Without Appropriate Housing, Visitation Could Be Difficult
Video Transcribed: What is appropriate housing now that you’ve separated from your ex so that your housing situation will not interfere with your ability to share custody of your kids? My name is Brian L. Jackson. I’m a Tulsa father’s rights attorney here with Dads.Law where fathers are not disposable.
I want to talk to you guys today about finding appropriate housing so that your right to see your kid is not going to be held up by some nonsense argument about your housing. The quick and fast on this. One, children should have appropriate accommodations. With older children, that means private bedrooms and their own beds. For younger children, if you have an infant, you need an appropriate cradle or bassinet. You need someplace that child can sleep safely. The children need to have access to a private bathroom and there needs to be appropriate food in the house. Obviously, cleanliness is important.
One thing that a lot of people don’t think about too, is permanency. If you’re couch surfing and you don’t have a permanent location, that could very well mean you’re not going to get overnights. The judge will definitely be concerned about that. So you’d want to actually have permanency. Also, if you are living in a really rough situation for example, like a camper or something, that’s a potential problem and you want to remedy that as soon as possible. Some obvious ones, the roommates are a potential problem. If you have roommates, make sure that anyone who’s in the household with you doesn’t have any kind of a record that somebody can make an issue of whether it’s criminal, child welfare, domestic violence, mental health, any of those things, or that they’re into drugs. Then that could be a potential problem. Any physical safety hazards in the household could be an issue too.
These are just some examples and a lot of this stuff is really common sense, but you want to pay attention to who’s in the house, and what goes on in that house. Everybody needs to have an appropriate place to sleep, to have some privacy, go use the facilities. You need working utilities, all of that kind of thing and then your housing situation shouldn’t be an issue. Oh, and one last thing to be aware of is pets. Now, no court’s going to say you can’t have pets as a general rule, but if you do have pets, you want to be aware of particulars about that animal. Make sure the animal’s clean, doesn’t have fleas or any other parasites, isn’t vicious, isn’t like some big lumping dumb dog with little kids that could get mushed, and things like that. And again, a lot of its common sense.
If you have questions about any of that or you need to discuss your particular housing situation or need to see your children and your visitation rights, then I would encourage you to speak with an Oklahoma child custody lawyer at Dads.Law where fathers are not disposable.
