Articles Posted in Parenting Plans / Time Sharing

When parents divorce, children usually suffer to some degree. Good parents – those who truly want to put the welfare of their children first – often seek advice on how to successfully parent their way through a divorce.

Therapists who specialize in children of divorce agree that one of the most difficult things for divorcing parents to do is to encourage their children to maintain a great relationship with someone they no longer like. Here are some tips for making it easier:

Recognize that your child needs both a mother and a father to nurture them and be good role models if you want to help them grow up to be a fully functional adult.

Thousands of Florida children are impacted every year by divorce, and according to research from relationship skills training organization PAIRS Foundation, children of divorce are three times more likely to have problems in school and five times more likely to commit a crime.

Child and adolescent psychologist Dr. Jennifer Hartstein offers three tips for effective co-parenting to stop trouble before it begins:

1. Respect each other. You do not have to like each other, but you do need to exhibit respect and positive ways of resolving conflict to present a good model of that behavior for your children. Speaking negatively about each other creates resentment and anger in your children.

The effort of one parent to turn a child against the other parent has become known as “Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS)”, a disorder first identified by psychiatrist Dr. Richard A Gardner in the 1980s in association with the growth in child custody litigation.

Dr. Gardner, who was a clinical professor in Columbia University’s Division of Child Psychiatry, was a consistent advocate for fathers in custody battles. Later research done into PAS has shown that a child’s alienation from one parent is usually the result of systemic dysfunction within a family that begins well before divorce.

Whether PAS is a true medical disorder is still being debated, but any divorce lawyer will tell you that parental alienation does exist, and it is an unfortunate circumstance for both children and the target parent. So how can you tell if your child is at risk for parental alienation? Here are some widely recognized risk factors:

If you are serving in the military and become active, deployed, or are temporarily assigned military service and your ability to comply with a time-sharing agreement is materially affected as a result, under Fl. Stat. 61.13002, you should file a supplemental petition or a motion for modification of time-sharing or parental responsibility. Doing so will prevent the court from making any amendments or modifications to the time-sharing agreement in effect before the parent became active, deployed, or temporarily assigned military service. The only exception is if it can be shown by clear and convincing evidence that an amendment or modification should be made because doing so is in the best interest of the child.

If the court decides to issue a temporary order, the court shall consider and provide for contact between the servicemember and his or her child by feasible means of electronic communication such as webcam, telephone, or other available means. Because it is in the best interest of the child to maintain a bond with the parent serving the military, Florida courts will also permit liberal time-sharing during the periods of leave from military service. This temporary order will terminate and the previous time-sharing agreement in effect before the parent was called to military service shall be reinstated upon the servicemember’s return from active duty, deployment, etc.

It is important to maintain a bond with your child while serving in the military. Being deployed or temporarily assigned military service may also affect any active child support obligations. Contact a Florida Family Law Attorney to discuss how military deployment may affect your time-sharing or child support obligations. An attorney can also file a petition with the court to make amendments or modifications to a time-sharing agreement or child-support obligation that will account for your active service.

If you are going through a Florida divorce and have children, one of the most important tasks that lie ahead of you and your spouse is to create a workable parenting agreement.

A parenting agreement is essentially a plan on how you and your soon-to-be ex will parent your children together. It covers decisions on custody, visitation, child support, education, religious training (if any) as well as how time is to be divided and shared between parents.

If you and your spouse have an amicable relationship, you can usually work together to create a parenting plan without the involvement of a mediator or other professional to assist you. If this is the case, then the plan you develop together should also be reviewed by your Florida divorce attorneyhttps://www.woodatter.com/lawyer-attorney-1163342.html prior to be made part of a court filing.

As a Florida divorce lawyer, I tell couples with children who are getting a divorce that it is better for them to agree on a co-parenting plan rather than have the court do it for them.

Creating a parenting agreement usually helps to reduce future conflicts because the expectations are clear from the beginning on how each parent will interact with the other when it comes to parenting their children.

Just the act of creating a parenting agreement allows couples to make decisions about all the issues that they will face in the future with their children. Once a parenting agreement has been created, the court should then approve it so it becomes enforceable in case one party does not live up to the agreement.

Florida visitation laws changed to timesharing laws in 2008. The primary goals of these laws are to (1) ease the need for a custodial parent to be determined and (2) to protect the child and keep his or her interests as a central concern throughout custody or divorce proceedings.

How is timesharing affected during the summer?

Generally, the roles of the primary parent and non-primary parent are swapped. For example, the primary parent – the parent who has custody of the child for a majority of time – becomes the non-primary parent during the summer. Generally, the timesharing laws allow for the non-primary parent to have custody of the child for a consecutive 6 weeks with every other weekend going to the primary parent. This switch is the normal practice unless the parents deviate from the standard visitation schedule in the parenting plan, which is also a requirement in visitation cases. If that happens to be the case, it is usually established in the parenting plan established by the parents if they have deviated from the standard schedule.