How do the child custody laws in Florida impact your children? Think about this. Your parents just told you they are getting a divorce. It’s pretty scary, pretty horrible actually. You rely on these people for all of your needs and necessities. You are just essentially a little kid. Anybody in their teenage years or younger is really just a kid. Their lives are being uprooted. Their friendships are uncertain. Their days at school might be turbulent. They are growing up. There’s so much uncertainty in their lives and now you, the parents, have introduced total chaos to their lives. According to Florida’s new child custody law passed in 2023, both parents are presumptively entitled to equal timesharing.
Child custody laws in Florida are important to know. You have just told your kid something very important. You are getting a divorce, which means now they’re going to have two houses, maybe three or four, if you both work and they are frequently with relatives, grandparents, aunts, uncles, older brothers or sisters, or even friends that are babysitters. Now these little kids, their lives are fractured. On account of Florida’s new child custody law, your child custody is half on, half off. They’re going in different directions. They are now essentially split up. They’re living one life at mom’s house with one set of rules, another life at dad’s house with another set of rules. And when they go to school, if their day’s terrible, then they have to go home and they lack the support system. Dinner’s different at each house. Bedtime is different at each house. Their room is different in each house. Their clothes, their blankets, their books. Maybe they left the homework at mom’s house and mom’s not bringing it over to dad’s house. Maybe they left their shoes and their uniform or sporting equipment at dad’s house and dad’s not there. Nobody’s there to help.
Maybe the parents are squabbling over who does the pick up and drop off. And this poor kid is stuck at school for an extra two hours until school’s absolutely closed might sound like a nightmare situation because it is. If two parents cannot co-parent, that child is going to live a life of total uproar, which can be a life of bitter unhappiness, which is one of the reasons why so many kids nowadays report having negative thoughts mentally and why so many kids are seeking therapy or brought into therapeutic situations. We must take this very seriously.
I know easy for me to say I’m a divorce attorney. Yes. And this is a line of work that I didn’t naturally believe that I would ever work in. And yet I understand it so thoroughly. I understand it. I’ve lived it. I know all about it. My parents were divorced. My brother’s divorced. Child custody situations in our family are certainly not an unfamiliar situation by any stretch by any stretch of the imagination.
What I can say is that having been a child of divorce, knowing other children of divorce and having been professionally and personally involved in these situations, it’s devastating on a kid. So hurtful. And imagine if you have a preference for one parent because they’re the parent that treats you well, that really seems to care about you. And you only get to see them 20%, 30%, 40, 50 % of the time.
And then the other time you’re with the parent that might not be quite as emotional with you. And I mean that in a good way, not quite as caring and compassionate, not quite as concerned for your wellbeing, maybe a little more strict. Not that’s a thing either. I think you understand the point though. The differences in parental approaches and the kind of struggle and tug of war with the parents bleeds through to a child custody too, bleeds through to how they parent.
And now you are a child of two worlds subject to the child custody laws in Florida. Not only that, what happens when mom and dad get remarried or date somebody else? Maybe lots of somebody else’s. Then, if both of your parents are remarried and they have more kids with those other spouses, or you inherit stepbrothers and stepsisters, now you have not just two homes, you now essentially have four different homes. You have multiple blended families with multiple people to get along with multiple people to compete for attention with, new rules, new situations. Your life is constantly changing. When are you ever going to have routine and consistency and stability? If this is what normalcy is, then normalcy might need a new definition. When it comes to divorce, equal timesharing is the default position, but I urge you to consider what is best for your child.