What Parents Need to Know About Custody and Visitation Rights

Understand what parents need to know about custody and visitation rights during marital breakdowns in San Diego.

What Parents Need to Know About Custody and Visitation Rights

San Diego, the southernmost city of California, also commonly known as “America’s Finest City,” boasts a 70-mile-long stunning coastline with a near-perfect mild climate, housing cultural attractions like the San Diego Zoo and Balboa Park.

With good public and private schools and many family-oriented neighborhoods, San Diego is one of the safest cities to raise a family in the United States. However, it’s only natural to drift apart from our loved ones and reach a marital breakdown for many of us. At times like this, one of the main things we have to deal with is who gets custody of the child and who gets to visit.

If you or someone you know is in need of assistance to handle the custody of their child and visitation rights, hire an experienced San Diego lawyer specialized in child custody to assist with the whole legal process.

Types of custody you need to know about:

Custodial rights are comprised of two kinds of custody. Physical custody and legal custody.

Physical custody decides which parent will be part of the child’s day-to-day life and gets to stay with them, while legal custody determines how a parent can be part of a child’s major decisions in life, like education and healthcare, and can pass their values onto them, like religious upbringing and political values.

Both parents may share legal and physical custody, a situation known as joint custody. The child will be part of both parents’ lives for an equal amount of time. When only one parent gets to have all the rights and responsibilities of raising their child, it’s called sole custody.

Visitation rights:

When a non-custodial parent seeks to visit their child, they can be either granted visits by the court in custody cases, considering the best interests for both the custodial and non-custodial parent, or they can file a petition to ask for visitation hours.

These visitation hours can be supervised and unsupervised.

Supervised visits:

When a non-custodial parent has a history of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, substance abuse, and crime records, they’ll be supervised by another adult or an agency to look over the safety of the child during visitation hours.

Unsupervised visits:

When a non-custodial parent is deemed safe to spend time with their child, they can bond with their child freely without any court-ordered supervision.

Reasonable vs. Scheduled Visits:

Visitation rights can also be categorized as reasonable and scheduled. When parents are left to work it out between themselves to decide visitation times based on their own flexible times, it’s called reasonable visitation. When parents can’t agree on a proper scheduled time, they often choose specific occasions to grant a visit to a non-custodial parent. This is a scheduled visitation.

Factors that affect the custody of your child and visitation rights:

When both parents are competing to get custody over their child, the parent with a more stable life and stable history and a fitter and cleaner behavioral history will get the custody.

Factors like a child’s preference, having a history of abuse, violence, drug abuse, mental illness, and your crime history can be used against you.

Having a more stable source of income and a stable place to stay are also crucial to winning over the custody of your child.

Hire a professional and experienced family law attorney to handle the implications of your case regarding getting custody of your child.

Key takeaways:

• Custody rights can be physical and legal. Physical custody involves a parent being part of the day-to-day life of their child, while legal custody involves being part of their child’s major decisions in life.
• Legal and physical custody can be shared by both parents or given to just one parent (joint and sole custody, respectively).
• A parent’s history can affect their unsupervised rights, so they will only be granted supervised rights. Visitation hours can also be reasonable and scheduled.
• Many factors, like your stable life and history, can affect the custody over your child. Hire a well-versed attorney to handle your case.