Tag: Child custody

A Presumption of Equal Timesharing?

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On behalf of Ronald H. Kauffman, P.A. posted in Timesharing/Visitation on Friday, September 14, 2012.

Increasingly, clients are demanding shared custody and 50-50 child custody, meaning they want to divide the time with their children and other parent equally and have equal decision making rights. I’m also hearing calls for legislation to make joint custody and equal time sharing mandatory. The British government recently announced it is seeking to amend Section 1 of the Children Act 1989 to introduce a legal presumption of ‘shared parenting’.

When parents get along reasonably well, and live close by, an equal timesharing schedule may be in the children’s best interests. It can: foster Florida’s policy of frequent contact with parents after divorce, reduce custody litigation, spare thousands of children from being dragged into a battle between their parents, and discourage custody cases which have more to do with how much child support gets paid than timesharing.

Equal timesharing can be done in different ways: Week on/week off, 5-5-2-2 (in which a parent has the child for two weeknights then the child goes to the other parent for two weeknights, then the child goes back to the first parent for the three day weekend and the first two assigned weeknights which equals five nights.) and more. I can’t list all of the schedules possible, but an equal timesharing schedule is only limited by the parties’ willingness to be creative.

The rub of course, is creating a timesharing schedule which maximizes parent/child time, and minimizes transition troubles. While a 50/50 timesharing schedule may be desired, geographic distance, school hours, extra-curricular activities, and work schedules make equal timesharing impractical. In those cases, a more traditional timesharing schedule may be desired, and any shortfall in a parent’s timesharing can be made up during long school breaks, like Christmas and summer.

In order for an equal timesharing schedule to succeed though, the parents have to be flexible, and put the interests of the children first. This is easier said than done. Inevitably, school and extra-curricular activities – or a parent’s work commitment – are going to require the timesharing schedule to be adjusted. If parents are inflexible and unwilling to cooperate with each other, 50% timesharing can have a 0% chance.

Do I Need Divorce Therapy?

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On behalf of Ronald H. Kauffman, P.A. posted in Child Custody on Saturday, July 28, 2012.

Negotiating child custody, support, and the division of assets is strongly tied to emotions, and if your head is not in the game – because you are still overcome by swirling emotions – your attempts at settlement may fail. I see this happen frequently: a client, or their spouse, cannot make a rational decision because their anger, sadness or suspicion is too much to overcome. When that happens, the only alternative is to go to court.

You may have heard that therapy can help couples save a marriage. But, did you know more and more people are relying on therapists to help guide them through the grueling process of a divorce? I suggest to clients early on in my representation to seek out a good therapist to help them through the divorce process. They can help you overcome your emotions, as well as create timesharing schedules and more.

I remember reading about Elana Katz, the director of the Family and Divorce Mediation Program at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, in a New York Times article.

We used mediation, so we did not go through the adversarial nightmare and did a lot that set up a structure that was going to make us both highly involved parents. There was not going to be winner-take-all.

Katz discussed how therapy helped her through her own divorce. Let’s face it, if professionals in the business know to hire a good therapist, shouldn’t you? It is important for couples to find post-divorce parenting roles and be able to predict finances. Having a professional therapist go through each stage of the process carefully can help you develop new relationships, and understand future goals.

Katie Homes & Tom Cruise: Can Court’s Choose a Child’s Religion?

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On behalf of Ronald H. Kauffman, P.A. posted in Child Support on Wednesday, July 18, 2012.

Child custody cases always raise interesting issues. One of the questions in the Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise divorce is what religion will the child be raised in after the divorce. Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, and Katie Holmes is reportedly a Catholic. TomKat are not alone, about 27% of Americans were in interfaith marriages according to the Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Happily for them – but not so much for the media – Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise have reached a settlement in their divorce. But, when divorcing parents can’t agree about religion, can it be a factor in a custody case?

Whenever a court decides custody, the sine qua non is the best interests of the child. But, deciding the religious upbringing of a child puts the court in a tough position. There is nothing in our custody statute allowing a court to consider religion as a factor in custody, and a court’s choosing one parent’s religious beliefs over another’s, probably violates the Constitution. So, unless there is actual harm being done to the child by the religious upbringing, it would seem that deciding the child’s faith is out of bounds for a judge.

Ironically, that may not be the rule all over Florida. Different appellate courts in Florida have slightly different takes on the issue, and the question of whether a trial court can consider a parent’s religious beliefs as a factor in determining custody has been allowed. For this reason, it is best to speak to an attorney experienced in child custody matters.

In Child Custody Cases, Stay-At-Home Dads Are Here to Stay

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On behalf of Ronald H. Kauffman, P.A. posted in Child Custody on Thursday, July 12, 2012.

Parenting Plans, and specifically timesharing, is increasingly more complex as parenting roles reverse. Time magazine reports that the proportion of stay-at-home dads has doubled in the past decade, and not because fathers got laid off and had nothing better to do:

“The percentage of stay-at-home fellas has doubled in the past decade, though it’s still tiny: just 3.4% of stay-at-home parents are fathers. But man, are those guys happy. Perhaps the joy they take in doling out Cheerios and doing loads of baby laundry is merely additional evidence of the inordinate pleasure that men take in parenting, a phenomenon discussed on Thursday on Healthland.”

“It’s clear to us that men strongly identify with this as a role,” says Brad Harrington, executive director of the Boston College Center for Work and Family and lead author of the stay-at-home dads report. “They don’t have a feeling of ambivalence of, What am I doing, I’m a man. There is no sense of angst. These guys strongly identified with being a SAHD. They are proud of it.”