In this video, New Jersey divorce attorney Jordan Rickards discusses the seven primary factors that go into determining child custody and parenting time in New Jersey divorces, all of which happen to start with “S.”

Below is a transcript of the video.

“Hi. Nice to see you. The topic of today’s video is child custody and parenting time in New Jersey divorce and in particular, the seven S’s of child custody and parenting time. And, if you haven’t heard that expression before, don’t worry. I don’t expect you to have heard it because I made it up myself. But, it’s nevertheless very good.

Now, custody and parenting time in a divorce, for whatever reason, they’re topics that tend to get put to the back burner a lot. They don’t get discussed as much as the financial aspects, I’ve noticed. Everybody wants to know about equitable distribution. Everybody wants to know about spousal support, how to divide up retirement benefits, qualified domestic relations orders, things like that. And, it almost seems like the parenting time and child custody comes secondary.

I even notice this when I’m doing mediations. When I do mediations in court or in early settlement panels and things like that, it’s almost like it’s an afterthought, and I wonder if that couldn’t be because I think some people have already given up on winning child custody or winning parenting time, at least… At least the amount that they want, before the divorce even starts. And, I’m here to tell you today, you don’t have to worry about that. That what you just need to understand is how these different factors go into the child custody and parenting time decisions that a court’s going to make, but also, not just a court because remember only about 2% of all cases get before the judge.

These are the factors that you need to be able to assert to your spouse in a mediation, in an early settlement panel, even to your attorney if he doesn’t know what he’s doing. In order to… In order to prevail and to get the child custody and parenting time that you really need and that you deserve and that your children need and deserve as well.

So, we’re going to go through the seven S’s because each of these start with an S. Before I do that, let me just add this caveat. What I’m about to tell you really should not be applied in cases where there is domestic violence restraining order in effect. Many of these factors will still come into play, but once there is a domestic violence restraining order, there is a strong presumption in favor of the victim parent being the parent of primary custodial care. In other words, in plain English, if someone has a restraining order against you, the odds of you being the parent of primary care or the odds of you having the majority of your children’s parenting time diminish very dramatically. Once that restraining order is in place, that’s kind of like a poison pill, so you want to avoid that at all costs.

But, putting that aside, let’s just say this is a normal case. It doesn’t involve restraining orders. Where the seven S’s, the seven factors that the courts are going to look to and the first S, believe it or not, is schedules. What are the respective parents’ schedules? It’s very simple. If you want to exercise parenting time and visitation with your child, you have to be able to present to the court a schedule that says, “Here’s how much parenting time I can reasonably do.” Now, if you work a regular nine to five job, you’re not able to spend as much time with the kids during the week if your spouse, for example, is working from home or if that person’s not working at all.

And, in that sort of situation, it becomes rather challenging to craft a pure 50-50 custody and parenting time relationship simply because you’re not able to exercise 50% parenting time. And so, what I try to impress upon my clients when we’re talking about custody and parenting time and they’re telling me they want at least 50-50, is I say to them, “Okay. Tell me what that looks like. Tell me what schedule you want me to ask the court to impose for you or to ask the mediator or whoever.” What does 50% time look like for you? Does it mean Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays of one week and then the next week you guys switch or something like that?

Oftentimes, 50-50 parenting time is one week on, one week off, and so, the children are with one parent for one week and the next parent for the other. Well, if you have a nine to five job where you’re not really seeing the kids during the week, that becomes very challenging. What if both parents have nine to five jobs? Again, then it goes into different dynamics. So, my point is simply you need to be able to put yourself in the position where you can at least exercise the parenting time that you’re asking the judge or the other side to give you. So, number one is schedules.

Number two: Believe it or not, the second S, sleeping arrangements. It matters that the place that you’re living in has enough bedroom space for the kids, and this is one of these things that kind of gets overlooked but it happens a lot because here’s what… Here’s what winds up happening. You got two parties getting divorced and maybe one of them is going to keep the house. The other moves out. So, let’s say wife keeps the house and dad decides to move out and let’s just say they have three kids. You could have two or three kids. Whatever. We’ll use three kids in example.
Well, now dad moves out and dad’s paying spousal support and he’s paying child support. He cannot afford the house that he just moved out of, right? He can’t afford the five person house, so he goes and gets himself a two-bedroom apartment. Well, here’s the problem. How are three kids going to spend overnight parenting time in a two-bedroom apartment, especially when those kids are going to have schoolwork. They’re going to need space to do the schoolwork in, right? So, it’s not just a matter of the sleeping arrangements. It’s a matter of them having the space they need for doing especially virtual classes. But, not just that, but just doing regular homework. How are they going to do that if dad is sleeping in one bedroom and the other three have to share another?

And, you could say, “Well, that’s not really fair.” And, maybe it’s not, but I’m telling you this is something you have to plan for because I’ve seen it come up. And, courts are going to place emphasis on this. How much they should or shouldn’t, that’s up to dispute, but nevertheless, it happens and so when you’re getting a divorce, if you’re not going to be living in the marital home afterwards, you’re going to have to make sure your home, wherever it is, is still going to be big enough to accommodate your children.

That brings me to number three because we mentioned education. The third S, school districts. If you’re moving out of… Well, let’s say he’s not even moving out. Let’s say one parent lives in a good school district and the other one lives in a bad school district. That’s going to weigh into the court’s decision. You want to be able to say, look, I live, for example, in Princeton or Monroe or somewhere nice and the other side lives in an area where the schools aren’t as good. That factors in. We want our kids to have the best education available to us. So, the educational factor comes into play and not just because of that but also courts don’t want kids to change schools if they don’t have to. Which brings me to another S here, which is stability or we could put it another way, status quo.

This could be… We’ll call this the fourth S… We can debate all day long, and we’ll get to this in a second, the extent to which courts favor the wife, the extent to which courts favor the husband. But, they are definitely biased in favor of the children. Courts don’t want to visit the divorce onto the kids. They want this to impact the kids as little as possible and they go to great pains to ensure that. And so, if the kids… Let’s just say, I’ll just make something up. Let’s say the parties grew up in Plainsboro and that’s where the marital house is, which has a pretty good school district. And now, let’s just say dad moves to New Brunswick or something, which frankly doesn’t have a very good school district.

Well, number one, that’s going to militate against him having primary custody because now he’s in a bad school district. But, secondly, the kids need stability and the other side’s going to be arguing, “Look, this is their school. This is what they’ve known. They’re on course to graduate. They want to graduate with their friends. And so, we can’t be interrupting this.” Especially if this is happening in the middle of a school year. You think a court in the middle of a school year is going to tell the kids to drop out of school A to go to school B? Even if it’s a better school, they’re probably going to be reluctant to do that because they don’t want to interrupt the kid’s schooling. They don’t want to interrupt the status quo. That stability, those S’s we’re talking about.
And, that brings me to another S. Their social life. Their friends are in that school. Right? Their friends are in the town where the marital residence was. That’s where they grew up. And so, especially when you start talking about teenagers, maybe they don’t want to spend as much time with parent B who’s moved to a different town because they want to be around their friends more and maybe dad has moved too far away and now it takes 45 minute to get to see their friends or their friends can’t come over, that sort of thing.

Again, these are things that factor in and we can argue about whether they should factor in or not, but they do. And, understand. Listen, social life is important to kids. Stability is important. All these things are important. So, I’m not saying that they’re not important. I am saying how much weight they are given is going to vary from judge to judge and from case to case and from situation to situation.

And, speaking of teenagers, and, I’m going through this quickly because, again, I’m not giving you a law school course here. I’m just giving you an overview. But, we mentioned teenagers. This brings me to the sixth S and that is selection. The parent the child selects to be with more. As children get older, schools… Sorry. As children get older, the courts will look more and more to their preference, who the child selects, who they want to be with more, especially when you get to something like age 16. You know, age 12, 13, it’s a little bit more murky. But, when you have like a 16-year-old, the court is not going to force a 16-year-old to spend more time with parent A than parent B if he doesn’t want to, and that’s just reality.

And, I’ll tell you this. 16 is not like a hard and fast number. It’s not like at 15 years and 10 months, you know, courts aren’t going to be deferential, but at 16 years exactly they’ll be deferential. It’s not like that. I’m just giving ballpark. Every child is different. Some children mature more quickly than others. Some children have better reasons than others for wanting to be with one parent. All I’m saying, though, is that the selection the child makes at some point does start to factor in and one of the saddest things I see is when parents start to weaponize the children and start to turn one child against another.

I’ve actually seen a situation, I’m not making this up. Where the two parents were still living in the same household during the divorce and they’ve got the child going between the two rooms, between the two parents, to try to mediate the parenting time and the mother is saying, “Tell your father you only want to see him every other weekend,” and he’s going up to dad and saying, “Dad, you know, Mom says I should say I should only see you every other weekend. What do you think about that?”. And, Dad says, “No. Tell your mother you want to be with me every week or every other week or something. You know, for the full week.” And, he goes back and tells mom. That shouldn’t be happening, guys. If that’s happening, that’s a real failure.

The selection of the kid doesn’t matter but the manipulation of the kid should never happen. I should say the selection of the kid does matter but the manipulation of the kid should never happen.
Now, I want to talk about the seventh S and I’ve saved this for last very deliberately. And, I know some of you are waiting for me to get to this, especially the men. The seventh S is sexism. Is there sexism in the court system? Well, let me tell you this. I can tell you for certain that for many years, there absolutely was and it was very deliberate and it was actually statutory. In other words, the law actually said, and it was called I believe the tender years law. The law actually said that it is understood that children of certain age, sort of the tender years, the early years of a children’s life, should be spent with the mother. That’s actually, it was part of the law and it actually got litigated all the way up to the Supreme Court and the state Supreme Court said, “Well, that’s a silly presumption. Why are we presuming that the child is better off with one gender than the other? And, in fact, if anything there should be an equal presumption on both sides.”

Does that mean that necessarily prevails? If I am being perfectly honest with you, I will tell you no. It does not always prevail. I have absolutely seen cases where the only explanation for the judge’s decision is that one side is the woman and the other side is the man. And, I’m not saying the judges are biased. I am not saying we don’t have good judges. We do. I am saying this is a human process and it happens.

Now, if you go through the rest of the factors I just told you about, you can kind of understand why sometimes. Because, when it comes to schedules, the husband is more likely to have the full time job and mom is more likely to have stayed home. And so, mom is more able, just because of her schedule, to care more for the kids. And, remember, we want to maintain the status quo, the stability. And so, we don’t want to change things, and so, that’s going to… That’s going to militate in favor of mom.

You know, the sleeping arrangements. If mom is able to do the buyout of the house and she’s able to keep the house… Again, stability. We want to keep the kids in the same house. We want to keep the kids in the same school. And so, those things are already biased in favor of mom just by virtue of how the divorce is shaping out. Well, then, it’s going to benefit mom. But, I will be honest with you. There are absolutely other times where I can think of no reason why mom is given more time than the other person other than that she’s the woman.

In domestic violence cases, I can tell you, if you are a man… I’ll just tell you right out. If you are a man and your wife calls the police on you, And, there is… There is any reason for the police to think that anything happened, believe me, you got two strikes against you right there. It’s not quite the same the other way around, but if the police are responding to a domestic violence complaint and the man is the one who’s accused, they have an uphill battle. Let’s just put it that way.

Now, I don’t mean to discourage any men out there because, again, I don’t think the bias is that prevalent against you and I think most of the bias is attributable to the other factors I mentioned. All I’m going to tell you is I’m never going to say that it’s never going to happen, that no one is ever going to hold you being the man against you. I do think there is still sort of a remnant of that prevailing practice where for so long it was just ingrained in our legal system. And, we’ve done a lot to come out of that. I mean, nowadays we have men who collect alimony and that would have just been unheard of even 15 years ago, 10 years ago. You didn’t hear about that and now it happens quite frequently.

And so, the situation isn’t as bad and, you know, you’ll have people who say, “Well, Jordan’s wrong and he’s exaggerating.” Hey, listen. You know what? I can’t afford to be naïve about this. I know what I’ve experienced. And, I’m not saying the judges are bad people. I’m not saying it’s that prevalent. You know, they’re good people. They’re smart people. I’m just saying it’s a human process and you have to deal with the fact that you’re dealing with human beings. And, that’s all the more reason that when you go into a child custody and parenting time situation, you need to know the other factors and you need to be able to assert them. And, you need to be able to show how they militate in your favor regardless of what gender you are. And, that’s true for husbands and wives.

That’s why I’m saying regardless of the gender, that all of you should know… All of you should know what the different factors are and be able to use them to your advantage.

Now, I’m not going to get too much into this. One last topic because it’s technically not an S but it has an S sound and it’s called… If all these things can’t be worked out, what do we do? Psychologist. I guess there is an “S” in psychologist, but what’ll wind up happening more often than not is you’ll have to get best interest evaluations done and those people will kind of… The psychologists will do interviews with the parents and the kids and they’ll make recommendations to the court. That’s a bigger topic than I want to get into now. This video is already running long and I’m speaking fast even to keep it as short as I can. So, I’ll do another video on that.

But, just for now, just know that the seven S’s of child custody and parenting time… Just to recap. Schedules, sleeping arrangements, school districts, social life, stability, selection of the child and unfortunately I’m telling you… Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t think I am. I do think there is a little bit of sexism that comes into play, fairly or not. I can’t tell you that it’s never happened and never will again happen. That’s reality. Again, I love our judges. I think we have a great system here. But, nobody’s perfect and the system certainly isn’t perfect and it’s more the reason why if you’re going to be doing this… This is complex stuff. You really need to be hiring an attorney because you can always make up for money here or there but you can’t make up for time that you’re missing with your kids.

And, as I’ve mentioned in other videos, once a parenting time arrangement gets put into place, it tends to ossify over time. It solidifies and it becomes very, very difficult to change it down the road, so you got to do it right the first time. All right, guys? So, listen. I know this was a longer video. I apologize. I got more coming out soon. But, thanks for hanging out with me and listening to this video. If you have any questions or you just want to talk to me about this, you want a free consultation, I’d be very happy to meet with you. Just give me a call at that number below. All right, guys? Thanks a lot. Take care of yourselves.”