Divorced, but still sharing the family home

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When Kathleen Brigham and her then-husband, Jim, decided to divorce, she proposed an unconventional living arrangement: Instead of shuttling their three children back and forth between homes every few days, they would let the kids stay put. The parents would take turns living with them.

Brigham and Jim drew up an informal custody agreement for the children, who were ages 4, 9 and 12 at the time. Most days, she stayed with them in their New York City apartment, while he lived in a smaller place within walking distance. After work on Wednesdays, he came over and she went to stay at a friend’s empty apartment or with family. They each got a weekend day alone with the kids. Then they shared a meal together on Sunday nights.

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“It was really about the three kids and not about us,” Brigham said. “I was just trying to find any way I could soften the blow.”

The arrangement, commonly known as “birdnesting,” aims to reduce disruption in children’s lives while their parents are going through a split. Although divorce rates have declined in recent decades, there are still plenty of couples calling it quits. In 2023, more than 1.3 million Americans ended a marriage, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Of course, no two divorces are alike. From the “conscious uncoupling” popularized by actress Gwyneth Paltrow and musician Chris Martin, to the mutually assured destruction of marriages that end in emotional and financial wars, divorce experiences are all over the map. Leo Tolstoy had it right: Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

But for ex-couples who find themselves more on Paltrow’s gentler end of the splitsville spectrum, nesting really can work.

Before nesting, Brigham and her soon-to-be ex established strict rules for every potential issue they could think of. They committed to punctuality, promising to show up – and leave – at their appointed time. They agreed to always leave the shared space as clean as they found it. He would bring his own food or order out, instead of eating food she had purchased. He would sleep on a pullout and not enter her bedroom. They wouldn’t look through one another’s mail, electronics or other private things. And no other adults were allowed in the home unless they discussed it ahead of time.

“Setting those rules was really important,” she said. “Little things become big.”

The arrangement made her uneasy at first. She sometimes felt vulnerable and judged when he came to the house. What if he noticed new furniture and wondered where the money came from to buy it? Would he listen to her phone conversations when they were both at the house?

“It’s not for everybody,” Brigham said. “A lot of people read about it and think, ‘I can do that.’ But when you’re in it, you have to settle in this complete discomfort. I don’t think I ever got to the point where I thought it was really easy.”

She would leave the house 15 minutes before Jim’s scheduled arrival times to avoid an awkward interaction. The kids were with a sitter. She stayed in a friend’s apartment nearby for the night, but woke at 5 a.m. to return and help them get ready for school so he could go to work. It was a grueling schedule, she said, but focusing on the well-being of the children carried them through.

If approached with care and a spirit of cooperation, nesting can give children time to adjust to the new state of affairs while their parents go through what can be the most stressful time in their lives, said Ann Gold Buscho, a family therapist in Marin County, California, who advocates for nesting, so long as the parents can work together peacefully.

Buscho, who helps her clients determine whether nesting might work for them, has first-hand experience with the practice. In 1994, long before “birdnesting” entered the cultural lexicon, she and her former spouse split time living in a house with their children. Like many divorcing couples, their financial futures were uncertain, so they waited until they had more clarity before purchasing their own places. When not at home with the children, Buscho rented a room in a house with five other people, while he stayed with another woman with whom he had a relationship.

“He and I agreed on one thing, which was that we wanted to protect our kids,” she said.

She was in her 40s and found herself bunking with several housemates as though she were back in college. It was uncomfortable and required her to swallow her pride. Shuttling between houses left her feeling unsettled, but she figured it’s better for her to bear the brunt of the discomfort than her three children. The arrangement lasted 15 months, which gave both the adults and kids a chance to adjust to the new life, she said.

Nesting can take many forms, especially for people in diverse financial situations. Off-duty parents often stay with friends or family, on an office sofa or in an Airbnb. One father Buscho encountered lived in a church with permission from his pastor. Some parents agree to share an off-site apartment and trade spaces every few days, although that’s uncommon. Others might reconfigure an attic or garage as an auxiliary unit for the off-duty parent, but that can be confusing for the children, she said: “Daddy’s here, but we can’t see him?”

The arrangements don’t have to last long, although in rare cases, it becomes a way of life that works for people for years.

Lori Badach and her ex-husband began nesting from their Buffalo-area home in February 2023 when their children were 13 and 10 years old. They’re still doing it. They originally agreed to split responsibilities, but she ends up staying with the kids most school nights. He stays with his father when he’s off-duty; she bunks with her sister. When they occasionally overlap in the house, he takes the guest room and she sleeps in the primary bedroom.

Although they are separated, they have been able to maintain trust in one another, Badach said. They travel together, on family vacations and for the kids’ sports teams, and they still celebrate holidays as a family. The arrangement sometimes perplexes friends who struggle to understand how divorced people can continue to cooperate and coordinate schedules. Some might have a hard time grasping it, but focusing on the children and keeping their lives largely the same as it was while the marriage was intact helps, she said. While she’s happy to talk about it, she doesn’t feel the need to justify it to suspicious onlookers.

It has gone so well that Badach has resisted opportunities to change the status quo. She recently considered buying a condo, but when she considered how well her kids were doing, she passed.

“My motto is it will work until it doesn’t,” she said.

The key to maintaining the health of any nesting arrangement is communication, Buscho said. Every detail and contingency should be sorted out, in writing, before starting. Parents should agree on the condition of the house when the other leaves. They should make a plan for how the bills should be split and who should pay them. They should even hammer out how they will communicate. How much notice should they give when they want to end the nesting? What kind of food should be in the pantry? Who will change the linens? Who will do the dishes?

Sometimes these conversations can be difficult and awkward. Can the divorcing couple bring new boyfriends or girlfriends back to the nest? Buscho worked with a couple who didn’t have a plan for new relationships. The woman found a used condom in the bedroom and the arrangement fell into disarray.

“If they had discussed that ahead of time, it never would have happened,” Buscho said.

Nesting isn’t for everyone. Divorces are, after all, lawsuits – and the process can be cutthroat as both sides ready themselves for emotional warfare. Sharing a physical space during this time could spell disaster.

Christine Leatherberry, adjunct professor and assistant dean for administration at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, has cautioned clients interested in nesting about the potential pitfalls. She advises that they only proceed under strict rules and for only a few months, at most.

Often it’s little things that end up eroding the agreement. People fight over the cleanliness of the house, whether the refrigerator is stocked or where the other person put the television remote.

In particularly contentious divorces, the shared space can create temptation for sabotage. Leatherberry said she has seen couples that accessed private financial information on electronic devices left out, or private chats on a shared cloud. Electronics, she said, are “where we see the most problems.” Some people snoop through garbage or place hidden cameras in bedrooms. In one extreme case, a colleague worked with a couple in which one parent put an illegal substance into the other’s shampoo bottle to frame them before a drug test.

“It can go awry very quickly,” Leatherberry said.

Nesting can also prolong the difficult process of accepting the change that comes with divorce, said Lynn Waldman, a collaborative divorce counselor in San Diego.

“It’s harder for the parents to emotionally separate. Especially if it’s the family home, then they’re coming back every few days,” Waldman said. “They’re not able to really move on with their own separate life. Each parent should be able to have the opportunity to develop their own routine, their own roots in their own home, develop memories and traditions with the kids on their own time.”

Still, nesting can work, especially when it’s only meant for a brief season of life. On some occasions, it works out so well that it can last long after the divorce papers have been signed.

As her children grew, Brigham and her ex-husband continued an evolving form of nesting for several years. She later married another man, a divorcé who also nested with his children. They bonded over their shared experience and chronicled it in a co-authored 2022 book. Brigham received a certificate in divorce mediation and now works as an adviser to help divorcing couples draw up a detailed plan for their split.

Among her clients, she said, 80 percent show interest in nesting, but only about half of them go through with it.

But, given the benefits to her growing children, her own “six years of uncomfortable cohabitation,” as she put it, were worth it.

“For our kids it really made a huge difference,” she said. “It allowed them to just be.”

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Chris Moody is a writer based in Boone, N.C.

07-09-2025 10:53AM