Keeping Up With Legal Requirements When Your Life Is Falling Apart
In family law, almost nothing is forever. In the best-case scenario, a parenting plan remains in force until the child reaches adulthood; if the parenting plan pertains to more than one child, then it requires modification as each child reaches the age of majority. Modifying a parenting plan at some point between the divorce becoming final and the child turning 18 and graduating from high school is so common as to be unremarkable. People modify parenting plans to accommodate changes in the work obligations of the parents, the schooling of the children, and the health of any family members, including but not limited to the parents and the children. When you modify a parenting plan, both parents can sign off on the modification from the outset, or else they can reach an agreement during mediation or the court can hold a hearing after which the judge decides how the new parenting plan will be. Even though you can modify a parenting plan even after it has been in place for years, appealing an unfair or unfeasible parenting plan has a short deadline. If you are unhappy with the parenting plan that the family court set for your family, contact a Boca Raton child custody lawyer.
You Can Always Modify a Dud of a Parenting Plan, but the Deadline for Filing an Appeal Is Short
The neatness of a family’s parenting plan is usually proportional to the neatness of the family’s situation before the parents separated. If you lived a boring, soccer mom life in a McMansion until one spouse’s emotional affair or mid-life paranoia ruined the marital relationship while leaving the family’s finances intact, then your parenting plan will probably involve the children staying in the formerly marital McMansion with Mom on school nights and staying with Dad in his new house on the weekends. By contrast, if your relationship with your ex was drama from beginning to end, then your parenting plan will probably involve more contortions to keep the drama at bay, such as requiring the parents to hand off the children at a grandparent’s house instead of interacting with each other directly.
Trisha’s alcohol addiction led her marriage to unravel while her children were younger than school age. Her parenting plan indicated alternating weeks of parenting time for her and her ex-husband. As a condition of keeping her unsupervised parenting time, she had to participate in an alcohol use monitoring program called SoberLink. For reasons that the court documents did not specify, she was not able to do this, so she appealed the court-ordered parenting plan. The appeals court refused to review the parenting plan, because she had missed the deadline for filing an appeal. Therefore, her only choice was to petition the court to modify the parenting plan.
Contact Schwartz | White About Maintaining a Relationship With Your Children When Your Life Is in Chaos
A South Florida family law attorney can help you if the parenting plan the court has ordered makes it more difficult for you to stay on track instead of easier. Contact Schwartz | White in Boca Raton, Florida about your case.
Source:
scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=360110299157888978&q=divorce+hotel&hl=en&as_sdt=4,10&as_ylo=2015&as_yhi=2025
