What nobody has studied yet
Every page on this site is built by reading the statute or the study and quoting it. Doing that for six hundred and fifty pages turns up something nobody writes down: a list of the things everyone repeats that turn out to have no source at all. Here are 12 of them, with what we found instead.
This is not a list of things we failed to look up. Those get flagged on the page where they belong, in the reader’s view, and we go back for them. This is a list of claims where we went looking properly and the research is genuinely not there, or where the honest answer is that the experts disagree. Two of these were given to us by researchers who told us plainly that nobody has studied the thing yet.
Repeated everywhere, sourced nowhere
Where you will have seen it. Repeated across divorce advice sites, coaching pages and self-help books.
What we found. We could find no peer-reviewed study, no government source and no named researcher using this formula or reporting evidence for it. It appears to be an invented rule of thumb that spread because it sounds plausible and offers false precision.
What is actually known. The resilience-trajectory research finds most people recover faster than the formula implies and a minority struggle far longer. Neither group is doing it wrong.
A named expert says the research does not exist
Where you will have seen it. Raised with us directly by Dr Patricia Papernow, Ed.D., 31 August 2026.
What we found. A child whose stepmother may be doing everything right cannot look at her without feeling disloyal to their mother. Dr Papernow says she has never seen this studied, in almost five decades in the field, and that in her experience it often intensifies when daughters reach adolescence, for reasons she does not yet understand.
What is actually known. There is good research on stepchild rejection generally and on denigration between parents. The intersection, which is where the harm she describes actually lives, has not been done.
Repeated everywhere, sourced nowhere
Where you will have seen it. Books and stepfamily sites variously say eighteen months, two years, or four to seven years.
What we found. We could trace none of those numbers to research. What the research does support is the sequence, not the timetable: connection before correction, with the child rather than the calendar setting the pace.
What is actually known. Ganong, Coleman and Jamison on the six patterns of stepparent and stepchild development describe how the relationship forms without putting a clock on it.
Repeated everywhere, sourced nowhere
Where you will have seen it. Property sites, mortgage lenders’ blogs, personal finance columns.
What we found. We went looking for the study behind it and there is not one. It is a heuristic that has been repeated until it acquired the texture of a finding.
What is actually known. The honest answer is that maintenance cost varies enormously with the age, type and condition of the house, and that a survey of the actual building beats any percentage.
A folk idea, not a finding
Where you will have seen it. Universal in popular writing about divorce.
What we found. It is a folk construct. We could find no dedicated peer-reviewed literature on the pattern itself.
What is actually known. Amato and Gilbreth’s meta-analysis found that frequency of contact alone predicted little, while authoritative parenting and payment of support both predicted child wellbeing. That is the real finding, and it is more useful and less comfortable.
Repeated everywhere, sourced nowhere
Where you will have seen it. Widely recommended in divorce coaching and family mediation writing.
What we found. No rigorous empirical source, and no quantified practitioner consensus we could verify. We are not able to tell you either the typical duration or the outcomes.
A gap in provision
Where you will have seen it. Frequently referred to in general terms.
What we found. We looked and could not identify one that is currently operating in the United States. The one candidate that surfaced appears to be UK-based. This is a gap in provision rather than a gap in research, and it is worth naming as one.
Not written down anywhere we can read
Where you will have seen it. Almost every page that lists crisis resources describes them simply as confidential.
What we found. We could not find a written policy from any of the major hotlines stating exactly when they do this. So we do not tell readers those lines are unconditionally confidential, because we do not know that they are.
Real, but not peer-reviewed
Where you will have seen it. A clinical framework from Stephanie Sternes, LMFT, described on her own site and used by Dr Papernow.
What we found. It describes something real that experienced clinicians recognize immediately. It has no peer-reviewed definition. The nearest established constructs are conflictual co-parenting and co-parental gatekeeping, and neither captures it exactly.
What is actually known. We publish it as a clinician’s framework with the definition quoted and attributed, rather than as a research finding.
No instrument, no protocol
Where you will have seen it. Family courts, custody evaluators, reunification and reconnection therapists.
What we found. Dr Papernow’s account is that court processes do not recognize stepparents, that family law professionals are not trained to assess stepparenting, and that the great majority do not know effective stepparenting and effective parenting are different things. There is no established instrument or protocol for it.
Evidence too thin to rely on
Where you will have seen it. Court-ordered, commercially provided, and expensive.
What we found. The evidence base is thin and the field is commercially active. The main published outcome study of one prominent program was conducted by a person connected to it, and investigative reporting has documented coercive practices at some camps. We are not able to tell you these programs work, and we are not able to tell you they are safe.
The experts do not agree
Where you will have seen it. Quoted constantly in writing about stepfamilies.
What we found. Two of the field’s most senior researchers have written to this site and do not agree about it. We have published the disagreement rather than picking the number we prefer.
A named expert says the research does not exist
Where you will have seen it. One of the largest unbudgeted costs in a contested custody case, and one of the first questions people ask.
What we found. We asked the National Center for State Courts. Alicia Davis, JD, Principal Court Management Consultant in Research and Systems Design, told us there are no national standards: each court, sometimes at state and sometimes at local level, sets its own appointment practices and rates. Asked whether any national survey has measured what these appointments cost families, she said she was not able to say authoritatively that none exists, but that she has looked for this information at other times and been unable to find a national survey. To our knowledge nobody has measured it.
What is actually known. The structure varies more than the price does. These professionals are sometimes court employees paid by the county or the state, and sometimes private contractors paid by the parties themselves, with separate arrangements where a party is indigent. Some jurisdictions provide the service in house, including Arizona and counties in Ohio and Florida. Colorado is the one state we have found that publishes rates.
The one state that publishes a number
We were pointed to Colorado by the National Center for State Courts as the state that publishes caps. Reading the directives themselves, the picture is more mixed than that: one sets real hourly rates and total maximums for guardians ad litem and child and family investigators, and the other, covering the most expensive appointment of the three, sets no cap and leaves the number to the judge.
| Role | Maximum hourly rate | Maximum total fee |
|---|---|---|
| Court-appointed counsel | 100 dollars per hour | — |
| Guardian ad litem, for an adult | 100 dollars per hour | 4,437 dollars |
| Child and family investigator, attorney | 100 dollars per hour | 3,009 dollars |
| Child and family investigator, non-attorney | 100 dollars per hour | 3,009 dollars |
| Court visitor | 40 dollars per hour | 779 dollars |
For parental responsibility evaluators, the fuller custody evaluation, Colorado sets no cap at all. The directive says in terms that there are presently no funds available for state-paid evaluators, and that the presiding judicial officer has discretion to cap the fees and allocate the costs.
At present, there are no funds available for state paid PREs. The presiding Judicial Officer has the discretion to cap the PRE fees and allocate the costs.
Those state funds are appropriated for cases where the party is determined to be indigent. If you are not indigent, the directive tells you what the rate structure looks like; it does not tell you the state is paying it.
Why publish this at all
Three reasons, and the third is the real one.
Because it is useful. If you have been told the one-year-per-five-years rule by someone confident, it helps to know it came from nowhere.
Because it is a check on us. A site that never publishes what it could not establish is a site that is quietly guessing somewhere.
And because these are research questions. If you are an academic looking for something worth doing, at least two of the entries above are real, unstudied, and affect a great many people. We would be glad to be made obsolete on any of them, and we will say so on this page when we are.
Curated 1 September 2026 from the research files behind this site. If you know of a source for any of these, tell us and we will add it and say who found it.
Keep reading
- What we have got wrong before — and what we did about it
- How this site checks things
- Why this site exists