Reply to Any shared insights / lessons learned on designing best-for-kids custody situations

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why is he in a smaller place and farther away? The expectation should be same standard of living in both homes. Kids will start not wanting to go to his place if it is far from friends and activities and they have to share a room there. Finances should be arranged so he lives close by and has rooms for each.

Could dad take the kids after work for an  evening or two each week and then do a Friday afterschool until Sunday am type routine? That way he would still have one day of the week for himself but see the kids 3-4 days a week and have a long stretch with them where he would gets substantial time.[/quote]

Why is that the expectation? [/quote]

Picture it. Your spouse lives in nice house near the school. The kids each have their own rooms and can easily get to and from school, hang out with friends, and get to community activities and to extracurriculars. You live a distance away in an apartment. when the kids are with you they don't have their own space and the living area is small with less comforts, they need to endure a long commute to and from school, can't easily get together with friends, and there needs to be a lot of planning and time put into getting to extracurriculars. Over time they want to stop coming to your place. There are too many inconviences and not enough comforts compared to their other home. Their friends become more important and they want more independence to hang out with friends and move around the community and get to and from school. Would you really be fine with that?

If you don't think it should be an expectation then you should be the parent in the smaller space far away.[/quote]

But it's often the parent in the smaller space far away, who chose that smaller space far away. Full respect to those small-space parents who battled it out for primary custody or the house and lost, that certainly feels awful and I agree a court should enforce an expectation along these lines over what might feel like banishment. But what do you do when it's the parent themselves who prefer that? Are you also going to order the remaining spouse to sell the house and move the kids away from their school/community to live in a smaller space to be closer to apartment parent?[/quote]

No, if the parent chose purely for their own personal selfish reasons to move far away from their kids and to get a small place , then that is on them. Clearly if they financially could have had a bigger place and intentionally got something small that didn't have a room for each child, they don't really want the kids to spend much time there.

The whole premise for child support is to reduce inequities between homes. It isn't an expectation I came up with![/quote]

One of (several I think PPs) - thank you, now I understand your point about expectation.[/quote]

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