In my Tampa office, parents come to me all of the time and say they want “sole custody.” Maybe they are having an argument with the other parent. Maybe they just don’t get along. So parents figure that the solution is to be the only one to have decision making authority over their child.
In the video below, social worker Gary Direnfeld challenges the assumptions behind requests for sole custody.
Divorce court here in Florida is a terrible way to resolve disputes. Divorce litigation is an adversarial proceeding where husband is pitted against wife, mother is pitted against father.
And it is the children who end up suffering the most.
But don’t take my word for it. Tampa psychologist Stephanie Moulton Sarkis writes about the consequences of high conflict divorce on children:
Collaborative family law is a process that can be tailored to your family’s specific needs. In all collaborative cases, issues related to divorce are discussed peacefully and respectfully in private conference rooms rather than confrontationally in public courtrooms. Each spouse has their own attorney – who focuses exclusively on helping his or her client reach an out-of-court agreement – on whom the spouse can rely to provide advice and guide them throughout.
Oftentimes, experts are brought into the collaborative process so that the clients can reach a comprehensive agreement that deals not only with legal issues, but also emotional and financial resolutions. Experts end up making the process much more efficient by being able to handle issues far more quickly than attorneys are able to.
One option that families may want to consider is whether to bring in a child specialist. The short video after the jump, produced by Cypress Collaborative Divorce, discusses the role of the child specialist.
When most people go through divorce, they are consumed by their emotions. No matter how you look at it, divorce is a trauma. However, people oftentimes forget how the divorce is affecting children. And they forget that children are keenly aware of how parents treat one another during divorce.
A video that has been going around the internet lately shows a little girl talking to her mom about how she wants her divorcing parents to be friends and treat each other well. You can find the video after the jump.
If you are going through divorce, you should have a lawyer. Divorce is one of life’s traumatic moments, and it is smart to have a steady hand to advise you during uncertain times.
However, you don’t need to have a lawyer to get divorced.
You have the option of going through pro se mediation (mediation without legal representation).
The Tampa Bay Times is reporting that Florida Governor Rick Scott has vetoed SB 668, a bill that was intended to make large-scale changes to the state’s alimony and child custody laws.
For the first time, the bill was set to create alimony guidelines that calculated a presumptive range for the amount and length of spousal support. Further, the bill would have directed judges, when establishing custody schedules, to start out with the premise that each parent should have approximately an equal amount of time with children.
It was that second point that seemed to be the sticking point for Governor Scott.
I have noticed lately that there is a trend among divorce mediators in Tampa Bay: keep spouses separate from one another. This is known as “caucus”-style mediation, where the spouses are kept in separate rooms from the very beginning of mediation, and the mediator travels back and forth between the rooms relaying information and offers.
There is a good reason why many great mediators prefer caucus-style mediation. As divorce is a highly-emotional process, spouses can set each other off when they are facing one another, and negotiations can descend into argument and cease being productive.
I can see where caucus-style mediation may be appropriate for some families, but it is not my preferred method.
Rather, when I act as the neutral mediator, I prefer to practice face-to-face mediation.
Senate Bill 972, the “Collaborative Law Process Act,” is making its way through the Florida Senate and will hopefully become law this summer.
The Collaborative Law Process Act creates a legal framework for families to resolve disputes outside of court. The bill specifies that family law matters under chapters 61 or 742 of the Florida Statutes may be resolved via the collaborative process. These family law matters include the following:
Families in Tampa Bay, Greater Sarasota, and throughout the state of Florida are already utilizing the collaborative process to resolve divorce and other matters privately and respectfully, but a big improvement with this bill is that there will be a statutory framework to ensure discussions had in the collaborative process can be enforced as confidential. Read more →
If you are divorcing in Tampa Bay and you have children, Florida law requires that a parenting plan be created. The parenting plan outlines parental responsibility (decision-making authority) along with a time-sharing (custody) schedule.
The time-sharing schedule should not only address where the children stay during the school year and in summer months, but also how holidays, such as Christmas, are to be handled.
Below are some sample Christmas time-sharing schedules:
Cynthia Schwarzkopf, daughter of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr, discusses how she and her husband utilized the collaborative family law process to dissolve her marriage in a video released by the Tampa Bay Collaborative Divorce Group.
You can see the video below the jump:
