Family Law, Divorce, Custody and Child Support Attorneys in Denver, Colorado

Percentages

All too often, a parent in the middle of a divorce views the allocation of parenting time as a battle or a contest to produce a winner and a loser. Universally, the divorce lawyers and CFIs involved in these cases will say that when parenting issues are approached in this way, everyone loses, especially the kids.

An early sign of trouble is talk by a parent in terms of percentages, like “50/50″ and “70/30″ or the ever-popular “100% custody”. The latter is so wrong on so many fronts it’s hard to find a place to begin, and while there are extreme circumstances where a court may award one parent all of the parenting time, they are extraordinarily rare.

Property can be divided “50/50″. So can debts. But kids are people and discussing their lives in terms of percentages – while expedient and easy – is wholly wrong.

Here’s a test: how would a child feel hearing a parent talk about “dividing them 50/50″, verses hearing both parents talk about “sharing” time equally? There is a fundamental difference between these two perspectives – and kids know it.

Not only does it help change the perspective away from some kind of competition, dropping all talk of percentages also frees up the parties to focus better on the child’s needs. We’re not so fixated on ending up at 183 overnights each year, if we’re using the phrase “shared parenting time”. Sharing may be equal, but it may not. It’s still sharing, though.

Use of percentages is easy and quick and in the heat of serious negotiations, even lawyers may slip into this bad habit. But it’s not productive, it comes from the wrong perspective, and it can be a serious distraction from child focused parenting plans.

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Overnights

Divorcing parents who are fixated on percentages are also often fixated on the number of overnights they get throughout the year. This may be because child support is based, in part, on the total number of overnights every year a parent has with their children. It’s a good bet that a parent who’s never talked about “overnights” before who suddenly can’t talk about anything else has probably talked to a lawyer about his or her child support obligation.

On the road to divorce court, there can be all kinds of conversions. Don’t be surprised when a parent who, before the filing for a divorce, was distant and disinterested in spending a whole lot of time with the kids, suddenly becomes neurotic about getting as many overnights with the kids as possible.

While it’s really nice to be in charge of putting the kids to bed and getting them ready for school, isn’t there something strange about fighting over who gets the kids when they’re asleep? As parents putting together a child focused parenting plan, does it make sense to put so much emphasis on the hours the kids spend sleeping?

Yet this is what the law sets as the priority – overnights. And Colorado law uses the number of overnights for more than just calculating child support. For example, if a parents seeks to modify the original parenting order, certain limits may exists, or burdens may apply, depending on the current number of overnights and the modified number of overnights the parent is seeking.

What do you do in these circumstances where your economic interests (i.e. child support) may not align with a child focused parenting plan? Good lawyers can work on detaching these two issues, to the extent the law allows, so that all parties can get back to focusing on the best interests of the child.

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Schedules for Parents & Kids

Really, the focus should be on parents spending good, quality time with their kids. In figuring out how to accomplish this objective, we look at, among other things:

• Each parent’s work schedule
• Age of the children
• Travel time to and from school/daycare/activities

To accomplish the objective of maximizing quality time with each parent, sometimes you have to be creative. For example, in the case of nurse, whose schedule may change every couple of weeks. We have to find time slots where that parent can exercise parenting time with a very fluid schedule.

Time with a parent is better than time with a daycare or with a babysitter. Therefore, if one parent is able to have parenting time when the child would otherwise be in daycare or with a babysitter, often times a court will make it happen.

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