Hopefully you are reading this before you have found yourself in the Family Court system. If you are like most litigants, your knowledge about Family Law and it’s Court isn’t a great deal. Whatever expectations that you have or judgments about your case should be left at the door or you’ll likely suffer in this arena. Your journey can unfold in many ways, it can go smoothly and both you and your children’s other parent can simply agree and move on with your lives. This is the general path of most child custody disputes, they just get settled and there isn’t a trial or much court involvement. Hopefully, this will be the case for you; unfortunately, it can be difficult to tell in the beginning whether your petition for custody will be contested and to what degree.
In a perfect world, your preparation for a custody battle would have begun long before any court filings, in any event, you will not be successful and your children will suffer if you do not adopt the right mind set.
The first thing is that there won’t be a “winner”. You will not “have your day in Court”.
Things that you anticipate happening won’t. Any control that you had over the outcome of your case will be handed over to the presiding judge – whoever that may be. This is not going to be what you’ve expected in any way. Your children’s parent may be a drug addict and they will still be given 50% of the time, or they haven’t seen your child in 8 years, but now they have every other weekend visitation. The Courts don’t always get it right; in just a short amount of time, based on what was presented, your judge is going to make a decision about you and your children’s lives.
Going into this, you have to understand that you must set the tone and you must be the bigger person and you must be willing to compromise if at all possible. I tell my clients that you’re going to be co-parenting with the children’s other parent for many years to come. You get to make the decision right now about how those years of your life and your children’s lives will be. The reality is that most likely the other parent is going to get some form of visitation and decision making rights. It’s very difficult to convince the Court otherwise if there are not exceptional circumstances like substantiated proof of child abuse. The Courts have seen it all and what amounts to a difference in parenting styles and abilities is not going to sway a judge to your favor.
Even contentious custody litigation, after it’s settled tends to relax as tempers calm and the big picture comes into place. The likelihood of sole parental responsibility or no time-share is generally not granted, and sometimes not even granted in cases where most rational adults would disagree with the judges decision.
The law places a lot of importance on the rights of a parent to raise their child and the child’s best interests oftentimes is not at the forefront.
We must be prepared to look at the big picture and at the longevity of the relationship between all parties. Someone must be the bigger person and refuse to place the children in the middle. In doing so, you may have to give up all the expectations that you had in what being a parent looks like. You may have to give up expectations of what your life should look like.
Co-Parenting can be very messy, especially when each is vying for control, and there is still resentment and anger. There are various measures to take to protect your child and yourself in a high conflict situation. Nonetheless, the mindset is the same. You must understand that you do not have control over the other parent and that they have just as much right to parent and have a relationship with their child, despite their shortcomings.
If you preface your actions with that mindset, taking the circumstance as a whole, you’ll be much more successful in the long run with your co-parenting arrangement, and your children will one day thank you for being the bigger person.
