Amending Custody Orders
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, the court system has adopted two rules.
Two Rules of Custody Orders
The first rule is that no request to revise a custody order can be considered. That is unless the person asking for the change can demonstrate that there has been a “material change in circumstances.”
That means the person asking for the change has to show that something significant is different from the way things were when the court 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. Examples of this are:
- One party simply changing their minds about the arrangement.
- The child being one year older, by itself, would usually not be a material change where as the child being 5 years older could be.
The second rule is that nothing that occurred before the last order was signed can be brought up at the hearing on the request to change the order. 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 she and her husband would have equally shared custody of their child. Her previous attorney had not warned her about this rule. She thought it would be easy to get the order revised by proving her husband’s history of substance abuse and criminal behavior.
When it came time to ask for a 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 these limitations on your ability to change the order.
