Sometimes, couples in the process of divorce spend untold amounts of time and money on petty battles over assets that neither of them wants; they just want to win, and they want their ex to lose. Likewise, some people make outsized demands, simply because they want to hurt their ex in the pocketbook, which seems to be the seat of their ex’s emotions.
If your lawyer can talk you down from these destructive plans, though, it will soon become obvious that what you truly fear is losing your relationship with your children. Everyone knows that, in a divorce case, both parents get parenting time, and the most self-aware people know that parent-child relationships take a lifetime to build or to unravel, and that there are plenty of people who are still married to their first spouses and yet are estranged from their adult children.
Despite this, you fear that the court will take your children away from you and award them to your ex, and this fear is hard to shake. Instead, you should work toward the same goal that the family courts of Arizona have set: formalizing a parenting plan that will enable the children to maintain a stable relationship with both parents. For help drafting a parenting plan that you and your ex can live with, contact a Mesa child custody lawyer.
What Does Custody Mean in Arizona Family Law?
Every divorcing couple with minor children must draft a parenting plan as a prerequisite to finalizing their divorce; the parenting plan becomes a court order when the judge signs it. The parenting plan is a fillable form where the parents outline their rules for many aspects of co-parenting, but not financial matters. The financial aspect is determined by the child support order, which the court calculates based on statewide guidelines, taking into account the timesharing schedule outlined in the parenting plan. In legal terms, the parenting plan shows how the parents define physical custody and legal custody, but what does that mean to you?
Physical custody, also known as parenting time, refers to the arrangement under which a parent has the children on specific nights during the year. The parenting plan asks you to write a detailed schedule. For example, you can say that the children are with Dad on the first and third weekend each month, as well as from Friday evening to Sunday evening of Thanksgiving weekend each year, and December 21 to 26 in odd-numbered years and December 27 to 31 in even-numbered years.
Legal custody is what you and I call decision-making authority. The parenting plan asks you to assign legal custody regarding the children’s education, extracurricular activities, and non-emergency medical care, in other words, which parent has the final say regarding the choice of the children’s school, summer camp, and primary care physician. You can choose to share legal custody in all of these matters if you and your ex-spouse get along well enough that you can handle all these decisions jointly.
Should You and Your Ex Divide Your Parenting Time 50/50?
Most parents finalize their parenting plans during divorce mediation; the judge’s only role is to sign a parenting plan that the parents themselves set the terms. You can arrange your parenting time in a way that works best for your family. Some parents are able to achieve truly equal amounts of parenting time, with 188 overnights per parent in leap years and either 187 or 188 in common years. This is only feasible if the parents live close to each other, and it is more difficult when the children are in school than it is with infants. When parents share parenting time 50/50, they might rotate weeks or days, or they might follow a 2-2-3-2-2-3 schedule that repeats every two weeks.
When parents do not live within the zone of the same neighborhood school, though, the children tend to stay with one parent on school nights and the other parent on weekends. As for holidays, each parent might claim his or her favorite holidays, such as Thanksgiving for Mom and the Fourth of July for Dad. They might also choose to alternate years of holiday parenting time. For example, the children might spend Thanksgiving with Mom and Christmas with Dad in odd-numbered years, and do it the other way around in even-numbered years.
How Does the Family Court Determine Children’s Best Interests?
When the parents cannot agree on the terms of the parenting plan, the court decides how to divide parenting time and decision-making authority. It does this by determining the children’s best interests, by considering more than a dozen factors. It aims to cause as little disruption to the children’s routine as possible; in other words, the parent who picked up the children after school while the parents were married should continue to pick them up after school after the divorce. The courts do not assume that all children are better off with their mothers or that teen boys are better off with their fathers. If you smoke cigarettes and your ex-spouse does not, this does not count against you in parenting decisions unless your ex demonstrates to the court that you smoke in your children’s presence and that the secondhand smoke is harming your children’s health. If the children are in high school, the judge may privately ask them about their parenting time preferences and consider their responses as one of the factors contributing to the decision.
What Happens if Your Ex Does Not Follow the Parenting Plan?
The parenting plan is meant to last until the youngest child turns 18, but if your circumstances change, you can modify the parenting plan. If one parent relocates or remarries, he or she may wish to modify the parenting plan to accommodate the family’s new situation. If your ex-spouse does not exercise his or her parenting time or prevents you from exercising yours, you can petition the court to enforce the parenting plan, which may result in the court holding your ex-spouse in contempt.
Contact Modern Law About Drafting a Parenting Plan
A family law attorney can help you draft, enforce, or modify a parenting plan. Contact Modern Law in Mesa, Arizona, to discuss your case.
