Is "Nesting" a Good Option for Divorced Couples?

I can clearly remember the first time I heard the word “birdnesting” as it relates to custodial time for children. It was almost 20 years ago. I was a young lawyer—out of my New York Legal Aid position and into my new private practice—and, at my new firm, the lawyers on the case and the clients had gathered in the small office of the children’s attorney to try to hash out a settlement. While we were in a lull in the negotiations, the attorney for the children and I had a conversation about our thoughts about various parenting schedules, and she said, “I really like birdnesting.”

It was the first time I had heard of this concept, more frequently referred to as "nesting," and I was intrigued because, under a nesting framework, it is the parents who travel away from the primary residence (“the nest”) instead of the children. In sum, Parent A leaves the nest when Parent B is scheduled to be with the children and Parent B leaves the nest when Parent A is scheduled to be with the children. While I first heard about nesting in the beginning of my career, it is only in the last five years that it has become a more common topic that clients with children of all ages raise as a potential solution to their custody matters. This is similarly noted in the January 2023 article written by my fellow Psychology Today contributor, Dr. Ann Gold Buscho, Nesting During Separation or Divorce: A Trending Topic? in which she describes nesting as a trending topic.

If you ask people, whether they are divorced or children of divorce, a nesting schedule sounds logical and in the best interests of children. In theory, nesting mitigates the impact of the parents’ separation and divorce on the children. In theory! In my experience, nesting should be the exception and not the rule for both psychological and financial reasons.

Nesting Prolongs Close Contact Between Exes

Nesting forces parents, who have decided to end their relationship, to co-exist in the same space. Some people have enough space in their family home that one parent can move into an extra room, but many do not, which means that both parents have to sleep in the proverbial marital bed, and most parents have to share the same personal spaces (bathrooms, kitchen, working space) and the food, household items, and furnishings therein long after the divorce paperwork has been signed.

To do this well requires the highest levels of respect, cooperation, and courtesy between former spouses, which is aspirational but not realistic. Divorce is not fun—whether you were able to reasonably resolve your issues through mediation or you were in a knockdown litigation in court—it is impossible to maintain the best version of yourself at all times in a divorce proceeding. If your spouse never picked up a wet towel when you were living together, imagine the fury you will feel when you come home to your kids only to find your now ex-spouse’s wet towels all over the place. Continuing to share space with your former partner may sound like a good idea at the beginning of your divorce but, when it’s over, you’re likely going to want your own space.

Nesting Can Be Complicated for Children

Nesting can initially take the burden off children—they can leave their sports equipment and backpacks in one place. However, the logistics and dynamics of nesting can make the reality of the family’s situation more complicated for children to process and much easier for them to engage in magical thinking that their parents are still together. Further, in a nesting model, the parents can experience newfound freedom when they are not parenting and they may move on romantically. But the children, who are not privy to their parents’ new independence outside of the nest, may be stunned to learn that a parent has a new romantic relationship. If little has changed for the children, it can be disorientating and even hurtful for them when they realize how much has changed for their parents without them.

Nesting Can Have Hidden Costs

When an "off-duty parent" leaves the nest, the parent needs a place to go. Few families have enough funds to secure two new residences—one for each parent—on top of the marital residence, so most parents are either at the mercy of friends and family with extra space or they obtain another shared residence where, again, they are forced to share personal space with their former spouse, which is less than ideal.

Deciding if Nesting Is Right for Your Family

There are situations where the family’s circumstances or economics make nesting the most appropriate choice. Many divorcing couples nest for a short period of time at the beginning of the divorce process. Having made the difficult decision to end their marriage, they want or need some separation from one another. Finances and custody can be addressed for an interim period, providing stability for the children who don’t need to know that their parents are separating, while giving the parents space from one another to digest and process their next steps and work on a global resolution of their divorce.

Parents should critically evaluate whether nesting makes sense for their family. It is worth considering, especially in the beginning, but it is extremely difficult to sustain and may backfire, resulting in negative consequences for the parents and their children.

Importantly, in any family where domestic violence, coercive control, or surveillance/privacy issues were present during the marriage, nesting post-separation will be fertile ground for these behaviors to continue, sometimes insidiously, and should be avoided as much as possible.