Hanover Mothers’ Rights Lawyers

If you are going through a divorce or other legal proceeding and are concerned about maintaining your rights as a mother or protecting your child from domestic abuse, it may be beneficial to consult with an attorney from O’Connor Family Law. A Hanover mother’s rights lawyer can help you safeguard your rights to your child and explain your legal options. With over 35 combined years of exclusive family law experience, you can rest assured that your case will be in trustworthy hands.

A Mother’s Right to Seek Custody

When determining custody and parenting time, a court will apply the ‘best interest of the child’ standard. In doing so, a judge may consider various factors, including but not limited to:

• The child’s age
• The relationship the child has with both parents
• Whether one parent has been more involved in the child’s daily life
• Where both parents live
• The stability of either parent’s household
• The child’s preference if they are old enough to give an opinion

Family courts generally prefer custody schedules and parenting plans that give both parents significant time with their children. However, a mother has a right to request sole custody or limit the father’s time with the kids if is she trying to protect her children from abuse and believes that she is the more capable parent.

If a mother is not awarded custody of her child in situations where she has a substance abuse or psychological issues, she may still be entitled to visitation. If the child’s other parent interferes with the court-ordered parenting plan, a mother may file a complaint for contempt with the Probate and Family Court. An experienced Hanover lawyer can help a mother exercise her custody and visitation rights over her child.

Requesting and Enforcing Child Support in Hanover

The person who is the “custodial” parent is typically entitled to child support from the “noncustodial” parent. This is the once typical scenario of the mother having the children during the week and the father taking them for “visits” every other weekend. There has been a fairly recent shift in family court where it is now understood that both parents are equally important to their children, and the children need regular contact with both.

To remove the stigma of one parent being more significant to the children over the other, the terminology has been changed from one parent having “visits” to each parent having “parenting time.” There has also been a change from the prior belief that the children needed a primary base to consider home, to it now being more important for the children to have fairly equal access to both parents.

Because of the more recent preference for shared parenting time, there are significantly more cases where the parenting schedule allows each parent fairly equal time with the children on a regular basis. A common misconception is that, in a shared parenting schedule, child support is no longer involved since each parent has the children for equal time. However, that is not accurate.

A mother who shares equal parenting time may still have a right to receive child support if her income is less than the other parent’s. Where many more women are high earners in today’s society, however, there can also be a situation where a mother may end up paying child support to a lower-earning father if he gets half the time.

But if you are entitled to support because a child support order is already in place and the father refuses to make payments, an attorney in Hanover can petition a court to enforce an order that protects a mother’s right to child support.