The court has ruled that Joseph Reyes will be allowed to take his 3-year-old daughter, Ela, to church according to the Chicago Sun-Times.  Rebecca Reyes, who has full custody of the child in their divorce proceedings, said the father was breaching an agreement they made that Ela would be raised in the Jewish faith.

The court also ruled that the father would have Christmas and Easter holidays with the child and the mother would have the Jewish holidays.

But Reyes still faces contempt sanctions for taking his daughter to church in violation of a previous court order.

by Jill H. Breslau

Typical timesharing schedules, like 50/50, or 5-2-2-5, or 4-3, or weekdays and weekends do not take into account the needs of children are different at various ages and stages of development.  Frequently, the approach to visitation is to consider the schedules and convenience of the parents first, figure out a logical access schedule, and then see if the children can adjust to it.

But a baby doesn’t need the same kind of access schedule that a 12 year old does.  Their basic needs and developmental tasks are different.  The baby’s “task” is to learn to bond, because all future emotional relationships depend on early bonding.  The baby needs continuity and frequency of contact, because for a baby, when someone goes away for weeks at a time, it is as if they died.

A 12 year old on the other hand, needs time with parents that takes into account his or her need to develop peer relationships and extracurricular activities.  And any children with issues like ADHD or special needs may have unique requirements that parents should consider when setting up schedules.

It is not easy to look at life through your child’s eyes. But a good parenting plan and child access schedule does just that.  You are a parent for the long haul; your children grow and change, and so should your schedule.  The way to begin to establish a schedule is by understanding the needs of each child.

Highway 20 Ride

by the Zac Brown Band

I ride east every other Friday but if I had it my way
The day would not be wasted on this drive
And I want so bad to hold you
So much things I haven’t told you
Your mom and me couldn’t get along
So I’ll drive
And I think about my life
And wonder why, that I slowly die inside.

Mishcon de Reya, a law firm in London, England, has completed a study in which 2000 parents and 2000 children involved in divorce were interviewed.  According to the London Times, the findings were:

• one in three children permanently loses touch with a parent, usually the father, after the divorce.
• one in five parents said that their primary objective during separation was to make the experience as unpleasant as possible for their former spouse.
• one in five of the children said that they felt used by their parents.
• One in three of the children said they felt isolated and lonely.
• Half of parents said that they had been to court to fight over residential custody arrangements despite knowing it made matters worse for their children.

“The adversarial, blame-focused system is polarising parents and prevents them thinking forward about the long-term interests of their children,” says Sandra Davis, head of the family division at the law firm.  “As a result the courts are drowning, trying to sort out what are fundamentally behavioural and family issues, with lawyers being drawn into disputes over what time a child is picked up from school.”

Sometimes it is just easier for co-parents to communicate online with messages and visitation schedules so they don’t get distracted and drawn into arguments.

I have seen a few websites devoted to this idea, with visitation calendars and other features for a fee.

But today I ran across Cozi which says it is a site for organizing your family life.  It is completely free, totally user-friendly, and has a color coded family calendar, photo upload, list maker, email, journal and more.  I signed up and was able to use it in about five minutes.  While probably designed for the intact family, it occurs to me that this is a perfect tool for visitation schedules and messages.

Caryn Tamber tells the story in the Maryland Daily Record of Marius Aydanian and Antonina Aydanian, both of Bulgaria, who met when they were seeking political asylum in the United States.  They were granted asylum, married and moved to Indianapolis.  In 1998, Antonina enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.  Marius stayed in Indianapolis.  Antonina gave birth to their son.  In 2005, she obtained a Bulgarian divorce.

Marius was able to obtain a visitation order in the U.S. for two days a month and the summers.  However, Antonina sent the boy to Bulgaria for two summers in a row.

Marius filed suit in Montgomery County, Maryland, for intentional interference with visitation.  On July 1, 2009, after two and a half days of trial, the jury returned a verdict for Marius in the amount of $23,000.

In a 2008 case, Khalifa et al. v. Shannon, the Maryland Court of Appeals upheld a $3 million verdict in favor of a father for interference with visitation when his ex-wife and mother-in-law took their two children to Egypt.

The mother removed her child from England, where the father lived, to her country of origin twice.  Both times the father sued under the Hague Convention and the mother returned with the child.  The father now has custody.

The mother wanted visitation under an interim order until a custody evaluation could be completed.  The father objected, concerned that the mother would abscond with the child again.

The English High Court, in Re A (A Minor), March 17, 2009, issued an order requiring that the mother wear an electronic ankle bracelet before being allowed to visit her child.

Read more at Jeremy Morley’s excellent International Family Law Blog.

Eathan is a divorced father of two boys who is thinking outside of the box when it comes to alternating holidays.  He says in his blog that he tried the every other year for holidays and it’s no fun.  There are travel arrangements, scheduling conflicts and plans that don’t work.  You have to coordinate the weeks events around the dreadful kid-swap.

So, Eathan says, he decided to let his boys stay with their mom for the holidays.  “They get to spend the day with grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins.  They get to eat Grandma’s stuffing and pies.  They can take their time and relax.  Problem solved.”

Then Eathan takes his sons on other holidays and special vacations.  He went to Disney World one year and took them on a father/son camping trip. “ Both of those trips are still talked about every year.  They are burned in their memory.  The one thing they can’t remember is Thanksgiving at Grandma’s last year.  It’s just a normal event, but the trips with dad are memorable.”

Clark Rockefeller made headlines when he took his seven year old daughter in Boston on July 27 during his first supervised visitation with a social worker.  Rockefeller lost custody last December when the mother relocated to London for work.

Rockefeller turned himself in in Baltimore and now faces felony charges in Boston.

Some websites portray Rockefeller as a hero of fathers’ rights and are using his case to draw attention to problems with the family court system.

Dahlia Lithwick, writing at Slate.Com, recognizes these problems:

“Many good fathers will be downgraded from full-time dads to alternating-weekend-carpool dads. They will be asked to pay at least one-third of their salaries in child support for that privilege. Simple rules of modern life make it likely that an ex-wife will someday decide that a job or new husband demands a move to a faraway state. At which point the alternating-weekend-carpool dad is again demoted—to a Thanksgivings-if-you’re-lucky dad.”

But, she notes, that “lionizing Clark Rockefeller or other violent, lawless fathers will not promote fathers’ rights or fix the family-court system.”

She’s right.  The system is imperfect.  But until we come up with something better, it’s the best we’ve got.  As Rockefeller found out, taking the law into your own hands will not work.

“In 85% of divorces, fathers get just two weekends a month and a couple of hours during the week.” — Mike McCormick of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children.

With the divorce and custody trial of Christie Brinkley vs. Peter Cook in the news, the Intelligence Report at Parade Magazine is asking if divorce courts are anti-dad and is taking a survey on this question:

“Should divorced dads get equal time with their kids?”

Parade notes that up to half of fathers lose contact with their kids after a divorce even with a trend toward shared custody over the past twenty years.

Proportional time is a new legal trend according to Jennifer Rosato of Philadelphia’s Drexel University School of Law, where “the custody decision is based on the time dads spent with their children before the divorce, rather than presuming that dads have, and want, limited involvement with their kids.”

But, says McCormick, “Courts want a check first and a relationship second.”