NY Divorce 101: The Issues Of Custody, Visitation & Fathers’ Rights

UPDATED: Jul 16, 2021

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Jeffrey Johnson

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Jeffrey Johnson is a legal writer with a focus on personal injury. He has worked on personal injury and sovereign immunity litigation in addition to experience in family, estate, and criminal law. He earned a J.D. from the University of Baltimore and has worked in legal offices and non-profits in Maryland, Texas, and North Carolina. He has also earned an MFA in screenwriting from Chapman Univer...

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UPDATED: Jul 16, 2021

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We strive to help you make confident insurance and legal decisions. Finding trusted and reliable insurance quotes and legal advice should be easy. This doesn’t influence our content. Our opinions are our own.

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UPDATED: Jul 16, 2021

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It’s all about you. We want to help you make the right legal decisions.

We strive to help you make confident insurance and legal decisions. Finding trusted and reliable insurance quotes and legal advice should be easy. This doesn’t influence our content. Our opinions are our own.

UPDATED: Jul 16, 2021Fact Checked

Filing for divorce is never an easy undertaking’ from the emotional aspects related to the divorce itself to the confusion often surrounding the issues of custody, visitation and fathers’ rights. Here is some basic information about all three from a New York divorce lawyer knows too well what families go through during this difficult time.

NY child custody issues

We asked Elliot Schlissel, a veteran New York Attorney whose practice area includes divorce, estate planning and many others, what New York courts look at when dealing with child custody. He told us that the standard in New York is to determine what is in the child’s best interest and explained:

Courts look into who is the primary nurturing parent; who spends more time with the children; who deals with the children’s needs; who goes to parent-teacher conferences; who takes the children to the doctor; who buys the children clothes; who makes them breakfast, lunch and dinner; who sees that their homework is done, etc. Courts try to ascertain which parent has the greater impact in the child’s life and usually that parent, in a contested custody matter, is given custody of the children. Courts also take into consideration what the children want, although that is not a controlling factor.

Typical NY visitation schedule

The typical visitation schedule for a parent who does not have primary custody of a child in New York is normally every other weekend and every other holiday, according to Schlissel. He explained:

This includes all school holidays, school recesses such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and Spring break/Easter vacation. The nonresidential custodial parent usually obtains parenting time (visitation) with the children from two to four weeks each year when he or she is off from work.

Courts today are more interested then they have been in the past in giving the non-custodial parent greater access to the children. Along with the every other weekend visitation, we very often have it set up so the non-custodial parent sees the children during the evening on two weekdays for dinner during the week. We advise our clients that it enriches children lives to have relationships with both parents.

New York Fathers’ rights becoming more recognized

It used to be that mothers generally got custody of the children. However, Schlissel says that fathers’ rights are becoming more recognized. He told us:

Up until approximately 1989, it was presumed that the mother would get custody of the children and that the father would support those children. Now, New York has a gender neutral divorce statute and there’s no presumption that the mother gets custody. Fathers are on equal ground with mothers with regard to custody. Fathers are much more actively engaged in seeking custody of their children today then they have been in the past. Our office handles custody cases on behalf of mothers and fathers. Our office has handled cases in the courts on Long Island as well as in the City of New York dealing with issues involving custody, parenting time, orders of protection and other issues involving the children.

That being said, Schlissel admitted that, although fathers have the right to ask for custody, mothers still do obtain custody in the large majority of cases before the courts. He explained,’This is very often caused by the fact that children are raised in a traditional family where the father spends most of his time working and the mother is the nurturing parent who raises the children. However, fathers have an absolute equal right to have custody of their children and in many instances fathers litigate this issue before the courts in New York.’

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Jeffrey Johnson

Insurance Lawyer

Jeffrey Johnson is a legal writer with a focus on personal injury. He has worked on personal injury and sovereign immunity litigation in addition to experience in family, estate, and criminal law. He earned a J.D. from the University of Baltimore and has worked in legal offices and non-profits in Maryland, Texas, and North Carolina. He has also earned an MFA in screenwriting from Chapman Univer...

Insurance Lawyer

Editorial Guidelines: We are a free online resource for anyone interested in learning more about legal topics and insurance. Our goal is to be an objective, third-party resource for everything legal and insurance related. We update our site regularly, and all content is reviewed by experts.

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