Flexibility and Cooperation

Video Transcript: Moving along with the theme of interpreting your decree. My name is Brian L. Jackson. I am a Tulsa fathers’ rights attorney here with dads.law. And we’re still talking about how to interpret a decree, if you need to.

So, how rigid is your schedule? You’ve got the visitation schedule and it says you get X number of days and she gets X number of days. How rigid is that? To answer your question, typically the way the court will view a schedule is that it provides a baseline of what’s going to happen.

In other words, that schedule exists for when you cannot agree with your children’s other parent. Then you can fall back on that schedule. If you and she agree to do something other than the schedule, then you will not, generally speaking, have an issue with the court.

The only possible exception to that is if you were dealing with a situation that falls into a child’s safety concern and one and one parent’s visitation rights are restricted because of that, and the other parent doesn’t enforce that restriction, and their children are placed in danger. But other than that very specific scenario, generally speaking, schedules provide what you could think of as a baseline or a floor. That’s what you do when you really can’t agree.

If you can agree to do something different, you want to do additional time, you want to switch weekends, that’s all fine as long as you have an agreement. And really, the only caveat with that is if you are going to agree to deviate, do it in writing, and that’s just so that if you end up in a dispute later, you can show that to a court and say, “Nope, we agreed to that.” And the court will stand by that. If you all agree to it, you agree to it.

If you have any questions about that and need an Oklahoma divorce lawyer, I would encourage you go to dads.law where fathers are not disposable, and we’d be happy to help you out.