Mocktails, Sobriety, and Child Custody: A Discussion Around Commitment
For many people who struggle with alcohol abuse, preventing the urge to drink demands more than simply avoiding alcohol — It also requires a conscious effort not to participate in drinking culture.
Understanding Your Rights When Dealing with Addiction, Recovery, and Child Custody
If you are struggling with addiction, understand that your right to visitation, parenting time, or overall child custody rights may be affected. However, your parental rights could remain the same – you have the right to maintain a relationship with your child so long as contact is achieved safely and remains in the best interest of the child.
How to Navigate Hearsay in Family Law Cases Involving Alcohol Abuse
According to Family Law experts, addiction is amongst the top six reasons for divorce, next to a lack of partnership or intimacy, falling out of love, communication problems, and not being ready for marriage. In any of these instances, emotions are running high for both partners, especially when there are children involved. “With the emotional content of a divorce, it’s common for spouses to make allegations about each other’s behavior,” says Susan Guthrie, 30-year Family Law Attorney, and Mediator. “We run into this situation frequently where there are allegations of alcohol abuse.”
Can Child Custody be Changed?
It can take months of back-and-forth to come up with a parenting plan. Once it’s in place, most parents work hard to stick with it. But there can come a time when a current co-parenting plan stops working for one reason or another. When that happens, parents can adjust their child custody arrangement post-litigation, if it continues to uphold the best interests of the child.
How Flexible Should Alcohol Monitoring be in a Parenting Plan?
Allegations of alcohol abuse, whether they’re supported by a history of abuse or based on unsubstantiated concerns, are taken seriously in Family Law cases involving children. Family Court Judges and settlement lawyers turn to more than just the testimonies given by opposing parties when creating custody arrangements in the best interest of the child. Separating fact from hearsay, they turn to the global leaders in remote alcohol monitoring technology: Soberlink. Providing court-admissible evidence and adaptive facial recognition technology, Soberlink’s comprehensive system is used by thousands of Family Law Professionals and their clients as a tool that documents sobriety, provides peace of mind, and fosters child safety.
5 Ways Soberlink Alcohol Monitoring Can Help Your Client’s Custody Battle
When alcohol use is a factor in a child custody case, practitioners often look for solutions that will enable a child to maintain healthy, loving relationships with both parents. Whether your client is the one making or facing allegations of alcohol use, or you are a judge determining custody, using remote alcohol monitoring to support your case might help.
How to Balance a Child’s Best Interests and a Parent’s Rights in Child Custody
Child custody, visitation, conservatorship – these are the various terms used across the United States to reference a parent’s legal rights and responsibilities upon divorce or separation. When parents find themselves at this crossroad, they are given the ability to negotiate a parenting agreement or parenting plan together that provides in-depth details on how their child(ren) will be cared for moving forward. In sensitive and often emotionally volatile situations, amicable settlements may be difficult for parents to reach, thus resulting in the courts deciding visitation and custody arrangements based on what they determine to be in the best interests of the child.
How Can Alcohol Abuse Affect Chances of Custody in Divorce?
A common issue that arises during child custody litigation is that one or both parents may be unfit to parent due to alcohol abuse. People may assume that alcohol abuse claims immediately disqualify a parent from receiving full or partial custody. While alcohol abuse may, in severe cases, lead to this outcome, it is not necessarily the intention of the judge to permanently separate families due to substance abuse.
How to Protect a Family Law Client Falsely Accused of Alcohol Abuse
In Family Law, there are two sides to every story. When interpersonal disputes between spouses result in irreconcilable differences, the judge must rule on the third side of the story to the best of their ability: the truth. As part of this responsibility, judges must determine whether any evidence that the parties present is illegal, irrelevant and/or inadmissible in court and ultimately determine the child’s best interests. Due to the sensitive and emotional nature of many Family Law cases, it’s not uncommon for false allegations of alcohol abuse to make their way into the courtroom. When this occurs, both Family Law attorneys and their clients must understand the rules of evidence and present indisputable proof to the court that refutes these false claims.
How to Choose an Alcohol Monitoring System for Co-Parenting
When you or your client are navigating shared custody while recovering from alcohol abuse, you look for a way to ensure the children are safe and rebuild trust. Parents struggling with alcohol abuse aren’t alone. The 2017 National Survey on Drug Use and Health found an estimated 10.6 million adults aged 26 and older abused or were dependent on alcohol within the previous year.
