Keep Your New Partner Away From Your Kids
Video Transcribed: Let’s talk about girlfriends and boyfriends. My name is Brian L. Jackson, I am a dads rights attorney in Oklahoma. And today’s topic, I want to talk about the boyfriend or the girlfriend, or as we consider in the legal field, the paramour.
Now, this is a subject that can frequently become contentious in the context of child custody litigation and divorces, paternity, that kind of thing because many times, particularly in the divorce context, the parties don’t wait to finish the divorce before they start looking elsewhere.
And typically, the other parent will have a certain feeling about having some strange third party of the same sex as them around the child. Can raise concerns such as, “Well, you’re trying to replace me,” or that the person you’re bringing around might be of wholesome influence or that you may behave inappropriately around the child. And you may have those same concerns about your ex’s new man.
So how do courts typically handle that? Well, a common thing that the courts will do in many cases, especially if there’s a pending divorce going on in an order that you do not have guests of the opposite sex stay the night in your house.
They may go as far as to say you can’t bring paramours around the child period during the dependency of a divorce. And the reasoning for this is pretty straightforward and it makes sense.
It’s less about being worried about the one parent trying to replace the other, and more about understanding that for the children, this is a confusing and very, very difficult time without involving the new boyfriend or girlfriend, without the issue of dating.
And it just makes it that much worse when one parent or the other, or both parents, are bringing a new adult into the child’s life at a time that the child is already going to be struggling, and that adult is a romantic partner. So it’s not uncommon for courts to have some instructions for parents when it comes to this thing.
My advice to my clients is typical if you’re in the middle of custody litigation, this is about the worst time to bring a new partner around children because it is going to antagonize the other side nine times out of 10. You may not mean it to, but that’s frequently the result.
They take it as they’re being replaced. So the smart thing to do is not to bring that person around. Another good reason as well to think about is creating witnesses. And this is a problem from a couple of standpoints.
One, if you say or do something in front of your new girlfriend or boyfriend that is potentially foddered for being brought up in court, that person could be brought to court and can be summoned there, mean to testify against you.
Now, obviously, you don’t want to create witnesses against yourself, but that issue aside, if you’re planning to actually have a relationship with this person, one are the worst things you can do is have them get drug into the middle of your family court drama.
It’s going to probably screw your relationship up in ways you can’t even imagine. So my advice would be to keep that person out of the picture, and also, I think discretion is important. You don’t want your kids going to mom and telling her that you’re dating. I mean, if they’re older kids, they’re not stupid. They’re probably going to figure it out anyway, but you should try and have some discretion.
It goes beyond just not bringing that person around the children. Don’t be sitting there right in front of the kids, sending a bunch of texts to that person or whatever, or posting stuff all over Facebook, or any other behaviors that are going to throw that relationship out in public at a time when the court’s probably not going to look kindly on that, and it’s not going to help your child.
So my advice is I don’t think it’s a problem to date, but you should use good judgment, be discreet, and don’t bring that person around the kids. And if you have questions about this father’s rights lawyer, you need a good lawyer. So you should go to dads.law where fathers are not disposable.
