A Judge’s Guide

Recurring Issues in Child
Custody Cases
Chapter
6
While some custody cases may be quite straightforward, others will
involve more complicated issues. For example, due to various factors,
some parents may need to participate in supervised visitation. In
another family, the custodial parent may receive a new job offer in a city across the
country after years of being in the same city as the noncustodial parent. Mental
illness may affect a parent’s ability to visit with a child, and domestic violence may
make visitation problematic or unadvisable. This chapter is devoted to some of
the recurring issues you may experience when deciding child custody cases or
considering whether to modify custody orders.
Visitation
Custody determinations affect visitation arrangements and schedules. In keeping
with the trend toward use of child-friendly terminology in divorce, visitation today
is often referred to as access or parenting time. The two standard statutory
approaches to visitation arrangements are the “best interests of the child” and the
“entitlement” approach. The best interests of the child approach presume that
visitation is a privilege bestowed on a noncustodial parent when contact with the
party is in the child’s best interests. 1 The Florida statute sets forth a detailed list
for judges to consider when deciding best interests. This list includes, but is not
limited to, the following: 1) whether the parent is “more likely to allow the child
frequent and continuing contact with the nonresidential parent”; 2) “[t]he love,
affection, and other emotional ties existing between the parents and the child”; 3)
the ability of the parents to provide “food, clothing, medical care . . . and other
material needs”; 4) “[t]he length of time the child has lived in a stable, satisfactory
environment and the desirability of maintaining continuity”; 5) the parents’ moral
fitness; 6) the parents’ mental and physical health; 7) the child’s home, school, and
community record; 8) the child’s “reasonable preference” if the court determines
“the child to be of sufficient intelligence, understanding, and experience to express
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