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Shared Custody When Dad Doesn’t Exercise His Parenting Time

It’s a tale as old as time – or, at least, a tale as old as shared custody. What happens when a dad fights for a parenting plan that reflects shared custody (meaning that he gets 90 or more days of parenting time over the course of a calendar year), but then doesn’t exercise his…

Pregnant and Expecting – a Virginia Divorce

Pregnancy can be wonderful, but it can also be really challenging – especially if you’re also starting to think that your marriage may not last past (or even up until) the birth. Expecting women are particularly vulnerable, especially if you’re currently unemployed, because childbirth is both personally and professionally complicated. Not only that, but caring…

Can I refuse to send my kids to visitation?

I first started writing articles about COVID-19 related concerns back in March of 2020, never expecting that an entire year later I’d still be dealing with concerns related to the ongoing pandemic. Custody and visitation issues are some of the biggest that we face in family law, especially when parents share children between two different…

50/50 Custody in Virginia

Custody and visitation are always major hot button issues in divorce and custody cases, especially because there are so few guarantees. The whole ‘best interests of the child’ standard means that there’s not a standard custody and visitation arrangement ordered; it’s a subjective, not an objective, process, which means that a variety of different arrangements…

Virginia Child Custody: Moving and Taking the Kids

If you and your child’s father are no longer together, it makes sense that, sooner or later, one or both of you will find someone else. And it probably goes without saying that your someone else comes with his own baggage as well. Blending families – and making it work – is a complicated contention…

Do i have custody of my child?

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…

Calling the police to enforce Virginia custody and visitation

For every highly contentious case I see, there are probably hundreds of other where the parents are able to work things out. There are likely a bunch of families where mom and dad split up, but they never see the inside of the courtroom. Professionally, I see some people like that. They come in for…

My first custody court date

If your first custody court date is coming up, you’re probably a barrel full of nerves. If you’re anything like me, whenever anything stressful is approaching, you get that “can’t eat, can’t sleep” feeling. When it relates to your children, that feeling is probably amplified by, like, a million – and, especially since we’re dealing…

He just wants to pay less child support

I see it all the time. It makes me sad, but it’s just the way it is. For a lot of dads, their chief motivation is figuring out some way to pay less child support — or, even better, none at all. To them, I think, it feels like a long term monthly payment to…

Should I handle custody before my divorce?

Women ask me all the time whether they should just get custody handled first, and then come back and handle the divorce itself.  In a sense, I think I get what they’re saying – custody is the more pressing concern immediately, and needing to have that handled is clouding everybody’s judgment about everything.  Maybe they…