Articles Posted in Custody/Time-Sharing

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The long-running and often contentious child custody dispute between pro basketball star Dwyane Wade and his ex-wife, Siohvaughn Funches, added a new chapter recently when the 3d District Court of Appeal issued a ruling upholding a timesharing decision made last year by a Miami-Dade trial judge. Although rejecting the mother’s appeal, the court warned lawyers on both sides regarding their behavior in email exchanges between the two sides. The case offers a reminder that, regardless of the amount of financial resources, child custody matters are often very emotional and hard-fought disputes.

Wade and his wife filed for divorce in 2007, which was finalized three years later after a long and arduous battle. During their marriage, the couple had two sons. In 2011, the father obtained a court order from a judge in Chicago granting him sole custody of both of the boys. The Illinois court’s custody ruling was domesticated to, and became enforceable in, Florida a year later.
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Following time-sharing schedules can sometimes be complicated, especially when timesharing involves a child who is old enough to have a desire to assert her own self-control over where she lives. Even when faced with a child who does not want to return to the home of your ex-spouse, it is important to note that failure to follow court-ordered dates for returning a child to Florida from outside the state (or country) can have damaging impacts on your custody rights. In case recently decided by the 5th District Court of Appeal, that court ruled that an emergency order granting custody to a mother was legal even though the trial court never determined that it was in the daughter’s best interest. The court was not required to address the daughter’s best interests because the father engaged in an “improper removal” by failing to bring the daughter back to Florida from the United Kingdom on the date the court had established a month earlier.
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The implementation of a parenting plan hopefully represents the culmination of a collaborative process to create an outcome in the best interests of the children involved. Sometimes, though, circumstances change, and those changes may trigger the need for a modification of the plan. When they do, the Florida Statutes have some specific requirements regarding what must be established in order to modify a custody arrangement, especially if that modification involves stripping one parent of all decision-making authority.

A recent example of this in the 5th District Court of Appeal was the custody dispute between two parents. The couple married in 1993, but after a decade and a half of marriage, the husband filed for divorce. The couple’s 2009 marital settlement agreement called for a fairly common custody arrangement, with the mother getting primary physical custody, the father getting visitation, and the parents agreeing to share “parental responsibility on all aspects of the children’s lives.” The agreement also called for the father to pay child support.
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For some, it is about the ethics of performing arguably medically unnecessary surgery on a child. For other, it is about how much “say so” each parent should have in making decisions on behalf of his or her child. For the Florida courts, however, the case surrounding a child’s circumcision boiled down to the existence of a valid parenting agreement and the absence of any changed circumstances that would warrant the courts stepping in to avert that agreement’s execution.

The Palm Beach County parents H.H. and D.N. gave birth to the boy in 2010. The parents never married. Shortly after the child turned one, the parents each signed an agreed parenting plan. Parenting plans are required in cases that involve timesharing, even if the parents are in agreement about the timesharing schedule.
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Divorces are almost always difficult, but divorces that occur to couples with teenage children can be especially challenging. While a parent cannot control what his or her children feel or think regarding the other parent, he or she can help foster a healthy relationship by refraining from actively doing things to impede the children’s relationship with the other parent. One South Florida mother’s decision to engage in such counterproductive, hindering behavior ultimately earned her a judgment of contempt, which the 4th District Court of Appeal recently upheld.

When M. (husband) and L. (wife) divorced in 2011, they had three children together, some of whom were well into their teenage years. The couple’s divorce judgment called for shared parenting responsibility and established a timesharing schedule that placed the children primarily with their mother.
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A recent child custody battle represents the potential hurdles that can sometimes arise when trial courts attempt creative compromises. The 4th District Court of Appeal recently issued a ruling throwing out a trial court’s modified timesharing plan because the plan was something neither parent had proposed and neither side had any notice was a possible outcome.

A couple, K. and O., lived in Palm Beach County during their marriage and had one child together. After they split, the husband moved to the Florida Keys for work-related reasons. Initially, the child spent three days a week with one parent and four with the other. This timesharing plan had the benefit of giving the parents an approximately 50-50 split in timesharing, but it also presented a problem in that it required the child to travel 400 miles (round-trip) every week back and forth between Lake Worth and Bahia Honda.
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Child custody court cases involve many elements. One vital aspect is determining what is in the best interest of the child, an issue that many parents might feel capable addressing on their own. However, family law cases are still civil litigation matters, in many cases complete with multiple procedural layers. In one recent case, a trial court’s decision to grant a grandmother’s custody-related motion survived because, according to the 5th District Court of Appeal, the motion complied with the rules of procedure, so the trial court was within proper bounds to hear it and rule on it.

The case involved the custody of a son born to a Florida woman. In 1999, she granted legal temporary custody of the infant boy to the child’s grandmother. More than a decade later, in 2010, the mother was drug-free, remarried, and caring for her younger children with her husband. The mother asked the court to grant her substantial visitation with the child. The grandmother asked that the court require supervision for the visits, and the court agreed.
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A recent 4th District Court of Appeal ruling clarified the proper factors for determining if a parent has sufficiently abandoned his child to allow the courts to terminate his parental rights and gave a pair of grandparents’ effort to adopt their grandchild new life. The appeals court’s ruling explained that, in order to terminate a parent’s legal rights to his child, the law requires proof that the parent showed an intent to reject his parental obligations, but it does not necessarily require evidence that the parent willfully disregarded the child’s safety.

S. fathered a child in 2002. In 2010, the child’s mother died. The mother’s parents then went to court seeking to adopt the child. As part of that process, they also asked the court to terminate the father’s parental rights. As part of their termination request, the grandparents argued that the father had abandoned the child, both financially and emotionally.

The trial court held a hearing. At the hearing’s conclusion, the judge ruled that the grandparents had proven that the father indeed had financially and emotionally abandoned his child. Nevertheless, the judge refused to terminate the father’s rights and denied the grandparents’ adoption petition. So, what went wrong? According to the trial court, the law also required the grandparents to prove that the father “willfully disregarded” the child’s safety, and they did not offer evidence on this point.
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Psychological and physical evaluations can be important tools for courts as they analyze a parent’s fitness. The law, however, also maintains several hurdles on the permissibility of such examinations because of their invasive nature. The case before a court must implicate the parent’s mental or physical condition, and the parent must be on notice of the potential of an evaluation before the court may order such a step. In a recent case from southwest Florida, a mother’s appeal allowed her to escape such an evaluation when the 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled that her case did not meet either of the required criteria.

As part of one couple’s divorce, the court awarded primary residential custody to the mother and issued a time-sharing order. At a hearing in late October 2013, the court discovered that the father had not seen his daughter in more than four months. The father expressed his desire to see his child, but he also stated that he did not want to force his daughter to visit him.

The trial court assumed that if the mother was supportive of maintaining the child’s relationship with her father, the visits would be occurring in accordance with the time-sharing order. As a result, the court ordered the mother to undergo a psychological evaluation, but it made no findings of fact as part of the order. The mother appealed.
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Crafting parenting and time-sharing plans are challenging enough under ordinary circumstances. When the child whose custody must be resolved also has special needs, the decisions become even more difficult. However, when these cases go to court, the law imposes the same analysis as all other parenting plan and time-sharing matters. Namely, the court must decide based upon the best interest of the child. The law does not require the involvement of guardians ad litem or expert witnesses, as one recent Third District Court of Appeal ruling highlighted.

A Florida man and woman, both of whom were deaf, had a son who was also deaf. The mother and son lived in Broward County, and the mother enrolled the boy at a school in Pompano Beach with both deaf and non-impaired students. The father, who lived in St. John’s County, sought to modify the time-sharing plan so that the child could attend the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, located in St. Augustine near the father’s home. The school offered education entirely in sign language and also allowed deaf students like the son to participate in extracurricular activities and athletics.

At the end of the first day of trial, the judge expressed that he “needed” to appoint a guardian ad litem. However, since the court could not find a guardian fluent in sign language, no appointment was made. Ultimately, the trial judge sided with the father, ordering that the father have the child during the school year, with the mother receiving custody during the summers, and the parents would alternate weekends with the boy.
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