With the arrival of Memorial Day weekend and the official kick off of summer, it seemed a good time to share my post regarding vacation custody time. While another year has passed, the thoughts remain and will likely continue to be true. If you have a child, and the other parent has ANY custody time, I strongly suggest you read the below post, and contact me if you find yourself in a situation requiring legal assistance.
I am sure that if you haven’t already, at some point this summer just about all of you have had a conversation with a friend or relative about their plans for their big summer vacation this year: where they are taking the kids, what they are doing, how much those ride-all-day passes cost at the amusement park, etc.
What they probably didn’t share with you is whether or not their attorney had to go to court to make that happen. Seems kind of crazy, doesn’t it? That somewhere between airfare, hotel rooms, and tickets to Wally World, your friend or relative may have also been paying someone $300 per hour to go to Motion’s Court to ask for permission for a relatively mundane thing like a vacation with their children.
Unfortunately, I can assure you that this is an issue that arises in family cases and which has me spending a couple of days every summer standing in Motion’s Court along with numerous other attorneys (also billing their clients) to fight about the right of someone to take their children to the beach.
Maybe some of you reading this had to do exactly that.
Maybe some of you reading this are the reason someone else had to do exactly that.
In either case, it seems like a timely topic and a good opportunity to provide some advice:
1. You aren’t stopping a vacation request.
Are you co-parenting with Charles Manson?
If the answer to that question is no, then the answer to their vacation request is yes.
Even people who have minimal custody time throughout the year are going to have some entitlement to summer vacation. Yes, there are exceptions.
Family court is ruled by exceptions, not governed by rules.
Certainly, if there has been a history of abuse, substance abuse, etc., this may raise more questions about vacation time than your average case, but even in these situations, chances are the other side is getting a vacation with their kids. They may have to take a supervisor. That supervisor might be a parent, sibling, or some other relative/agreed upon third party. People on Megan’s List have taken their children on vacation. I am aware of more than one.
Saying that the court recognizes a very strong right to be able to take your children out of town for a week would be a gross understatement. While there may be whistles and bells and stipulations, chances are the vacation is happening. As always, the particular facts and circumstances will dictate whether or not there should be strings attached, and if so, what strings, but chances are you are losing your anti-vacation argument, or at least compromising your position considerably.
2. No, there is not an absolute right to throw your child in the car and drive towards the sunset. Much like any other issue that involves co-parenting, there has to be a sharing of information. Both parties are entitled to know where their kids are, on vacation or otherwise. This is true whether they are in town or out of town. It is particularly true when crossing state lines, international boundaries, etc.
At a bare minimum, the other side should know where you are going, how you are getting there, and how you can be reached once you have arrived. Depending upon how much the parties trust each other, there could be more or less information that needs to be exchanged, like how often you will communicate with the children via phone, if there is to be Skyping, exactly what family members will be there, whether or not alcohol can be consumed, etc. Itineraries for flights should be exchanged, hotel address and phone number should be provided, and agreeing to send a text to confirm you arrived safely isn’t going to kill anyone.
3. Vacations are generally also a “good for the goose, good for the gander” situation. You would like to take a week’s vacation to the beach and you want to tell the other side that they can’t? Again, unless you are sharing custody with Charles Manson, they are getting the same vacation rights you are.
You will probably get the same vacation rights every year so long as you are sharing custody of your children. Some people need these to be memorialized and go into painstaking details in a formal agreement as to who gets to select their vacation dates first in odd years versus even years, how many days’ notice you must provide, how detailed your itinerary has to be, etc. But, again, you are going on vacation.
Quite frankly, in more than a decade of practice, I don’t know that I have ever seen a vacation request denied. Certainly not in a situation where someone has provided reasonable notice, has a reasonable plan and is willing to reasonably accommodate the concerns of the other side.
Noticing a theme about reasonableness here? It is the golden rule in custody arrangements between parties. Make reasonable requests, grant a reasonable permission, don’t pay $300 per hour to go have a judge decide whether or not your kid should get to go to Disney World. They probably already think that they do.
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