How to Share Custody of a Child

When parents split up, or if they were never together, the question always arises over how to share legal and physical custody of the child or children. The law is the same no matter where it happens in California, the rules are the same in Los Angeles County, Ventura County, Orange County and San Diego. We have represented fathers in all those counties and more thoughout California.

Parents sharing Legal Custody, usually have an equal division and for the most part it is considered that each parent has the legal right to know and make decisions about medical care, schooling and religious training.

Parents who share Physical Custody have a harder time, because they need to divide up the days of the week, the holidays each year, school activities, and anything else that is of importance to the family.

Sharing Physical custody is hard to do because the child or children has to have a life, they have friends, school, sports and extracurricular activities to be dealt with. For parents who get along, usually this is a shared parenting situation and the physical custody is shared 50 percent custody.

But for parents who don’t along this gets difficult and for the parent who is the non-custodial parent, meaning the one with less than 50% they risk losing their child entirely if the custodial parent decides to move to another city, state or country. Those are called Move-Away Cases and we have lots of experience with those when the custodial parent wants to move to another state, or another country.