Co-Parenting for the Long Haul
No matter your family’s circumstances, you can set the provisions of your parenting plan to accommodate them. If you and your ex live within walking distance of each other, you can rotate parenting time every 24 hours, even on school days. If you and your ex live in different states, the children can travel by plane to spend the summer and winter break with your ex, and they can spend the school year in Florida with you. Not all divorced couples who do not live within commuting distance of each other can afford all those airline tickets, though, and the court would not order you to buy them unless it were financially feasible. Parenting plans include provisions about transportation, so your parenting plan can indicate which parent is responsible for driving the children to the other parent’s house on which days. The parenting plan might even require you to meet in the middle; for example, if you and your ex live 200 miles apart, you might hand off the children in a Walmart parking lot near the 100-mile point. While it can be nice that your ex lives so far away that you cannot constantly get on each other’s nerves, long-distance co-parenting can bring its own share of conflicts. For help resolving co-parenting conflicts when your ex-spouse lives several counties away, contact a Boca Raton child custody lawyer.
Court Orders Dad to Make Weekly Road Trips to Attend Co-Parenting Classes
A Sumter County man faced difficulties with his co-parenting arrangement with his ex-wife, who lived 200 miles away. When the parties finalized their divorce, the court awarded parenting time to the father on the first and third weekend of each month, but this turned out to be infeasible because of the travel distance. Therefore, the court modified the parenting plan so that the father spent only the first weekend of each month with the children. Eventually, though, the mother would not even let him exercise that parenting time, and he went back to court to ask that the court hold the mother in contempt and to request make-up parenting time for the weekends he had missed.
The court awarded make-up parenting time to the father, but it also ordered the parties to attend a co-parenting conflict management class together every Tuesday for eight weeks. This was burdensome, because the class was located near the mother’s home, so it required the father to leave work three hours early each Tuesday to attend, so that he could make the road trip. The father appealed this provision of the order, and the court reversed it, especially since neither parent had requested the co-parenting classes. The court then ordered the mother to attend the co-parenting classes by herself, without the father.
Contact Schwartz | White About Parenting Plans That Include Road Trips
A South Florida family law attorney can help you cope with a parenting plan that requires you to take road trips to spend time with your children. Contact Schwartz | White in Boca Raton, Florida about your case.
Source:
scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1473544028952624580&q=divorce+holiday&hl=en&as_sdt=4,10&as_ylo=2015&as_yhi=2025
