Is It Fair or Feasible for a Parent to Have Daytime Visitation Only?
The beauty of parenting plans is that they are customizable to your family’s needs. If it works for your family, and if you and your ex-spouse live a short distance apart from each other, you can trade off parenting time every 24 hours, every two days, every week, or at whatever interval works best for you, even during the school year. Likewise, there is a reason that the weeknights with Mom, weekends with Dad model of co-parenting is so widespread; it is often the simplest way to manage parenting time for school-aged children. How you and your ex-spouse divide your parenting time is ultimately your decision, though. Whatever you decide, the court uses the number of overnights the children spend with each child as one of the factors in determining the child support amount. Even if one parent does not spend any overnights with the child, he or she is still responsible for paying child support if he or she has a higher income than the other parent. If you do not currently have any overnights with your children, and you want to change your parenting plan so that you can be more actively involved in their lives, contact a Boca Raton child custody lawyer.
Supervised Parenting Time Is Inherently Temporary, but Parenting Time Without Overnights Is Not
When a Palm Beach County couple divorced, the court awarded sole physical custody of the couple’s daughter to the mother, pursuant to the parties’ agreements made during mediation. Their parenting plan gave the father several hours of parenting time twice per week, but no overnights. The parents’ agreed that the father’s life situation was unstable at the time, but the court documents offer no details about the nature of this instability.
After the divorce, the father did not consistently exercise his parenting time, and at one point, he went three years without seeing the child. Despite this, the mother brought the child to visit the father’s parents on holidays. Eventually, after the birth of his second child, the father committed to being involved in his older daughter’s life, and he contacted the mother to exercise his parenting time. It did not go smoothly, though. The mother canceled the arrangements several times because the child was sick or because of her own scheduling conflicts. Eventually, the parties returned to court. The parties both acknowledged that the child’s relationship with the father was strained because of the years of not seeing each other; she told her mother and her maternal relatives that she was afraid to spend time with the father because he would lose his temper and raise his voice. The court determined that the parties needed to spend more time together and that the long period of separation was the main cause of strain in their relationship.
Contact Schwartz | White About Moving Beyond Minimal Parenting Time
A South Florida family law attorney can help you if you are ready to repair your relationship with your children and increase your parenting time. Contact Schwartz | White in Boca Raton, Florida about your case.
Source:
scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=13046856132614049272&q=divorce+holiday&hl=en&as_sdt=4,10&as_ylo=2015&as_yhi=2025
