Even though Governor Northam’s order specifically allows you to leave your home in order to exchange a child pursuant to a custody and visitation order, there are a lot of parents who are using fears surrounding coronavirus as an excuse to deliberately withhold a child. I guess that’s always the case. These thing are inherently...
What should I do if my child’s father is using coronavirus to keep my child away?
An ER doctor in Florida recently lost custody of her 4 year old daughter on a temporary basis as fears of the coronavirus pandemic escalate around the country. We keep reading about the stories of heroes who keep working despite the dangers of COVID-19, and we’ve realized recently how dependent we are on some of...
Can I refuse overnight visitation because of coronavirus? The pandemic is changing the world. It’s changing everything, and there’s a lot of underlying fear causing people to make decisions that are more or less conducive to supporting a parenting arrangement. I’ve heard of all sorts of things recently. Parents not wanting to send their children...
I keep hearing a lot of “what ifs” lately, and it makes sense. There hasn’t been another pandemic like this in living memory, and these are exceptional times. Every morning these days, I get up and check the news, terrified of what I might see. I keep seeing news articles and hearing rumors that suggest...
If I had a quarter for every time a client asked me about supervised visitation, I’d have an awful lot more quarters than the number of cases where I’ve seen supervised visitation actually get awarded. It’s not like an annulment, which is essentially a unicorn, but it’s not very common, either. In fact, it’s pretty...
On Monday, I talked about an issue in coparenting that I see come up with some frequency: “how much information do I give my child’s father?” It’s often an issue when it comes to things like medical appointments; if dad doesn’t come, is mom obligated to share the details? What does it say if she...
I was talking to a woman the other day who was asking me all sorts of things about her upcoming custody case and the decisions she should be making. The (first time) mother of a very young son, she had never navigated this kind of territory before. Though she hoped to be able to reach...
People care for children every single day and haven’t been to court to have custody and visitation determined. In most cases, those people don’t really worry about custody; they just have their kid, and they take care of him (or her). Things only really start to become a problem when there’s turmoil in the relationship...