This question comes up very often people are moving towards divorce, they have children, they want to do the right thing, they want to make sure that they have a solid parenting plan moving forward. And so the way this works is that there are essentially three things that you should do when you have children especially minor children, younger children and you are moving toward divorce.
You Must Consider What Is In The Best Interest Of Your Children
So number one is you need to really do some work on thinking about what in the children’s best interest. And we say this because divorce splits are very emotionally charge and it can lead to people making some poor decisions related to the children because of their own self interest. And so what I can think of is money, right, so you have people battling for parenting time to line up a support amount that they are more comfortable with. And you also have people who are using the children as pawns using parenting time as a weapon to get back at the other parent, to stick it to the other parent because of personal issues. So you have to think about what’s on the children best interest and if you are not making a clear headed objective decision then you should really consider getting yourself some counselling so that you can look at this from a healthy prospective.
Get Some Advice From An Experience Family Law Attorney
Number two is, talk to a family law attorney before agreeing to a parenting plan. And the reason we say this is the court is very likely to consider a plan that’s in place or has been in place for significant period of time as precedent. And so if you agreed to something and you put it in place and it’s happening for period of time and then you change your mind it’s going to be very difficult to get a court order that contradicts that unless there is a very good reason for it. But when a family ends up in court, when spouses end up in court on a parenting plan issue, one of the first questions that come from the judge is what have they been doing? And so the court is very likely to consider that because court wants the minimize disruption for the children and so they don’t want to make changes unless absolutely necessary.
In many cases if the court is going to order something different then they has to be a pretty good reason. So be very careful before you put something in place and the best way to make sure that you are going about it correctly on the way that optimises. Your chances of attaining your goals on parenting time is to talk to an experience and trusted family law attorney before you agree to a parenting plan.
Log Important, Significant Incidents
And then finally, you want to log important and significant incidents. And the reason you want to do this is if you end up in a custody battle in a hearing in which the judge is going to want specific pieces of information to make a decision on parenting time. You want to make sure that you are able to accurately recall the important events. And the best way to do that is as you are moving forward making sure that if something significant comes up, you log the day what happened, any specific evidence that you can gathered to support that is going to be helpful.
Conclusion
Those are the ways you can prepare for optimising your parenting plan if you are moving towards divorce.
- Number one put the children’s best interest first that’s what the court does.
- Number two gets some advice from an experience family law attorney.
- And number three log important, significant incidents.