Choosing The Best Type Of Custody: Joint Or Shared?
For divorcing couples with minor-aged children, the issues surrounding child custody, visitation and child support are often among the most contentious, confusing and emotional. When it comes time for you and your partner to create a fair, workable child custody agreement, you will likely encounter some potentially confusing concepts and terms, such as joint custody and shared custody. To help ensure that you have a good understanding of these terms and what your choice could mean to your family, read on.
Joint Custody
The word "joint" can lead some confusion. With this form of custody, the couple (or the judge, if no agreement can be reached) chooses one parent to hold physical custody of the child. It should be noted that although the child will primarily live with one parent, the responsibility for major decisions lie with both parents equally and visitation privileges of varying degrees will allow the child to spend time with both parents.
This type of custody is often used when parents live geographically far apart and are willing to make travel arrangements to comply with visitation. Pay careful attention to your custody agreement; these agreements are quite specific about which parent has visitation on which holidays, vacations, birthdays, etc. Make every effort to ensure that this agreement is doable for the long-term.
Shared Custody
Parents must live in reasonable proximity to each for shared custody to work. Additionally, they must be cooperative with each other and extremely organized. The agreement for shared custody will spell out exactly how much time (normally a percentage of time) that will be spent with each parent, but will leave other details, like holiday and vacation arrangements, up to the parents. While it can be very beneficial for the child to live with both parents, the day-to-day scheduling can be chaotic. Often the child will require two sets of belongings and a shared activity calendar for the parents.
Your custody agreement should be created with an eye towards the future as much as possible, since changing the agreement requires a court order. Judges will always consider what is in the best interest of the child when making decisions and when altering an agreement, so it would be wise for the parents to also view arrangements in that light.
Work closely with a family law or divorce attorney, such as Fraser Legal PC, when creating a custody agreement. If you and your spouse are able to make major child-related decisions outside of court, you will save both time and money spent litigating in court. As parents, you may be the best judge of what's best for your child, so take care with custody arrangements to lessen the impact of your divorce on your children as much as possible.