A common contact schedule is that the child spends every other weekend with the non-custodial parent, one weekday evening, certain holidays and a few weeks of summer vacation.
States impose a range of incapacities until the children reach an age when they are deemed sufficiently mature to take responsibility for their own actions.
Issues of access and custody interact and overlap, and represent all of the aspects of care and control that parents may exercise in relation to their children.
Supervised visitation may have no location restrictions, or it may be ordered to occur at a specific child contact centre.
Usually, the children are not directly the parties to the lawsuit, so the courts have a range of options including the power to appoint a guardian ad litem to protect their interests.
This is particularly important in cases involving the breakdown of any family relationship where questions relating to the welfare of the children will become significant in sometimes acrimonious disputes.
At a supranational level, the Convention on the Rights of the Child emphasises the need to allow children a voice in any proceedings affecting their welfare.
Significantly, it also suggests a change to the terminology, replacing "custody" and "access" with the concepts of "residence" and "contact".
Whereas some jurisdictions formally prefer joint custody arrangements in situations where there has previously been a stable family relationship, many states have a formalised rebuttable presumption in favour of the mother.
The courts in the Member State where the child is habitually resident have the primary jurisdiction to rule on parental responsibility.
The courts in the other Member States shall enforce those judgments unless: Following a proposal from the Commission in May 2002, a regulation on parental responsibility which was adopted on 27 November 2003 and applies from 1 March 2005: Contact Orders are made under s8 Children Act 1989 to require the person(s) with whom a child lives to allow that child to visit, stay or have contact with a person named in the order.
Contact can either be direct e.g. face-to-face meetings with a person or indirect e.g. by letter, video, exchange of greeting cards etc.
[citation needed] Contact represents a change in fundamental concept to disputes involving the upbringing of children.
[citation needed] Generally speaking, visitation is considered only a privilege granted to the non-custodial parent of any child of the family.
But sometimes when there are safety problems or child abuse history, the court can set up a supervised or "safety-focused" parenting plan.
[citation needed] In at least 27 states, a rapist who got their victim pregnant can legally sue for visitation, and in some cases even custody.