Ask an Attorney: My Teen Doesn’t Want to See Her Father. What Now?

Answers to Your Tough Parenting Time Questions

Attorney Matt Ludt recently assisted a client with the issue below, and we want to make this advice available to anyone facing a similar parenting time dispute. For personalized guidance with your child custody or parenting time issue, contact our offices today.

Question:

My teenage daughter’s had a falling out with her father and hasn’t wanted to spend time with him for many months now. I’ve brought a motion to update parenting time and modify child support seeing that she’s with me full-time. He’s now filed a responsive motion asking the court to hold me in contempt for not following the court order. Should I be worried?

Answer:

First, it is paramount any time there’s allegations of disobedience with a court order that you treat that very seriously. It’s a little bit like when you’re driving and all of a sudden there’s a police car behind you with the lights on. This is no time for casualness or ease, even if you know your ex-spouse is in the wrong and their claim doesn’t hold water.

Ideally in these months where your daughter’s not wanted to spend time with her father, you’ve been proactive in trying to bridge that relationship. You know that your daughter’s going to have a better upbringing with a healthy relationship with her father. However, right now, there’s something that’s not healthy because it’s atypical for a child that’s had a long history of parenting time with her father to want to avoid him altogether.

AFFIRMATIVE INVESTIGATION OF WHAT’S WHAT. Have you talked to him? Have you talked to her? Have you just taken their words and their input at their word, or have you dug in, respectfully sought greater truth from them? Is there unreported abuse or neglect? Are the answers provided reasonable? Do the excuses hold water? Get to the bottom of it.

THERAPY IS NEEDED. Is your child talking to a therapist or counselor? Be it a private counselor or a school counselor? Even if you’ve got a great relationship with your daughter, you are part of the equation, and thus, it’s good that in this circumstance of her not wanting to spend time with her father that she have her own therapist someone who’s not mom or dad to talk to about mom and dad. It’s not appropriate for you to get your child involved in your adult legal issues but yet it’s also not a circumstance where you want to just leave her to sort some of this stuff out in her head by herself. Being a teenager is hard.

WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN. Assuming you’ve tried to repair the relationship between the two, do you have it documented? Do you have text messages with your ex that shows that you suggested that he invite her to a dinner, so it’s not normal parenting time but it’s a restaurant that she would normally like just to get started again somewhere? Have you been keeping a journal detailing what was said and done if it wasn’t in writing? Ideally, you’ve got all of this including a calendar of what should have been the parenting time and what’s transpired and was said for every weekend that was his or every weeknight they were supposed to be together.

TRAVEL LOGISITICS. Were you the one that was supposed to deliver your daughter to each of these parenting time sessions with her father? Does the court order specify that you’re to do the driving at the commencement of parenting time by him? The reason we ask this is that what was said and done by you in those instances in the last several months to get your daughter into the car to go to her father’s? In my 20 years, I’ve encountered this argument numerous times that the mother failed to deliver the child to the father as specified by the court order but that presupposes that the child is going to do whatever the mother says. Sometimes the mother will tell the child to get into the car and the child would do it even if the child doesn’t want to go to her father’s. But if the child doesn’t, what’s the mother to do? We’re going to advocate that the mother puts the child in a headlock and frog marches her to the car? We’re going to invoke the car’s child locks so the child doesn’t get out at a stop sign and run back home? These are ridiculous, of course. But nonetheless we want mom in this circumstance to have this documented as to the fact that she told the child to get in the car because it was time to go to her father’s and the child refused.

INVITE DAD TO PROVE HE CAN DO BETTER. The next best thing in this above circumstance is mother promptly notifies father of the daughter’s refusal. I’ve had a client invite the dad over to facilitate getting the child out of her room and joining him in the car to go back and start the weekend. I’ve had fathers who were so put out by the entire circumstance that they’ve called the local non-emergency police line and even had a local police officer verify by talking to the child directly that she doesn’t want to go with her father at which point the police officer declared “this is a Family Court matter, sir, I’m not going to put the child in a headlock to walk her to your car and I can’t expect the mother to do the same.”

IT DEPENDS. Hence to answer your question of whether you should be worried has the attorney’s favorite answer of, it depends. How much of what’s described above is amongst your fact pattern? If you’ve done all of the stuff above, that gives you reason to believe that the court’s going to be able to recognize that this is beyond your control and that you’re dealing with a teenager who may not have standing as a person in your divorce case but that child is going to vote with her feet including the non-movement of her feet when it’s time to go to her father’s.

THERAPY TOO? All in all, a lot of times when we encounter this, the mother’s motion for amended parenting time and child support is perfectly reasonable but we also roll in the consideration that perhaps if dad is earnestly interested in rehabilitating that relationship, there’s going to need to be some family therapy to repair that relationship at the direction of a professional therapist.

BIG DEADLINE: All in all, in your description above, you’re well advised to make sure that you do not fail to meet your seven-day filing deadline ahead of the hearing, by which time, seven days prior to the hearing you’ve both filed and served upon the father a responsive affidavit and documents outlining all of the above facts that help contextualize that parenting time was not happening as a result of the teenager’s obstinance and not at all with the blessing and consent of the mother and thus there’s no concern for the mother’s disobedience of an existing court order.

LEGAL HELP: As with many things in the world of post-divorce litigation, it’s wise to get an attorney involved. Not only do you not want to screw this up by yourself, but also there are ways in which trying to do it by yourself is going to lead to numerous future court dates and additional litigation in the years ahead, whereas if you’ve got a good attorney on your side, you have the opportunity to handle this in a fashion that precludes future litigation. In law, you often get what you pay for, and when you don’t pay for a lawyer, the outcome is likely to be compromised.