Colorado Child Custody Laws

What is child custody based on in Colorado? Child custody is based on a standard – a legal standard – called “What is in the best interest of the children“? And Child custody includes two pieces. It includes parenting time and it includes decision-making. And also, of course, there’s child support that needs to be dealt with. So how is that determined? Essentially, you’ll either agree to those things, in other words, you’ll have the children, let’s just say, 50% of the time – 50% of the overnights a year. Your ex-spouse will also have the children 50% of the time, or 50% of the overnights for the year.

Or certainly we have clients where they take a stand that for reasons of stability or reasons where someone has a job that requires them to travel all the time, that they have less child custody. So the parenting time might most of the time with one parent – the primary parent – and then the other parent might have every other weekend per se with the children. Child custody is either going to be determined, like I said, by you and your spouse or it’s going to be determined by the court if you can’t come to an agreement on that. The court is going to look at what’s in the best interest of the children. The court’s not – I know this is hard – but the court’s not interested at all in you or your spouse. They’re not. That’s not their charge. Their charge is what’s in the best interest of the children.

So it behooves you when you’re sitting down and maybe talking about a child custody issue in the case of a divorce, what is in the best interest of the children in terms of parenting time? What is in the best interest of the children in terms of decision-making? In other words, should decisions all be made by both of you together – joint decision making – or are there some decisions that one or the other of you should make because you can see down the line that there may be real problems associated with trying to come to agreement.

Mostly I see this in the area of wanting the children to go to therapy. One parent believes in therapy, the other parent doesn’t. Or medical issues. We’ve seen children with attention deficit syndrome. One parent believes in medication, the other parent doesn’t. So you can see down the line that there might be issues regarding decision-making.

One of the exceptions to joint decision-making that the court will impose has to do with domestic abuse. If there is domestic abuse in your relationship, then the court will not allow joint decision-making because there’s an imbalance of power between the two parties.  So you can see, there’s some complexities here. But the decision the court will make will always be based on that standard – the best interest of the children – and it will be the judge’s opinion about what’s in the best interest of the children.

So if you can’t come to an agreement, you’re essentially handing that, let’s just say subjective decision to someone else, and hopefully the judge will make a good decision on that for you if you can’t do that yourselves.

By: Leslie Matthews

In Colorado, when a parent wants to move out of the state, there’s a couple of different issues that arise as far as visitation is concerned and custody is concerned. The first thing to be aware of is that the state of Colorado, and really any state in the union, cannot force an adult to stay where they’re at. They’re free to move at any time that they want to move. The question is whether or not the children will be allowed to go with you.

Of course the court is looking at what’s in the best interest of the child or children. There’s a number of different steps that have to be taken to procure relocation if it’s after your divorce has been finalized, or after your custody matter has been finalized. It works a bit differently if it’s the initial case. These are all issues that are discussed in a consultation. But if the non-custodial parent objects to the substantially changing geographical ties with the parent, that’s a big consideration for the court to look to. You look to the children as well and their community, their friends that they would be leaving. There’s a whole host of factors that go into a relocation matter. It’s a very uphill battle even if you’re in the initial case in the first place.

In order to effectuate a good relocation case, you need to have good facts behind it, not just “I think I can get a job” or “I think it will be better to live out there.” Courts really want to know the reasons for moving out there. If you have family out there, if you already have a great paying job, if you are forced to move for work– these are reasons to set forth before the court. But they’re not guarantees that a court would look to, or a court would grant your wish to relocate with the children. So it can have a fairly big effect on how that visitation is ultimately decided.

By: Scott Goldman

In the state of Colorado, a parenting plan is the document that the court ultimately will make an order of the court that determines when each parent will have their parenting time, what decision making looks like, what child support looks like, whether or not one parent can take the child tax credits in one year and all sorts of things regarding the child and children.

It’s very important to have a parenting plan because when there is a breakdown in the communication between the parents in the future, they have something to rely on, they have something that they can go and enforce in the court. It also gives the children a sense of stability.

The children may not be and should not be made aware of the parenting plan, however, when the parents are not fighting over issues and rely simply on a document that either they entered into through an agreement process or by a court order then the children really have – at that point – a worry-free life until something is modified in the court and a parenting plan is very important in that respect.

By: Scott Goldman

Winning full custody of your child or children is a very difficult thing to do in the state of Colorado. The courts look at the issue from what’s in the best interest of the child or children. From the start, it should be in the best interest of the child or children to have both parents involved in their lives.

However, when you look at other issues that come into play– maybe one parent is moving out of the state of Colorado and can’t have a true parenting plan that wouldn’t necessarily allow them to have 50-50 parenting time. That would allow one parent, should the children remain in Colorado, to have a majority of the parenting time. But to completely eviscerate the other parent’s rights as far as parenting time is concerned really need to show the court that the other parent is an unfit parent and that they endanger the children either physically or emotionally to the point where sole custody is the only option left.

By: Scott Goldman

When you get divorced, you have a number of pieces of paper that need to be sent in to the court. A divorce decree is all of that final paperwork put together that’s made an order of the court. So, that final paperwork would include your parenting plan, it would include your separation agreement, it would include any other orders of the court, and that package, all put together, is your divorce decree.

Now what you can do once you have your divorce decree is you can enforce it, so it becomes as I said an order of the court, meaning that if somebody doesn’t do what they’re supposed to do based on that paperwork, you can go to the court with a contempt motion or an order to enforce and it actually is a court order. So when you’re at the end of the divorce you have a divorce decree, you have your legal rights essentially handled.

By: Leslie Matthews

When I’m working with people on developing parenting plans, what we do is sit down together, you and I, and we work out what is the plan that serves you the best. Now we will have to try to convince the court that that’s in the best interest of the children, but you and I would sit down together and figure out a plan that you think serves your children’s best interest and that’s what we propose to the court. And we would propose that during settlement conferences, we’d propose that during mediation sessions, if we had temporary orders hearing that would be the plan, and that’s the plan we put forth at final orders.

Now oftentimes when we’re working on these plans, if we set a temporary plan we recognize somewhere along the way it just didn’t work, it’s not best for the kids. They’re not happy, their schoolwork is suffering, and we need to do something different. And sometimes that means the children are with you more often, sometimes it means we have to consider whether the other parent should have more time. But the complexities of that are the reason that I often suggest to folks, When you’re dealing with issues involving children and parenting you need professionals to help you.

By: Ray Chamberland

An uncontested divorce is the best kind of divorce, to be honest with you. It means that there’s nothing that you’re fighting over, that you have to court for, and have a judge make a determination on. In other words, you’ve gone through your divorce process, but you and your spouse have been able to reach agreement on all of the important factors in your divorce. That includes your parenting plan, all of the issues surrounding how you’re going to deal with the children, all of the issues surrounding child support, maintenance, if that’s important in the case. And you’re able then to go to court with your final agreements and the judge essentially is going to just agree to what you’ve agreed to, unless there is something completely onerous or wrong with it.

In most cases, the judge will rubber stamp what you’ve agreed to. You may or may not have to go in and see the judge for a final hearing, that depends on whether or not you have attorneys, and whether there are child issues involved. But in most cases you’ll be able to avoid going to court altogether and your divorce agreement will become an order of the court just as written. And that would be an uncontested divorce. A contested divorce means that there’s something that you’re going to have to have the judge decide, and you’re going to have to go to court to have the judge decide that. And that the distinction between the two.

By: Leslie Matthews

Enforcing parenting time in the state of Colorado is done through filing a motion to enforce parenting time in the proper court. A lot of times we’ll have people come to us though that have not had a parenting plan in place at all and have never been to court. So from that standpoint, the first way that you enforce parenting time or your rights is by filing the proper case, which would be an allocation of parental responsibilities or perhaps a divorce case to get that issue started.

However, if you’ve already had a parenting plan and a court order that dictates what your parenting time is, the proper way to file or to enforce your parenting time is to file a motion with the court saying that the parent has not been complying. Perhaps they didn’t give you your Christmas break or you were supposed to have parenting time for an entire weekend and they just refused to give you parenting time. In certain cases, and it’s unfortunate, child support is not being paid so that other parent sees that as a reason to take parenting time away. It’s not a reason. So at the end of the day, for those reasons and many more, we go into court and file a motion to enforce parenting time.

By: Scott Goldman

What is alimony based on in Colorado? Alimony, we actually don’t use that word here in Colorado. It’s the same thing, but we use the word maintenance. The reason we use the word maintenance is because it’s need-based here in Colorado. It’s not as if you just should have maintenance/alimony because someone’s at fault or someone’s been bad and they need to be punished.

Here in Colorado, regardless of how bad the other party is, you’re not going to be able to get alimony or maintenance unless you fulfill on what we now have as a formula or such. So here in Colorado, we have a formula. It went into effect at the beginning of 2014. It is a new formula. It doesn’t go into effect unless you’ve had at least three years of marriage.  If you are under three years of marriage, then the formula doesn’t apply. You might be able to get short term, temporary maintenance/alimony to tide you over until you get a job. But the formula itself won’t come into effect unless you’ve married a relatively significant period of time – three years. Once you hit that three year mark, the formula comes into effect and, whereas historically, we used to argue about maintenance all the time, now there’s less argument about it because judges like formulas.

Formulas make things easier. The maintenance formula itself has some complexities to it that are beyond this video, however suffice it to say, a thumbnail if you wanted to use it would be that the spouse that needed maintenance would probably get 40% of the other spouse’s salary minus – I don’t know if you can stick with it – minus 50% of the salary that the spouse who has less income already makes, and then the only question at that point is the period of time that you’d get the maintenance. It’s between a third of your marriage to half of your marriage, depending on how long you’ve been married. So the longer you’ve been married, the closer you’re going to get to the halfway point for the number of years that you would get maintenance.

For instance, if you’ve been married for (20) years, you’ll probably get maintenance for (10) years. And if you are a stay at home mother, let’s say, and you haven’t worked in years and years and years and you’re in your 50s, chances are you’ll get 40% of your spouses salary for that ten years. Now you can’t– I’m not promising that’s exactly right because like I said, there are many complexities to the statute and you’d have to come in a really sit down with me and really look for me to come up with what that maintenance formula will look like. So don’t take it as gospel. I’m just saying, that’s kind of a thumbnail sketch of how we do maintenance currently here in Colorado.

By: Leslie Matthews