Negotiating With Your Ex-Spouse About Parenting Is Exhausting, but a Family Law Attorney Can Help

Someone once said that having a child is like seeing your heart walking around outside your body.  As such, seeing the way other people interact with your child can trigger emotions you never knew you had.  You never thought your spouse was shallow until you heard the things she said about what people would think if your children dressed or acted in certain ways.  Everything your spouse says makes you think that he is needlessly exposing your children to danger, or, conversely, that he is excessively cautious and not giving them a chance to experience ordinary hardships.  And this is just when you are happily married.  Everything your ex-spouse does in relation to your children feels like a knife wound to the heart.  Therefore, the hardest part of co-parenting is not the child support order that leaves you feeling broke and resentful, whether you are the one paying child support or the one receiving it.  It also isn’t the parenting plan that requires you to drive on I-95 for an hour every year on Black Friday so that your kids can spend half of Thanksgiving break with you and half of it with your ex.  The worst part is the decision making.  Whose decision is it whether your teen daughter can get a second set of piercings in her ears or whether your 10-year-old son can watch PG-13 rated movies?  A Boca Raton child custody lawyer can help you with these most difficult aspects of co-parenting as well as with the usual parenting time and child support stuff.

Parenting Plans and Decision-Making Power

Parenting plans address both physical custody, which is how much time the children spend in each parent’s care, and legal custody, which is the question of which parent has the final say about parenting decisions.  Most parents are able to finalize their parenting plans during mediation, and they usually decide to share decision-making responsibility about children’s education, extracurricular activities, and non-emergency medical care.

Parents can choose to give one parent the final decision about one or more of these matters.  Would you sign away your right to decide which school your child attends?  If you do, you probably really trust your ex-spouse, which means that you have a better co-parenting relationship than most.  Likewise, if you have the final say about extracurricular activities, it means that it is your responsibility to figure out how to pay for them.  Most couples agree to share decision-making responsibilities, which can mean plenty of disagreements over the years.  In some cases, a judge even has to decide whether a teen can go to summer camp in another state if the parents can’t agree.

Contact Schwartz | White About the Hardest Parts of Co-Parenting

A South Florida family law attorney can help you resolve co-parenting disputes and set up a usable framework for preventing future conflicts.  Contact Schwartz | White in Boca Raton, Florida about your case.

Source:

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