Article originally published in New Jersey Family Lawyer Vol. 37, No. 4/February 2017 Practitioners know that joint or shared physical custody is a situation where the parents not only share decision-making authority for a child or children, but share primary caretaking responsibilities so that 365 overnights are split equally, or just about equally. Such an arrangement has been defined to mean a situation where “the child lives day in and day out with both parents on a rotating basis….”1 Under case law, specifically Beck v. Beck,2 a joint physical custody arrangement is disfavored. But there exists in the law a trend of ‘bird nesting,’ whereby one parent vacates the home for a week and the other parent stays in the home for that week, with a rotation each week thereafter, while the children stay in the home at all times. This trend seems to be going in the opposite direction from case law. Download to read more.#birdnesting #custody #sharedcustody #jointcustody