Communicating Effectively In Family Court

Posted on January 23, 2014 by About The Children LLC — 2 Comments

What Are You Really Trying To Say

Most of the time, parents don’t know what questions to ask or where to start in a family court case. It’s quite common for parents to be somewhat clueless about the whole process of getting custody or visitation of their kids or going through a straight divorce, and that’s okay. One of the biggest problems with situations like this is communication. If you don’t know what to say or how to say it, the chances are pretty good that your attorney or the person presiding over your mediation session or even the judge, will get confused about who’s talking about who, what the issue really is and what you or your ex wants out of this. Any amount of confusion is not good in these kinds of situations. In family law, the judge is going to make a decision based on what is in front of him in black and white; gray areas only make the water murky. Here are a few tips to make yourself be heard correctly.

Effective Communication. Okay, so you know what you want. You want to enforce your rights to your children, get custody of them or get more visitations with your kids on weekends. Whatever the issue is, you know why you’re here, there’s a problem and you’re trying to solve it. Being misheard in court, or having your attorney scratching their head about what you want and how to proceed will result in things being done that don’t reflect what needs to happen in order to fix the problem.
Make A Plan And Stick To It. If you’re not the best communicator for whatever reason; you get nervous talking to people you don’t know, English is a second language for you or you just don’t know the right terms to be using for what you’re trying to say, try writing it down. This might be a refresher course in how to organize your thoughts on paper, some people actually think better this way. Start by drawing a circle around the issue itself. Whether its visitation, custody, no phone calls on the weekends etc. identifying the issue and articulating it, brings it out into the open to work on. It’s like a car, you can’t tell what’s wrong until you have it raised up and you can take a look at the under carriage. The rest will follow from that.

In a lot of these cases, it’s going to require you to do a little research on your own to know what certain terms mean, what a child custody battle might look like in court and what your options are in your particular situation. The public library and internet sources are great sources of information. If nothing else you can see what other people have done in scenarios that are similar to your own and use that information to tackle your own custody, visitation or divorce issues.

Learn how at –> www.AboutTheChildren.org

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