It is known that approximately 43 percent of marriages in America end in divorce. Even though millions of our children's lives are dramatically affected by the family law child custody system, the shifting character of relationships in the United States is having an equally important impact on children's lives. By 1994 approximately 11 percent of children were born out of wedlock, and 40 percent of American children would live with “their unmarried mother and her boyfriend some time before their 16th birthday….” In 1994 of the 18.6 million children living in single-family homes, two-thirds of those children had one parent as a result of divorce or legal separation. Research has also demonstrated a direct correlation between unwed pregnancy or single-parent families and poverty, poor health, child abuse, and juvenile delinquency. It is therefore not surprising that annually there are more than 2.9 million reports of child abuse in this country and that a significant percentage of those reports result in child dependency actions.

Family child custody and child dependency proceedings take up a significant portion of states' judicial calendars. For instance, in California in the 1998–9 fiscal year there were 1,594,807 civil filings. Of those civil filings, there were 155,920 family law cases and 41,890 child dependency proceedings, for a cumulative total of 12.5 percent of all civilly litigated disputes.