Divorce, Holidays and the Kids

The holiday season is upon us and many people are beginning the fight regarding who gets the kids, for how long and when. In Florida, if you have a court ordered holiday schedule, the holiday schedule will trump your regular schedule. Additionally, "holiday" contact is usually defined as the day the children are released from school until the day they return to school at the conclusion of the break from school. If you don't have an agreement at this time, here are some tips to help you through the holiday season with as little stress and fighting as possible:

1. Be Willing to Compromise. Its rare that you will get both Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you want Thanksgiving this year, understand that you are probably going to have to give up Christmas Day this year.
2. Make Plans for Yourself. If you don't have Thanksgiving this year, you will have it next year. That's the way that it works and is what is fair to the other parent. There is no time like the present to figure out what you are going to do on the holiday when you don't have the kids. Don't give your kids a guilt trip, they should be able to spend time with their father/mother without feeling guilty.
3. More than one celebration is not a bad thing. Kids never complain about having two (2) Christmases so if you don't get to see your children on Christmas this year, you can celebrate with them on the day/days that you do have them.
4. Don't agree in writing to share holidays. You never know what is going to happen in the future and your new wife/husband may not understand why they have to have your ex-wife/ex-husband at their Thanksgiving table. If you decide to share a holiday that's great, but if you put it in writing, you are stuck with that indefinitely.
5. Don't make assumptions. If you are travelling for a holiday and there is no agreement as to who gets the holiday this year, make sure you speak with your children's mother/father before booking flights or hotel rooms. Never assume that the holiday is yours. You will have much better success at getting a particular holiday if you speak with the other parent first and ask them whether you can have the kids rather than just making plans without consulting the other parent.
6. Plan ahead. The sooner you can come to an agreement about the holiday schedule, the smoother the season will go. With the crowding of courts, if you wait until the last minute there will be little chance that you will be able to get to see a judge before the holiday if an agreement can't be reached.
7. Don't take the holiday schedule too seriously. If you agree not to have a holiday this year, all that means is that you get that particular holiday next year. Fighting over holidays does not make sense and ultimately will have a negative effect on your children.
8. Create new traditions with your children to make the holiday season special. Life is not going to look the same once you and your spouse decide to split, but that doesn't mean you can't create new and meaningful traditions.
9. Focus on the Positive. Divorce is difficult on everyone and can be even more difficult if you are going through one during the holiday season. Focusing on the positive can help you get through the season.
10. Be Flexible- If your ex-spouse has a holiday this year, wants to travel and stay a day later which means that will cut into your time, if you don't have other plans, be okay with this, because you never know when you are going to need the same flexibility.

Questions and Answers

I recently blogged about changes to the Florida Child Support Guidelines that are going to be effective in January of 2011. This particular subject has hit a nerve with many of my readers and also generated quite a few questions. As a result, here are some answers to some of the questions that were posted as a result of the new law regarding child support and what constitutes substantial contact for purposes of credits in a child support calculation.

1. Many people questioned whether or not this law is something that will help or hurt children. To answer this question, I think that we don't have enough data to know whether this law is going to have a negative impact on children. As a practicing attorney with many clients going through divorce, I have seen first hand issues with respect to time-sharing that are specifically related to whether or not someone is going to get the substantial contact credit. I see both sides of the agrument and don't know whether or not this is going to have a big impact on cases settling or people coming out of the woodwork asking for their statutory reductions. True, someone is going to get less child support as a result of this change in the law, but my hope would be that the payor parent will be more willing to help out in other financial ways like school supplies, clothing, and extra-curricular activities as a result of this reduction.

2. The statute does not specifically address extracurricular activities, however, there is a trend, at least in Central Florida to make all agreed upon extracurricular activities shared between the parties and that no party can unreasonably withhold their consent for monetary reasons. I suggest that all parties request that this be put in their Final Judgments and certainly address it in your parenting plan if you and your spouse are coming to a full agreement.

3. Daycare and summer camp expenses should always be a part of child support and addressed by a judge. One of the other changes that is going to go into effect is that childcare is no longer reduced by 25%. If you are paying 100% of the daycare, this will be factored into your child support award or obligation.

4. If you want to get this substantial contact reduction, you need to file the appropriate paperwork with the Court, which
I believe would be a Supplemental Petition to Modify. It is something that you can do on your own by getting the appropriate papers online or from your local courthouse.

If you would like more information or have a specific question, please feel free to email me at christine@bauerfamilylaw.com.

Country Concerns

I was reading an article recently about a father whose daughter was taken out of the country by his ex-wife and his efforts to have his daughter returned to him here in Florida. What was staggering to me in that article was a statistic from The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children which stated that in 2009 there were 1621 children that were wrongfully taken out of United States by a parent and of those 1621 children, only 436 were returned. I have had clients in the past that had legitimate concerns about a spouse taking their children out of the country without their permission. If a child is taken to a foreign country, it seems that there is less than a 30% chance that the child will make his/her way back to America. That is a scary statistic. Therefore, if you have a spouse who is from another country and you have legitimate fears that he/she may make an effort to remove your child from the United States, make sure that you have possession of your child's passport and don't give the other parent permission to take your child out of the country. While it is unlikely that a parent would have success getting the child out of the country without the other parent's consent, if the parent wishing to move to another country with the child is successful, the likelihood of getting the child back is very low. In many cases, its better to be safe than sorry when it comes to issues such as these.

Summer Time-Sharing

Summer in Florida, like in many other states, affords divorced parents the opportunity to spend blocks of quality time with their children. Most of my clients equally divide up the summer with the children spending half of their time with each parent. This is usually a time for summer trips, bonding and giving a parent who has the children primarily during the school year a much needed break. However, often what you decide to do when your children are younger, may not always work when they get to be teenagers when their life and schedules are more important than spending quality time with mom and/or dad. While I agree that teenagers should always get a say, but they shouldn't always get their way, its important to recognize that a teenager's needs and wants when it comes to summertime time-sharing. Don't take offense if your teenager would rather stay close to home to be near a boyfriend/girlfriend or summer job. Be flexible with them and find ways that you can spend time with them and still accommodate some of their own wishes and desires. Work with your ex-spouse to ensure that a summer time schedule makes sense for everyone. Planning ahead and scheduling out the summer in April or May is a good way to avoid confusion and to provide your teenager with a realistic expectation of what they are and are not going to be able to do with their summer.

Special Needs Children, Divorce, And A Race for a Cure

There is plenty of research out there that sets forth very disappointing statistics about couples with special needs children and divorce. Children put strains on even the happiest of marriages. Couples have a much higher likelihood of divorce if they have a special needs child, whether that is a child with mental or emotional special needs or a child that has been diagnosed with a disease such as cancer. There is no question about the devastating effects that the stress involved with caring for a child that has needs above and beyond what is considered "normal" can have on a marriage. Trying to keep things together emotionally and financially when caring for a special needs child can break the proverbial matrimonial back. Perhaps one of the ways that we can focus on keeping families together is getting to the root of diseases such as autism and cancer and doing proactive things to find cures. Perhaps if less pediatric diseases existed, less couples will end up in divorce court. That's why foundations such as Noah's Light Foundation are an essential part of keeping families together. The focus of Noah's Light Foundation is finding a cure for pediatric brain and spinal tumors. Finding a cure for such diseases can have a ripple effect which reduces the divorce rate in this country. While some couples may still end up in divorce court regardless of whether or not their children are healthy, I truly believe that reducing stress in people's lives does increase happiness which ultimately leads to less divorce.

To read more about Noah's Light Foundation, see: http://www.noahslightfoundation.org/

Child Support Changes

A new approach to calculating child support was signed into law in Florida in June and will effect most, if not all, of the cases that are currently pending before the courts. The law goes into effect either in October 1, 2010 or January 1, 2011 and in short, it drastically changes the way in which child support is calculated. It used to be that unless you had your child or children for 40% of the overnights, you did not receive any type of substantial contact credit. That has changed significantly. Once this law goes into effect, anyone who has their child or children for at least 20% of the overnights (every other weekend from Friday to Monday, alternating holidays and 1/2 the summer) will get a substantial contact credit. Additionally, the following changes will be made:

1. A child support order will have to have a specific termination date and have step down child support specified. This means if you have more than one child there will have to be a termination date inserted for after the first child reaches the age of majority, and then a changed amount and a termination date for each child thereafter. (i.e., child support shall be $1,200 per month for three children terminating June 10, 2012, then $900.00 for two children terminating on August 1, 2014 and then $600.00 ending June 10, 2016).
2. Daycare expenses are no longer discounted by 25%. You now will get credit for 100% of your daycare costs, however, the childcare tax credit will be taken into consideration when determining child support.
3. The courts may have the ability to impute income to someone if they don't provide "adequate" financial information in order to calculate child support. What income they can impute is the change, in that, they can automatically impute income to that party to have the income equivalent to the median income of year-round full-time workers as derived from the current population reports or replacement reports published by the United States Bureau of the Census. (If you can figure out what that means, call me.)

In a nutshell, I believe that the legislature is trying to cure the problem of people demanding extra overnights during the week in order to get a substantial contact credit. We'll see if that still makes a difference, but for now, it appears that the way that we calculate child support is going to make some people very happy.

Staying In A Bad Relationship For The Kids

There are many studies that talk about the negative effects that divorce has on children. A new study has just been released that states that staying in a hostile and volatile relationship "for the kids" can be much more damaging than divorce itself. I have long since believed that this is the case, and I have heard time and time again that once a couple separates they are able to be better people and parents. However, what couples who are going through a divorce need to understand is----how they treat one another after the divorce will dictate how well their children deal with the divorce. No matter what couples who have children need to put their own issue and problems to the side and learn how to co-parent their children without the hostility and anger that may have led to their divorce. This study shows that staying in a bad relationship is worse than divorce, but it does not address whether or not a relationship that is bad during the marriage and remains bad after the divorce has more or less of a negative effect on children.

To read the article upon which this blog is based, see: