Child custody, one of the most important
and stressful things you could ever be involved with. 5 mistakes that could
stop you from winning your child custody battle. I've got my great friend sitting today Sid is an attorney and he and I got to
know each other first in the context of doing child custody evaluations for the
corp so we've learned a lot in that experience. You from the perspective an
attorney and me from the perspective of a psychologist who was appointed to
do child custody evaluations which I don't do it more thankfully. - I wish he did. -
- Well you
know what though, I've collected all of this knowledge and experience that now I
get to share with you because this is what we're doing. There are some
mistakes that you could make in your child custody case that would completely
derail the whole thing, you're going to lose the case if you do these things so a
little heads up to this okay and some of these things are what you might be
naturally inclined to do but it's not helpful and I think I want to start with
the most obvious one, is that okay? - Okay. - Sid sent me a number of
suggestions and one of them was, don't do illegal stuff. Like what? - Well for example
just taking off with the children, just moving. If there is a court order then
you're under very strict rules and if you violate that court order, you can be
held accountable for that and violations of court order are contempt and contempt
are reasons to change custody or to change the custodial arrangements. - It may
change custody of you because you can go to jail for these kinds of things,
is that true? - That's right and there's a law about custodial
interference so if you violate the law, the police can arrest you. It's just,
just don't want to go there. - You may think because of all of the concerns
that you have and may I just say your concerns are valid and legitimate but
when you're working with someone like a custody evaluator, an attorney,
a judge, think about this for a minute, the judge gets up this morning, has
breakfast, kisses the spouse goodbye and hops in the car and heads to work, it's
just another day at the office for the judge and how many custody cases have
they seen in the last year? Well if they're doing domestic law, - They do a lot
of it. - they're going to see a lot of this more than they want to, would you agree?
- Oh, absolutely. - Do you think they've seen it before? - Yes, they've seen it before.
- Yes, they have so that perspective, here's someone who is not emotionally engaged
in your case does not know your history and is used to people talking about all
of these terrible horrible nasty awful things that their ex spouse is doing and
it just kind of goes right over their head, it's like, blah blah blah.
- Exactly, it's exactly like that. - Even if you're right but you need to understand
the judge is coming from a different place and so is the custody evaluator.
I tell you, I heard it so many times that when people would come in and say, "Oh my
child's not safe over there." I'm like, okay, that's what everybody says.
Now I know your case is special cause everybody's a special case but get
over your own pride for a minute and see where we're coming from because this
will help your case, you will feel like the only thing you can do here is
abscond with the kids, get out of state and somehow leverage child custody in
your favor. It doesn't work. - And one of my favorite
things to respond to when people say, "Oh but you don't understand, he's so good at
convincing the judge or convincing other people." - He's the master manipulator. - Yeah, a master
manipulator, that's very common. I say, "Well you know, you've done one divorce
maybe two, I've done four thousand. I think I know what I'm talking about.
I know what to look for here." - Right, exactly. So just take it from the experts,
you don't want to do that even though you might feel compelled to do that. Now
there's a few others, we promised five. - Yeah . - Give us the next thing. - Well, this
sort of goes along with this but it's the underlying philosophy of, do it to
others as you would have them do unto you, the Golden Rule and
with the illegality, one thing that we didn't mention directly is child support,
some people with whole child support for example, people in transition often lose
their job and I don't know why there's that correlation but it often happens,
they've had a job for 20 years all of a sudden they don't have a job and they're
looking for a new one and people who owed child support sometimes don't pay
anything because they can't pay what's ordered, let's say it's $600 that's
ordered and they just can't pay that. Here's the truth, you've got to pay
something. The judge will understand if you can only pay a hundred or if you can
only pay a hundred and fifty but if you paid zero, I've heard judges even ask questions, are you
eating? Do you have a place to sleep? So you're not sending anything to your
children? So that just doesn't go anywhere and that doesn't help you win
at all, it doesn't even help you to win regular visitation sometimes so you've
got to just do what you can so even though it's illegal to withhold child
support but you wouldn't want that to happen to you. Another thing that I
always get called on, someone says, "Oh, my ex, he wants to take the children on
this coming weekend but it's my weekend. Should I do that? " And I say, "Well, are you
ever in your life going to have a time when it's going to be his weekend when you might
want the kids?" And I don't know. Well, yes. The answer is yes. So just do the golden
rule here, say yes, keep track put on the calendar.
He may not give you the make up visitation, that may be true but you can
keep track of it on the calendar and we can show that to the judge and when push
comes to shove, if we have to argue about custody, if we have to argue about
visitation issues, we can show you we're not the ones standing in the way of the
free flow of the children between the parents and that's just
standing in the way, focusing on my rights is just the wrong way to look at
it. Focus on the children, what the children need. Everyone says, well I have
a right, I have a right, I have a right. Great, you do, that's true but if that's
all you're focusing on, you can create enemies with your own kids.
I know kids who don't even want anything to do with their parents. I have
one really sad case right now where a child turned 18, totally left the the mom,
went to the dad because that child could tell the horrible tension between the
ex-spouses there and moved in with dad, just didn't want to put
up with it anymore, mom calls me, "Hey, what can I do?" Nothing, child's 18 too bad but
she's still a senior. Too bad. - I'm hearing several different
mistakes that we could make here in a child custody case that would totally
derail everything so when you said the Golden Rule, what I thought, Sid, was
don't be an idiot. To be a decent human being and you know what, in my experience,
divorce and especially divorce that is complicated by a child custody battle,
brings out the worst in people and you're not immune from that, okay. As
good of a person as you are, you're not immune from that so if you slump to the
level of being an idiot, Sid, you're saying follow the golden rule, okay.
Remember, so that's one of them. You said don't withhold visitation or
child support or money. Sometimes you'll think, well they don't
deserve it, right? And I have to prove they don't deserve it by
withholding it. You know what? That's not going to improve anything. - Well it's going to prove you're an idiot. - Okay, so don't go there.
Now we're talking very bluntly because we're having a private
conversation, alright and we're not your attorney,
we're not your evaluator but we are an attorney and an evaluator that's seen
some things so we're on your team, okay? So let's see if we got this, the golden
rule, not withholding money or visitation, we already talked about don't do
anything illegal, you said something about don't talk to the kids about
the custody case. - Right. This is a mistake that everybody makes. Kids bring stuff up,
they come home from visiting mom or dad and they say stuff about what was going
on in the other person's house, your response is, "Oh that's great." and then go
on to something else. Don't follow up with interrogating questions or the
questions that could look like interrogating questions. The kid
free flow as far as the conversation is concerned but don't
start getting into it, the judges always always order you cannot discuss this
matter with minor children. Now the judges can't control what the minor children
say and they understand that, they understand that the
kids are going to bring stuff up but you've just got to be careful and
certainly and this is one more level, don't coach the kids about what to say
or what to look for or anything like, sort of ancillary to this cell phones
have ruined a whole lot of visitation because one parent will just call
incessantly the other, the child, while visiting the other parent. If this comes
to the court, the court will say no cell phones during the visit or you may have
one time a call, that's it. The children are always supposed to be able to freely
call, that also is a problem because when the children know that then if one
parent is doing something they don't want then they just call the other
parent or they text the other parent or that's just an endless horrible game so
control the media somehow and but don't do it maliciously but certainly don't
you be the malicious one trying to interfere. - So I realized as
we're having this conversation, some of what the rationale behind not involving
the kids in this conversation, I've already talked about at some length in
another video, it's called how to win child custody and you can link to it
right up there in that corner. - Beautiful video. - and it's got a lot of traction
because people are realizing, you know what, it's not about all these things
that I thought it was, this has to be focused on my child and what my
child's needs are and as an evaluator, I have a belief and I know there's
exceptions and you're probably a special case, okay, but I have a belief that kids
really need to have a loving relationship with both of their parents.
I know also that there's reasons why you guys split up and why you're not
together anymore, that creates some challenges. You can negotiate those
challenges, watch out for these mistakes. I think we've given at least 5, haven't we?
- At least five but there's just one more I just got to mention. Social media.
Do not Facebook, if you can avoid it, do not even email unless it's
absolutely private email. You would be surprised how many kids do not have
access to their parents' Facebook but the people their parents send
the Facebook messages to have kids who do have access. I have kids who have
completely been ruined because something that their mom said or their dad said on
social media that the parent have no intention of letting the child know that
but they were having a conversation and somebody, there are connections,
connections, connections, I don't know how many friends, I have something
like 1,300 friends or something on Facebook. I can't say anything without
knowing that a lot of people are going to probably find out what I said so
just know that. - Right, be aware of that and as an evaluator, I sometimes
looked at that stuff too and if there's angry vitriolic nasty stuff
going on on your social media feed, guess what I'm thinking. Yeah, and it's not
pleasant so yeah, that's probably enough for
now. We'll be back with more. If you want more, just make you comment down
below about what you're wondering and we'll address it. - And I love to be back. -
You game for that? - Yeah. - Awesome. Winning a child custody battle, that's what we're all
about, right? Well make sure you don't make
those mistakes. I'm glad I could share this with you. I'll see you tomorrow.
