If you have concerns about your child spending time with your estranged spouse for safety reasons or their emotional well-being, you may be wondering if supervised visits are possible following your divorce.
If the court finds a preponderance of evidence that a parent engaged in conduct that seriously endangered a child’s mental, moral, or physical health or impaired the child’s emotional development, the court will enter orders necessary to protect the child..
However, if the reason for your request is not supported by evidence, the court may evaluate the case over a period of time to determine parenting time and how parenting responsibility will be allocated.
Understanding the Terms When Deciding Child Custody and Visitation
In 2016, changes to Illinois law replaced the commonly known phrase ‘child custody‘ with the terms ‘allocation of parental responsibility’ or ‘significant decision making responsibility’. ‘Visitation‘ is now referred to as ‘parenting time’.
Significant decision-making responsibilities address which parent (or parents) will make important decisions about the child’s education, religious upbringing, healthcare and more, whereas parenting time is defined as the time that a parent and child spend with each other without regard for the allocation of parental responsibilities.
Illinois Supervised Child Visitation
Without evidence of conduct that endangers a child’s well-being, supervised visits may be ordered temporarily while the court gathers more facts regarding your concerns over visitation. The judge may order that the visits be supervised by a relative or professional entity, and, if there are no obvious problems, the visits may be moved to unsupervised, with potentially longer visits and a larger share in the parenting time and the allocation of parental responsibilities. However, if there are in fact issues that are found to be not in the best interests of your child, the court will act to protect the child.
Contact a Libertyville, Illinois Child Custody Lawyer
If you have questions regarding Illinois parenting time or the allocation of parental responsibility in a divorce, contact the family law offices of Schlesinger & Strauss LLC for more information.
