Can you earn an increase in parenting time before and during a divorce in San Diego? Are you concerned that your schedule or existing patterns regarding time with your children may work against you?
The existing patterns in your participation and involvement in the life of your children prior to and during the divorce can and will have a tremendous impact on temporary and permanent child custody and parenting time orders.
If you wish to earn an increase in parenting time you must exhibit not only exceptional parenting skills and involvement in your child’s lives but you must demonstrate to the Court you can and will be an effective co-parent.
The good news is the Family Court in California begins with the basic lean toward shared parenting and child custody time. The guiding principle of child custody and parenting time is “the best interests of the child.”
Begin by taking an honest inventory of your awareness of child’s schedule, developmental stages and schooling needs. How do you support getting them to and from school, homework and transportation and involvement in extracurricular activities. You may wish to consider counseling, parenting classes and other strategies to sharpen your skills and awareness as a parent and a co-parent in order to earn an increase in parenting time.
While things have been all but shut down during COVID-19 we will hopefully resume more normal childhood activities sometime later in 2021. This also means taking an active role in helping with remote learning and sharing time off work to parent with your present/former spouse as much as possible.
Demonstrating an active role in your child’s daily life is the most effective strategy to earn an increase in parenting time. If orders are already in place and you are dissatisfied with the time you have with your child(ren) begin by making sure you never miss the time provided within existing orders. Work to ensure smooth transitions and be prompt and courteous regarding communications with your co-parent.
The Court will be very interested in all communications between the co-parents. This means you must be very cautious about all communications, especially voicemails, emails, texts and social media posts. The Court will closely evaluate the ability of each party to cooperate and work constructively with the other party as they co-parent. This also means monitoring your own behavior toward the co-parent whenever you are in or around the child(ren). Model excellence in this endeavor.
If your co-parent is in agreement to an increase in parenting time the process to modify the existing orders is fairly straight forward. If the other co-parent is not cooperative you will need the advice and counsel of a proven Certified Family Law Specialist at Burke & Domercq if you wish to earn an increase in parenting time.
Protect your own interests and contact us or call 760-389-3927 to schedule an appointment for a remote or socially distanced consultation with one of our experienced Certified Family Law Specialists.