Child custody orders can be modified. Because circumstances can change in the life of a child, the court retains jurisdiction to revise its orders regarding child custody and visitation. To prevent people from endlessly relitigating the same issue, however, they have adopted two rules.
The first is that no request to revise a custody order can be considered unless the person asking for the change can demonstrate that there has been a “material change in circumstances.” They have to show that something significant is different from the way things were when the order was signed. Examples of a material change include the remarriage of one of the parents, a change in the distance between the parents’ homes, or one parent becoming unfit.
Trivial changes are not enough. The child being two years older, by itself, would not be a material change. One party simply changing their mind about the arrangement would not be enough.
The second rule is that nothing that occurred before the order was signed can be brought up at the hearing on the request to change it. This is a very important limitation that can be extremely frustrating.
I had a case where my client had agreed to a divorce decree that said that she and the husband would have equally shared custody of the child. The attorney who handled the divorce had not warned her that about this rule. She thought it would be easy to get the order revised just by proving the husband’s history of substance abuse and criminal behavior.
But when it came time to ask for the change all of that evidence was disallowed because it related to events that occurred before the divorce decree was signed.
So, before agreeing to a particular custody arrangement, you should think very carefully about the these limitations on your ability to have the order changed
