Articles Posted in Custody/Time-Sharing

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Generally, in order to obtain a modification in your timesharing agreement, both parents must be placed on notice that the court’s ruling may bring about a change in the current plan. In some situations, a court may alter the timesharing arrangement without notice if an emergency exists. The 3d District Court of Appeal recently overturned a Miami-Dade County trial court order because the mother did not have proper notice, and the conditions for an emergency change did not exist.

After several years of marriage, Tal Bronstein and Elizabeth Bronstein divorced in 2012. The couple had one minor child. By the time the divorce was finalized, the husband lived in Colorado.
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Until just a few short decades ago, grandparents had no legal right to visit with their grandchildren. Today, many states have laws governing grandparents’ rights to visitation. While Florida law contains several strong protections with regard to the right of a parent (or parents) to raise their children as they deem best, even these strong protections do not give a parent a right to evade a valid out-of-state court’s order awarding visitation time to grandparents. Specifically, the 5th District Court of Appeal ruled in a recent Central Florida case that Florida’s right to privacy and policy of parental autonomy did not nullify a valid order of grandparent visitation from a Colorado court.

The case involved the minor children of Ruth Ledoux-Nottingham. The mother and father divorced in Colorado in 2010. A year later, the father died and shortly after his death, the mother and children moved to Florida. Before the mother and children left Colorado, however, the children’s paternal grandparents, William and Jennifer Downs, filed a court petition requesting visitation.
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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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