Creating a parenting plan is a challenging legal process that a seasoned child custody lawyer is well prepared to help you handle.
Creating a parenting plan in Gastonia involves establishing the terms of both physical and legal custody. The plan you land on will reflect your parental rights, which makes it of critical importance.
If you are facing a divorce involving children or need a parenting plan modification, you shouldn’t wait to retain trusted legal counsel. Turn to the experienced child custody attorneys at the Law Offices of Regina M. Taylor, P.C., for the guidance you’re looking for.
Your parenting plan will address your child custody terms, which include both legal and physical custody. Legal custody establishes how you and your ex will address primary parenting decisions about your kids’ schooling, medical care, religious education, and participation in extracurriculars. Physical custody, on the other hand, resolves the matter of your parenting time schedules. Either can be joint or sole.
Both legal and physical custody will be determined in accordance with your children’s best interests, given the unique circumstances that apply. All things being equal, spending a significant amount of time with each of you is generally considered ideal.
There are, however, situations in which it makes more sense for one parent to take on the primary parental role. Clear examples include when one parent’s work schedule better aligns with the children’s needs and when one parent has been significantly more involved in raising the children.
Nobody understands your children’s unique needs and best interests the way you and their other parent do, which is why creating a parenting plan in Gastonia often begins with the parents themselves working toward mutually acceptable terms. In the process, you can implement plans that make sense for your family, and in so doing, you set yourselves up for co-parenting success. When it comes to negotiating terms that you are both willing to sign off on, you and your soon-to-be ex are not expected to miraculously get along and engage in a reasonable exchange of ideas. Child custody cases tend to be far more complex than that.
Instead, you will each look to your respective lawyers to help guide you on the path forward. There is also the option of mediation, which involves you and your skilled custody attorney, your ex and theirs coming together with a professional mediator. The mediator serves in the role of a neutral third party who will help set the stage for meaningful negotiations.
Only if you have exhausted your other options and have not resolved each of the parenting plan terms will your case head to trial. You can expect the court to apply best interest factors like the following in determining your parenting plan:
After weighing these factors, the court will issue a parenting plan designed to protect your children’s best interests and promote stability moving forward.
Creating a parenting plan in Gastonia can be a tall order, but keeping your case out of court allows you to retain this primary decision-making authority regarding your own children. The compassionate child custody attorneys at the Law Offices of Regina M. Taylor, P.C., will leave no stone unturned in our focused efforts to help.
Learn more by contacting us today.
