Child Custody and Divorce

As we continue to discuss the Child Custody Evaluation, it is important to discuss the impact of the Child Custody Evaluation on your family life, and conversely the impact your family life can have on the ongoing Child Custody Evaluation.

Basic Elements of the Evaluation

An evaluation involves collecting, managing, and analyzing a large quantity of information about the family. A private professional will often spend at least 25 to 50 hours on interviews, testing, and other data collection, spread out over a long period of time, before writing the report and formulating the final recommendations.

While each evaluator has an individual method, procedure, and style, all evaluations usually include a number of basic elements. The basic elements of a Child Custody Evaluation include the following:

• Individual interviews of each parent;
• Interviews of each child;
• Interviews of each child with each parent;
• Home visit to each parent’s home;
• Review of various documents submitted by counsel and each parent;
• Interviews of collateral contacts in the community proposed by each parent or as requested by the evaluator; and
• Psychological testing of parents and children.

Your Ongoing Family Life Influences Case Throughout Evaluation Process

The evaluation is a study of the family, focused both on past history and relationships and the ongoing lives of the parents and children over a period of several weeks or months. See Fam C §§3110-3118.

Often events that occur during the evaluation become material for the evaluator’s investigation, and guidance from an attorney or other involved professionals (such as your therapist) will help handle the situation appropriately.

You Will Be Placed Under Intense Scrutiny for a Prolonged Time Period

A Child Custody Evaluation can frequently take up to 6 months from the time the evaluator is formally appointed until the report is issued. During that time, you will be placed under intense scrutiny and held to the standard of good parenting. You may feel this standard is too high or unreasonable when others in the community who are not involved in a custody case may parent their children in questionable ways without consequence. You will be experiencing life under a microscope and must understand the importance of exercising good judgment at all times despite the intrusion of the evaluation in his or her family’s life.

At Divorce Helpline we can coach you through the intricasies of the Child Custody Evaluation. We also work with well-known California Child Custody Evaluators and routinely arrange and manage friendly Child Custody Evaluations for our Divorce Helpline clients who would benefit from the process.

Adapted from material developed by Sharon Baker for use in her family counseling practice in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

1. Tell children the truth in simple terms with simple explanations. Tell them where their other parent has gone.

2. Reassure them that they will continue to be taken care of and that they will be safe and secure.

3. Your children will see that parents can stop loving each other. Reassure them that a parent’s love for a child is a special kind that never stops.

4. Spend time with each child individually. Whether you have custody or visitation, the most important thing to the child is your individual relationship with that child. Build the best relationship you can in your circumstances. The future is built of many tiny moments.

5. Children may feel responsible for causing the divorce. Reassure them that they are not to blame. They may also feel that it is their responsibility to bring their parents back together. Let them know that your decision is final and will have to be accepted.

6. Often divorcing parents feel guilty and become overindulgent. Give your child love, but also give limits.

7. Your child is still a child and can’t become the man of the house or a little mother. Continue to be a parent to your child. Seek other adults to fill your own need for companionship.

8. Avoid situations that place a child in the impossible position of choosing between parents:

– Don’t use your child as a way to get back at your spouse. Children can be terribly wounded when caught in a crossfire.
– Don’t say anything bad about the other parent in earshot of a child.
– Don’t say or do anything that might discourage the child from spending time with the other parent.
– Don’t encourage a child to take sides.

9. You and your former spouse will continue to be the parents of your children for life. Pledge to cooperate responsibly toward the growth and development of your children as an expression of your mutual love for them.

10. Be patient and understanding with your children. Be patient and understanding with yourself.

Given the choice, most parents don’t want to move away from their children during or after a divorce. However, when an individual has to choose between relocating and losing a job or caring for an ill parent, a move may be unavoidable. In these instances, there are things you can do to help stay connected with your children if you are facing an interstate custody arrangement.

Ideally, you and your partner will both be focused on what’s best for your children, and you will work together to manage interstate custody or other situations where one of you is living far from a child.

Depending on the child’s age, you could set up a nanny cam in a young child’s room so that the out of area parent can visually check in on a child via a laptop. This is not to spy on what your ex is doing, but rather a way to feel more connected to your infant or toddler. This is an arrangement that can be negotiated during mediation or ordered by a judge in a litigated divorce.

With older children, it can be useful to schedule regular phone chats and/or video chats with Skype or FaceTime. You can also provide a child with a cell phone that has video chat capabilities. This can be very comforting for a child to know that you are accessible at the touch of a button. You may also want to consider setting up video chat with “white board” capabilities (a technology which allows you to write in real time on a virtual white board while chatting) so that you can help a child with homework or play games together.  Many age appropriate video games have multi-player capability, which, when coupled with a head-set, would allow a parent to play games with their child while chatting with them.

Video chat can also allow an out of state parent to participate in things like teacher conferences or other meetings/events concerning a child if it is not possible to arrange in-person meetings.

Another important aspect of interstate custody is face to face visits. Interstate visits are age-dependent. Young children can’t fly, so the out-of-area parent will need to come into town and stay with relatives or rent a place where they can visit with a child. For children, it can be helpful if this visiting location is kept consistent, but this is not always possible due to financial impacts.

Many couples opt to use summer vacations or school breaks to allow the out-of-state parent to spend a larger block of time with a child. In these cases, the “home” parent may wish to use video chats and other strategies outlined above to maintain their ongoing contact with their children.

Another issue which sometimes gets discussed in mediation is the idea of keeping up relationships with grandparents and other relatives of the out-of-state parent, who may live in proximity to the child. It can be very beneficial to the child to maintain contact with relatives on both sides of the family, and cooperation by the in-state parent may be necessary to make this happen post-divorce.

One final procedural point regarding interstate custody—if you are going this route, you will want to have some kind of document filed with the court outlining your agreement. Even if you and your partner are on good terms and want to handle things informally, it is important that this kind of custody arrangement be legally documented. The reason for this is that if the child ends up spending more than six months with an out-of-state parent prior to the filing of a divorce petition, then that state will have jurisdiction over the child as well as the authority to issue orders regarding custody.  For example, if a child spends seven months with her mother in Arkansas prior to the filing of a dissolution petition in California, then Arkansas will be the child’s “home state” and California will be unable to make custody orders.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding interstate child custody, please give us a call at 1-800-359-7004. We can help you review options and work out a strategy to make sure your interests, and the interests of your children are represented and protected during a divorce.

One of the biggest areas of concern (and often misunderstanding) during a divorce is child custody. We frequently work with couples to create parenting plans, and I have found that providing a basic understanding of these plans, also called custody and visitation agreements, can help ease anxiety for all parties involved.

If you and your spouse can agree on a parenting plan, you do not have to have a court order. The downside is that without a court order, you will not have legal recourse should one partner violate the agreement. The court can only intervene once the agreement is filed with the court and becomes a court order.

It’s important to know that from a legal aspect, custody and visitation orders are not set in stone. There is a common fear that you’ll be locked into whatever you agree to during your divorce. In fact, these orders are often modified over time. Things change as children get older, and it is quite likely that the arrangements that were made in the best interests of young children may not make sense when they are adolescents or teens.

I want to underscore that the main focus of any parenting plan should be what is in the best interests of the children. Understandably, when people are facing the end of a marriage or domestic partnership, they are likely to experience a range of tumultuous feelings, fears and new realities. In the midst of this whirlwind, it is important to not let what is happening between you and your partner overshadow the needs of your children. They are undoubtedly going through a similar upheaval and minimizing the impacts on them should be a priority of both parents.

It is important that any plan be developmentally appropriate based on the age of the children involved. In helping our clients create parenting plans, we will often defer to child developmental professionals such as psychologists to make age-appropriate recommendations. In general, younger children need to have extremely clear boundaries, especially at the beginning of the process. Unpredictability can cause anxiety, so we often find that the experts may advise that there be as little change as possible in the early stages of separation or divorce.

This suggestion requires both parents to make an honest assessment of their interaction time with their children. If through no fault of their own, one parent has typically spent less time with the children, suddenly changing that drastically in order to make things “fair” for the parents can cause stress for a child. It may be helpful to take a longer view of the situation and consider adding additional visitation time over a period of months or years in order to not disrupt regular routines for your child.

In some instances, couples opt for a nesting relationship during and after a divorce, where the children remain in the family home and the parents will alternate between living in the home and elsewhere.

While parenting plans can be as loose or as detailed as you wish, it is helpful to have clear boundaries spelled out. Keeping things too unstructured increases the possibility of conflict and miscommunication. Also, in the event that a parent violates the agreement, a clear plan (and court order) provides a pathway for procedural recourse. The non-violating parent can contact the police and ask them to contact the other party to enforce the agreement. (If the police are unwilling to get involved, you may need to go to the court for intervention help.)

Finally, it can be very helpful for both the parents and the children if the agreed-upon visitation schedule is set up in an online calendar that both parents can log into. This provides a clear understanding of who is responsible for a child at any given time, and can reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding or miscommunication.

If you would like more information on parenting plans and child custody agreements, please give us a call at 1-800-359-7004 or use our online contact form.