Child Custody Arrangements
No matter where you live, custody decisions are supposed to be guided by one central question: what arrangement serves the child's best interest? Courts and mediators weigh the whole family picture rather than any single factor — each parent's relationship and history with the child, each parent's ability to provide a stable and safe home, the child's ties to school and community, each parent's willingness to support the child's relationship with the other parent, both parents' health, any history of violence or substance abuse, and, as children get older, their own preferences.
Most states also split custody into two categories that are easy to conflate. **Legal custody** covers decision-making authority over things like education, healthcare, and religious upbringing. **Physical custody** (often called "parenting time") covers where the child actually lives day to day. Either can be awarded solely to one parent or shared jointly, and it's common for parents to share joint legal custody while one has primary physical custody. A growing number of states — Arizona and Kentucky among them — have moved toward presuming roughly equal parenting time when both parents are fit, though this still isn't the rule in most states, and outcomes continue to depend on the specific family.