Enforcing Your Visitation Rights: What You Need
What do you do if you’re not getting your visitation? My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m an attorney with Wirth Law Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve been practicing for about seven years doing mainly family and criminal law. I want to help you to make the law easy by talking a little bit about what to do in a situation where you’re supposed to be getting visitation with your child and the other side is just not having it.
This comes up a lot, especially around Christmas, summer break, and when school starts. Those are the big three where a lot of parents, for whatever reason, just decide, well, I know that you’re supposed to get visitation, but I’m not going to let you. Whether it’s a justified reason or an unjustified reason, it seems to me that’s what happens a lot. The other time I see this happen a lot is there’s a lot of people that will think, well, if you’re not paying child support, then I’m not going to let you see your child. It doesn’t work.
Seek Legal Help for Enforcing Visitation Rights
Every lawyer you ever talk to, every judge that you ever see on the bench is going to tell you that child support and child custody and visitation, they don’t interact. There’s no intersection in that Venn diagram. Just because somebody isn’t paying child support doesn’t mean that they don’t get to see their child. The flip is true also. Just because somebody is refusing to let you see your child doesn’t mean that you can’t stop paying child support.
What do you do if the other parent’s not letting you see your child? You call me. We file what’s called a motion to enforce, specifically a motion to enforce visitation. What this means is that we are filing a pleading with the court saying, hey, you entered this order back in the way back. This order grants me certain visitation rights. Unfortunately, the other side’s not letting me have those visitation rights. Please help.
Immediate Action for Visitation Rights
A lot of times I’ll file this in conjunction with an application for a contempt citation, basically informing the court and informing the other side, that you violate a court order. This is showing contempt for this court order. Therefore, we’re asking the court to send you to jail for that. A contempt carries jail time. A motion to enforce, though, has a little bit more of an immediate effect because you have to have a hearing on that within 10 days.
If you’re in a situation where the other side’s just not letting you see your child, you come to us, we file the motion, and it should be within a fortnight that the court will be able to hear why the visitation is being withheld. They’re going to have to show that your child was in imminent danger of immediate harm to justify not allowing visitation. If they’re not able to do that, more often than not, not only will you get your visitation back, but you will also get make-up time for the time that you were denied and you may even be entitled to attorney’s fees.
Contact Us for Help with Your Visitation Rights
If this is a situation that you think that you’re going through please give us a call. I would love to be able to talk with you about this and see what we can do to help. My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m with Wirth Law Office, and I want to help you make law easy. Thank you. To schedule a low-cost initial strategy session, contact us at 918-879-1681.
