Manhattan Visitation

Often visitation with your child is seen as the consolation prize when you’re the parent who was not awarded full custody. Any Manhattan Visitation Lawyer can tell you that the Family Courts or the Supreme Court after a Divorce, in New York today increasingly these courts give a greater amount of visitation time to a non-custodial parent. This is regardless or whether you even have joint custody. When the appropriate legal arguments get presented, visitation might far exceed a more customary alternate-weekends schedule. Today, a visitation schedule may often include regular weeknight visits, including overnight stays and extended visitation. It can even include picking up and dropping off the child at school, and extended vacations with a child. At Stephen Bilkis & Associates, PLLC, each of our Manhattan Visitation lawyers can advise that this kind of expanded visitation schedule is more frequently being granted throughout New York City, on Long Island, and in Westchester County—even though an individual county of course has their own judiciary. Naturally, advocates for Fathers Rights and Grandparents Rights applaud this trend of non custodial parent rights regardless, of whether they are from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau County or anywhere throughout New York State,.

You may realize that the “standard visitation” set-up with a child consists, generally speaking, of visits every other weekend, on alternate holidays, as well as during four weeks for vacation. A Manhattan Family Lawyer / Manhattan Divorce Lawyer from our office, however, can explain that, if a judge believes that the parent who seeks extra visitation time is a good one, that judge may be flexible and liberal in setting a visitation schedule. The reason for this view, in part, is that the Family Court tends to believe it’s in the child’s best interests to keep both of his/her parents involved in that child’s upbringing. And the best interest of your child is the legal standard on which such decisions will be made.

Clearly, representation by a skilled Manhattan Visitation Lawyer will be critical if it is your aim to be granted more time to spend with your child. Like other issues in a divorce, separation, or other Family Law case, a visitation question can grow complex. For example, one parent may be ordered to have only supervised visitation because the judge deems that leaving that parent alone with his/her child poses potential risk to the child. In such cases, supervision can be provided by a government or other agency or by a different family member considered responsible. Keep in mind that, as mentioned already, any such issues in your visitation case will be judged by the legal standard used to guide their outcome: What is in the child’s best interest?

Modifying Your Existing Child Visitation Order

Over time, an existing visitation arrangement may require updating or a change. For example, with counseling, a parent who has supervised visitation may move to unsupervised visits. For your order of Visitation to be reexamined by the Family Court and possibly thereby modified, a certain legal threshold must be met: there must have been a significant or substantial change in your family’s circumstances. A change in your circumstances might be that your work schedule (or that of the other parent) has changed, that one of the parents needs to relocate, or it might even be that your child is seen as needing more of the other parent’s influence.

Determining visitation is a process quite similar to the process to determine Child Custody. A Manhattan Family Lawyer working for you files your visitation petition with the court in the county in which the child resides—whether Richmond County (Staten Island), Kings County (Brooklyn), or Nassau County or Suffolk County. That petition can be filed either in the Family Court or with the Matrimonial part of the Supreme Court. Various types of visitation cases may then proceed. A Primary Visitation petition sets forth the first schedule for visitation. A modification to the visitation order will be filed when the goal is to alter an existing visitation order. And a petition of violation of visitation order can be filed with Manhattan Family Court if the individual subject to the visitation order isn’t obeying it. A violation petition requests the Family Court to rule against the violating party, as well as to take punitive action on your behalf against this party. For example, the Family Court judge can, in a severe case, terminate the violating party’s visitation rights completely.

In the offices of Stephen Bilkis & Associates, PLLC, we possess experience with all types of Family Law concerns, including many visitation cases. Any Manhattan Visitation Lawyer on our staff brings patience and understanding to his/her handling of the frequently complicated issues that are necessarily part of raising your child under the specter of court intervention.

Be sure to get the rights representation for your important Visitation case. Get free advice from a Manhattan Visitation Lawyer by calling us at 800.696.9529. Regardless if your case concerns Grandparents Rights or Fathers Rights, or if your case is about a Custody issue, about Child Support, or if you need assistance with your Divorce proceeding, with an Abuse & Neglect case, or with a Order of Protection, call today to speak with our Manhattan Family Lawyers. Our locations are convenient throughout NYC—in Manhattan and the other boroughs, from Staten Island across to Brooklyn, from Queens to the Bronx. And for those clients on Long Island, we also have convenient office locations in Nassau County and additionally in Suffolk County.