquishing total physical responsibility.

“Overnight, he became this great father,” she said. “I got the help I’ve always wanted with the kids.”

The first equal time share, a few days at Moms’s house, a few days at Dad’s, was too confusing for the children, they said. Now they switch every week.

They bag up and deliver forgotten clothing, they send medicine along and split doctor bills. Both said they avoid speaking ill of the other. If the children complain about a mommy or a daddy week, they explain that the other parent loves them, too, and that they need to spend time together.

The arrangement is working, but soon Lusby may be moving to reduce his hourlong commute to his Pasadena office. “We’re talking about her finding employment up here,” he said. “It remains to be seen whether Mary Ann and I can work through the restructuring of our arrangement in light of that move.”

Despite their cooperation, the parents said their children, now 4 and 6, still don’t understand why Mommy and Daddy can’t live in the same house.

“The bottom line,” Lusby said, “is there is no good answer to this problem. All you can do is make the best of a bad situation.”