Alternative Custody Arrangements 101, Pt II

(Continued from this post about alternative custody arrangements.)

As useful as custom custody arrangements are, they do have issues all their own. We try to ensure that all of  our clients understand these dangers before they put their name on a custom custody agreement.

Everything Changes
The biggest hiccup with custom custody is that your child is probably going to be a part of your life for at least a few more years — and a few years is long enough for everything to change. Maybe your son decides he wants to play Knowledge Bowl instead of football, and it completely alters his schedule. Maybe your spouse falls in love with someone from Seattle and wants to move out-of-state. Maybe you get promoted and your new job comes with a complete inability to pick the kid up after school every weekday. Whatever the case is, the only ‘correct’ way to address such a change is to go back in front of a judge and present the court with a request for modification — but to do that, you need the consent of your spouse. That can be daunting in and of itself.

Complexity Breeds Complexity
The flipside of the problem above, in a way. If you try to write a custody agreement in such a way that it takes into account potential changes of job, extracurricular activity, and so on, the language quickly becomes so complex and/or vague that the agreement becomes either impossible to follow or nearly impossible to violate. We’ve seen custody agreements that required literal Algebra to be performed in order to calculate parenting times, and they didn’t last three months. On the other hand, we’ve seen nearly-lethal disagreements between two parents about what a particular vaguely-written clause in a custody agreement actually meant — that wasn’t fun, either.

So if you write your custom custody agreement too specifically, it can become invalid quickly — and if you write too vaguely, it can be invalid before it begins…or never be invalid at all, no matter what your spouse attempts to get away with.

What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Between you and your ex, probably not a whole heck of a lot. But what happens when you find out that your ex is cohabitating with a new person? How is that going to affect your perception of the custody agreement? Or of your child sleeping at their house? What happens when your newly-independent and willful teen starts declaring their love for your ex every time you do something they disapprove of? Emotions are a powerful force when it comes to custody schedules, and love is probably the most powerful of all — so any agreement is going to have to take those potential shifts of loyalty and love into account.

In the end, there’s no real “list of alternative custody arrangements” — other than nesting, as we’ve mentioned, they all boil down to a short list of judge-invoked templates, and the ‘good option’ of putting in the work, custom-creating your own schedule, and working as hard as you can to stick to it.

If you’re worried about creating a custom custody agreement with your ex, call us today; we can — and would love to! — help.