Child Custody & Time-Sharing Attorney in Tallahassee

The vocabulary matters more than it sounds

Florida replaced “custody” with two separate concepts, and keeping them straight clarifies what is genuinely at stake in a case.

• Parental responsibility is decision-making authority over school, non-emergency medical care, and religion. Courts order shared parental responsibility in most cases, meaning parents confer and decide together. Sole parental responsibility is reserved for situations where shared decision-making would be detrimental to the child.
• Time-sharing is the schedule: which nights, which holidays, how summers work, and how exchanges happen.

Both go into a parenting plan, a written document the judge signs and which is enforceable like any other court order.

The 2023 change: equal time-sharing is now the starting point

Effective July 1, 2023, Florida law includes a rebuttable presumption that equal time-sharing is in the best interest of the child. This was a real shift. Before that change, the statute expressly said there was no presumption for any particular schedule.

What “rebuttable” means in practice: the court begins from a 50/50 schedule, and a parent who wants something different must show by the greater weight of the evidence that equal time-sharing is not in the child’s best interest. It is not an automatic result, and the judge must still work through the statutory best-interest factors.

What courts weigh

The best-interest analysis is a list of statutory factors, not a single test. Among the ones that carry real weight in practice:

• Each parent’s demonstrated capacity to support a close relationship between the child and the other parent. Courts notice parents who undermine this.
• How parental responsibilities were actually divided before the separation, and who handled day-to-day tasks.
• The stability of each home and the value of keeping the child’s school and community intact.
• The moral fitness, mental health, and physical health of each parent.
• Any history of domestic violence, neglect, or substance abuse.
• The reasonable preference of the child, if the court finds the child mature enough to express one.
• The geographic viability of the plan, particularly the practical realities of school-year travel.

Building a schedule that survives contact with real life

A parenting plan that reads well but ignores your work schedule, the drive between homes, or a child’s activities will generate conflict for years. The plans that hold up are specific: exchange times and locations, a holiday rotation written out by year, how summer break is allocated, who travels for exchanges, how the parents communicate, and what happens when someone is running late.

Vagueness is not kindness. Every ambiguity is a future argument, and unlike the two of you, a judge cannot referee weekly.

When the other parent will not follow the order

A parenting plan is a court order. If a parent withholds the child, repeatedly returns them late, or unilaterally changes the schedule, the remedy is a motion for enforcement or contempt. Courts can order make-up time-sharing, award attorney’s fees, and in persistent cases modify the schedule itself.

Contemporaneous records and written communication are what an enforcement proceeding is built on. Self-help, such as withholding support or the child in response, tends to damage the parent who resorts to it.