The process of dealing with a divorce or allocation of parenting time and rights situation is overwhelming in so many ways. At Children First Family Law, we want to lift much of that burden from your shoulders. Instead of feeling guilt, despair, or hopelessness about the changes on the horizon for your family, we want you to see hope as we help equip you to rebuild the broken family relationships in new and beautiful ways so you and especially your children can flourish in the new normal.
We focus on relationships and defending your family rather than tearing it apart. If you want an attorney who will fight to build you up by destroying your former partner, then we are not the right legal team for you. But if you want to protect your children, your extended family and friends, and your own peace of mind while developing the right plans for the future, then we invite you to talk to us. We can protect your interests assertively and effectively without emphasizing the damaging negativity and highly litigious focus that permeates most family law firms. We will equip you to help your family and especially your children flourish in this new situation, and to do so as peacefully and efficiently as possible.
We invite you to take a look at our wide variety of reviews from individuals we have represented. You can find more than 100 comments on our Google reviews, but overall they refer to this firm as:
professional, ethical, personal, attentive, strong, responsive, wise, tireless, upfront, strategic, candid, fearless, sensitive, kind, compassionate, warm, strong, completely focused on children
great follow through, challenging clients when needed, kept my child’s needs front and center, strong negotiator, took great care of me
Understanding Parenting Issues in Family Court
If you have children, your primary worry is about whether they will be ok despite what is occurring in family law. That is our main concern, too.
Courts call this “parental rights and responsibilities.” This is because “custody,” what you might think is the correct term, sounds like ownership, so we avoid it.
In Colorado, these parental rights responsibilities are broken into two main categories:
- Decision-making: This involves parents’ abilities to make decisions in major categories – primarily medical and educational, but also involving extracurricular decisions (especially who pays for them and whether parents have to allow kids to attend them during a parent’s parenting time); and
- Parenting time: This involves where the child lives and how many overnights the child spends with each parent.
The allocations of these different responsibilities are addressed as separate issues.
Judges generally prefer to give both parents a say in big decisions affecting their child, so courts generally order parents to share decision-making responsibility. If there is domestic violence in the family, the courts often split decision-making categories or give one parent the primary role as decisionmaker. Even then, however, both parents get access to information about the decisions and get to opine on what that parent would prefer. This is because parents have Constitutional rights to be parents and to be involved in the decisions for their children. These are complicated areas of law highly dependent on your specific situation, so finding the right legal counsel to help you navigate this is critically important.
Parenting time can also be shared or allocated in different proportions. Again, this is a complicated area of law that is dependent on a wide variety of factors. Generally, courts want both parents – so long as they are safe – to be involved with the children, but the extent of overnights is highly dependent on the situation. As a very well-known and respected child advocate involved in helping courts navigate these complex questions in every jurisdiction across the state, our attorney is uniquely situated to help her individual clients approach these questions in the manner best for the children.
Developing a Parenting Plan
Parents have the option of developing their own plans to allocate parental responsibilities or, if they can’t agree, the court will do it for them. Our attorney is highly sought after to help courts and families structure these plans in high-conflict situations as the role of the child advocate, so when she represents individual parents, they have the best possible advocate to assist in the creation of their plan.
Parenting plans address issues such as:
- How decision-making authority is allocated between parents
- A schedule of time the child will spend with each parents, including the schedule for vacations and holidays
- Details about how the parents will exchange the child, including when, where, and the transportation to be used
- Information about how and when the child will communicate with one parent while staying with the other
- Information about how often and through what means parents will communicate with each other,
- And many other issues.
In our experience, the more detail included in the plan, the easier it is for parents to work together long term for the best interests of their child.
How Courts Make Family Law Decisions
Whether you are developing your own plan or will have to go to court for the judge to establish arrangements, it is helpful to understand the factors the law requires courts to consider when creating a parenting schedule that serves the child’s best interests. These include:
- The relationship and interaction between the child and the parents, and between the child and siblings and others who are significant
- The child’s attachment to home, school, and community
- The physical and mental health of everyone involved
- A parent’s ability to encourage the child to share love with the other parent (except in cases of abuse, which is a complex area in and of itself) and to put the child’s needs ahead of their own
- The parent’s history of involvement in the child’s life
- The parents’ wishes
In addition, if the child is “sufficiently mature” to have an “independent, well-reasoned view,” the court will also consider the child’s wishes. In Colorado, this is explicitly not based on the child being a certain age, which is a common misunderstanding. However, also in Colorado, there are also new and advancing laws that allow for children exposed to domestic violence or child abuse (whether police have been called or not, whether charges have been made or not, and so on) to have more voice that is taken more seriously by the courts. If your children are in this situation, getting representation is critically important to advocate for their best interests in this complicated area of law.
It is a good idea to assess these factors in your relationship with your child and start collecting evidence to show your involvement in your child’s life. A wide variety of details need to be considered to see how they fit into the big picture of determining your child’s best interests.
Issues Beyond Parenting Rights and Responsibilities
Even when both parents spend equal time with their child, one parent will still probably be obligated to pay child support to the other, because it is extremely unlikely that both parents’ earnings are exactly the same. Support payments start with a calculation based on mandatory guidelines, but other considerations are then made as to whether that resulting amount makes sense.
When parents are divorcing, they need a plan for dividing assets and debts. This is often the most complicated and contentious part of a divorce. Both parties need to share honest information about their financial situation to create a fair plan for asset and liability division. When parties develop their own plans, they are usually happier with the results because each spouse can negotiate to keep the assets that mean most to them.
If one spouse earns substantially more than the other, that spouse may need to pay alimony (in Colorado called “spousal maintenance”) for a time, particularly if the other spouse earns less because they sacrificed career to focus on the home. However, each adult with children over the age of two is expected to have a reasonable, good-faith income assigned in the calculations of maintenance. This can be a complicated, highly contentious area of law as there are a lot of considerations to make, including whether someone stayed home with the children, what he or she used to do for work, what a person’s education and work history is, what he or she can reasonably now earn, if one person is returning to school to get more education, and so on.
The number of details to be settled between parents can become overwhelming, but guidance from an experienced, thoughtful, and detail-oriented attorney will make the process much more manageable. We bring all these details to you in manageable bites so you can address the future unknowns one step at a time, getting you through this difficult time in your life with as little stress as possible.
Unbundled Services
To save money, many parents try to handle as many issues as possible on their own, seeking legal assistance only when necessary. We can offer unbundled services on a case- by-case basis. For instance, if you want help developing a plan for parenting time and child support but you can agree to terms on other issues on your own, we can represent one parent in negotiation or serve as a neutral mediator to help you reach your own consensus on the issues in question. Or, we can be a coach to you, known or unknown to the other party, helping you in the background but not representing you.
If you reached agreement on all terms and just need legal guidance to prepare and review paperwork, we can assist with that as well.