Custody Battles

Hi, my name is Clint Hastings. I’m an attorney here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and you can find me here at Dads.Law. I focus on father’s rights, and I’m trying to maximize your ability to get orders for the best custody or visitation that you can get.

Importance of Communication

One of the biggest things that seems to just rear its ugly head over and over and over again in cases throughout the years that I’ve had is parents talking to their children about the court case. Especially, it seems to happen with teenagers or children over, let’s say, nine. Often, those kids will ask about the divorce and what’s going on. They may say, why can’t I go to mom’s this weekend? Why can’t I go to dad’s this weekend?

And sometimes parents tell them the truth. Your mom lied in court and got it to where I have restricted visitation. Don’t do that. Judges hate that. They absolutely hate any influence you try to impose on your children and any stress that you may impose on your children because they’re caught in the middle of a feud.

Guidelines for Communicating

So, don’t send messages back and forth, like tell your mom to let me take you to the concert next week. Anything like that is frowned upon heavily by the court. What do you say? If they genuinely just ask, you know, dad, I don’t understand why we aren’t going to go on our ski trip this year. And let’s say it has to do with something with court.

You just say, I wish we could go. There are reasons that that’s not going to happen. And I can’t talk to you about it, but you just have to trust me. We would go if we could, but it’s no one’s fault. You just have to do that. You cannot create a situation where the children are getting mad at the parents for what’s going on, even if it’s not justified, even if it’s based on total lies from the other party, your kids can’t get trapped in that.

Seek Legal Guidance Today

And that’s what the judge will look for. And it looks terrible. Just imagine at the final trial, opposing counsel gets up and cross-examines you and says, why did you tell your child that mommy was mean and mommy lied and mommy wouldn’t let you participate in some event? And you sit there and you have no answer for it. And at that moment, you admit it and if you deny it, there may be proof that you did it. Regardless, don’t do it in the first place. I hope that helps. You can contact me here at Dads.Law and I’ll get back to you.