Visitation and parenting time

Two things decide almost every parenting-time problem, and neither is the one people research. The first is what your state calls it, because that is the word that finds your own statute instead of somebody else’s. The second is that parenting time and child support are separate obligations everywhere — withholding one because the other has failed is the single most common mistake in this subject, and it is a mistake in both directions.

First, the word

“Visitation” is the old term and a shrinking number of states still use it. Most have replaced it, usually deliberately, because a parent does not visit their own child. This matters practically: search the wrong word and you get a national content farm, search the right one and you get your own legislature.

Sixteen of fifty, because these are the ones read at an official source. If yours is not here, the fastest route is your state judiciary’s own self-help site — not a search engine.

The schedules real orders are built from

Very little of this is invented case by case. Most orders are a named schedule with the edges negotiated, and two states publish theirs free and in full, which makes them the best reference documents in the country whatever state you are in.

• Indiana’s Parenting Time Guidelines are the best-written official document on this subject anywhere. For a child of three or older the minimum regular schedule is alternating weekends, Friday 6pm to Sunday 6pm, plus one midweek evening — “up to four hours but the child shall be returned no later than 9:00 P.M.” And the Guidelines say plainly what they are: “the minimum time a parent should have”. A floor, not a target.
• Arizona’s Planning for Parenting Time publishes fourteen numbered model plans with calendar grids and, unusually, a written list of advantages and disadvantages for each. Plan 11 is alternating weekends, Plan 13 is five-day blocks, Plan 14 is week-on/week-off. If you are trying to picture how a schedule actually lands on a school week, this is the document.
• Utah writes its minimum into statute: alternating weekends Friday 5.30pm to Sunday 8.30pm plus one weekday evening 5.30–8.30pm, for a child aged five to eighteen.

Indiana Parenting Time Guidelines §§ II.D.1 and Preamble; Planning for Parenting Time: Arizona’s Guide for Parents Living Apart; Utah Code § 81-9-302.

Texas, because half the country’s orders look like it

The Texas Standard Possession Order is the most copied schedule in America and it is worth knowing in detail even outside Texas, because it is what “first, third and fifth weekend” means.

• The weekends run “on the first, third, and fifth Friday of each month”, beginning at 6pm. Note that this is not alternating weekends: two consecutive months can hand a parent two weekends in a row, and a five-Friday month gives them three.
• The midweek period, unelected, is Thursdays 6pm to 8pm during the school term.
• The 100-mile line. § 153.312 is the schedule when the possessory conservator lives within 100 miles of the child; § 153.313 is a different schedule beyond it.
• The “expanded” SPO is not a different schedule. It is an election under § 153.317 to change the beginning and ending times — school dismissal to school resumption, rather than 6pm to 6pm. In practice it adds a large number of hours and a Thursday overnight.
• Since 1 September 2021 the expanded times are the default where the possessory conservator lives within 50 miles of the child’s primary residence, unless they decline or the court finds otherwise. That came in with H.B. 3203 and S.B. 1936. It did not come from H.B. 803, which many articles credit and which was left pending in committee.
• Christmas splits at noon on 28 December. The possessory conservator has the first half in even-numbered years, from school dismissal to noon on the 28th, and the second half in odd years, from noon on the 28th to 6pm the day before school resumes.

Tex. Fam. Code §§ 153.312, 153.313, 153.314, 153.317 and 153.3171 (added by Acts 2021, 87th Leg., R.S., Chs. 896 and 967).

Holidays

The near-universal device is straight alternation: one parent has a holiday in even-numbered years and the other in odd. Arizona’s guide gives model language for it. Two details are worth writing into any order:

• The holiday schedule beats the regular schedule. Indiana: “The Holiday Parenting Time Schedule shall take precedence over regularly scheduled and extended parenting time” — and a weekend lost to the other parent’s holiday is simply lost, not made up. If you do not want that result, say so in the order.
• Define the holiday by hours, not by name. “Thanksgiving” means four different things to four different families. “From school dismissal Wednesday to 6pm Sunday” means one.

If one of you wants to move

Relocation is the hardest contested issue in family law after abuse, and the states are not converging. Some define a move numerically; some require notice with a proposed new plan; some forbid it outright without consent or an order.

The practical reading: notice periods are the trap. Moving first and asking afterwards converts a difficult application into a contempt hearing, and it is the fact judges remember.

Supervised visitation, and its three quite different levels

People use one phrase for three services with different purposes, different supervisors and very different costs. The Supervised Visitation Network’s standards, current edition December 2024, define them.

• SVN’s premise, in its own words: “the safety of all participants is a precondition of providing services. After safety, the well-being of the child is the paramount consideration.”
• California separates paid “professional providers” from unpaid “nonprofessional” ones by statute, with different screening for each, and requires a professional to complete 24 hours of training including 12 in a classroom.
• Pennsylvania requires a professional supervisor to have training in domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse and trauma.
• Utah requires findings that the child is likely to suffer harm and that there is no less restrictive alternative — and then, unusually and sensibly, requires the court to consider whether the cost “is likely to prevent the noncustodial parent from exercising parent-time” at all.
• Cost. We have no national figure and will not print one. It varies from free at a court-connected center to well over a hundred dollars an hour for therapeutic supervision. Ask your court’s family services office first; that is where the subsidised places are.

Supervised Visitation Network, Standards for Supervised Visitation Practice (1 December 2024); Cal. Fam. Code § 3200.5; 23 Pa.C.S. § 5322; Utah Code § 81-9-207. The federal Safe Havens program funded supervised visitation and safe exchange where domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse or stalking was present; the Office on Violence Against Women now lists it among formerly authorized grant programs, and the work runs through its successor programs.

When your time is being withheld

That is the rule everywhere, and every official source that addresses it says the same thing in both directions.

• Utah’s courts, in plain English: “Custodial parents may not withhold parent time, even if child support is not being paid.”
• Michigan’s Friend of the Court handbook: “A parent may not refuse to pay support because the other parent violates a parenting time order.”
• Indiana lists arrears among the unacceptable excuses for denying parenting time — alongside “the child unjustifiably hesitates or refuses to go”.
• Colorado goes further and binds the court: it “shall separate the issues of child support and parenting time and shall not condition child support upon parenting time”.

So the remedy is never self-help. It is a motion, and several states have built a fast, cheap track for exactly this.

If you are the parent who is being denied and money is the reason you have not filed: check whether your state has an expedited track before you assume you cannot afford it. They exist precisely because ordinary contempt was too slow and too expensive to be a real remedy.

The child who says they do not want to go

This is the hardest problem on the page, and the official sources are more direct about it than most parents expect.

• The duty is on both parents. Indiana: “If a child is reluctant to participate in parenting time, each parent shall be responsible to ensure the child complies.” The parent receiving the child has work to do too.
• The analogy the courts use is school. Arizona’s guide: understand the feelings, then insist, “just as a parent would do if the child doesn’t want to go to school”.
• A teenager gets a say, not a veto. Arizona: “your teenager will usually want a say in the parenting plan but the teen doesn’t get to choose”.
• Most hesitation is developmental. Indiana’s commentary says it is usually “the result of naturally occurring changes in the life of a child”, and prescribes listening and counseling before litigation.
• And the exception that overrides all of it. Arizona: “If there are concerns that the children don’t want to go because they’re being abused or neglected, Child Protective Services should be contacted.” A refusal is not automatically alienation and it is not automatically abuse. What the words mean and what happens next.

Grandparents and other third parties

All fifty states have some form of grandparent visitation statute — the Supreme Court counted them in a footnote in 2000. What Troxel v. Granville did was set the constitutional ceiling on them.

• The parental interest is “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court”.
• “There is a presumption that fit parents act in their children’s best interests.”
• So if a fit parent’s decision is reviewed at all, the court “must accord at least some special weight to the parent’s own determination”.
• And a judge may not override it “simply because a state judge believes a ‘better’ decision could be made”.
• But Troxel did not strike these statutes down. The Court was “hesitant to hold that specific nonparental visitation statutes violate the Due Process Clause as a per se matter”. Washington’s was unconstitutional as applied, being “breathtakingly broad”. Yours may well be fine.

Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000), plurality opinion of O’Connor, J.; N.C.G.S. § 50-13.2(b1); C.R.S. § 14-10-124.4.

Virtual parenting time

A growing number of states provide for it by statute, and the useful thing about the statutes is what they say it is for.

• Texas is explicit that electronic communication “is not intended as a substitute for physical possession of or access to the child”. Nobody trades weekends for video calls.
• Florida ties it to relocation: when a move is approved the court may order “telephone, Internet, webcam, and other arrangements” to keep contact frequent and meaningful.
• Wisconsin defines it broadly — instant messaging and video conferencing, not just phone calls — and requires a proposed parenting plan to address it.
• Utah makes the court decide whether the equipment is reasonably available, which is the question that actually decides these cases.
• North Carolina authorizes visitation by electronic communication outright and lists the factors.

The small clauses that prevent most of the fights

Experienced practitioners put these in every order. They look fussy and they are what stops a Sunday evening becoming a motion.

• Right of first refusal. Illinois has an actual statute for it: if a parent intends to leave the child with substitute care “for a significant period of time”, they must first offer the other parent. And the statute lists the four things a workable clause must specify — the length of absence that triggers it, notice, the response, and transportation. A clause missing any of the four is the one that gets argued about. Indiana has the same mechanism and refuses the name, noting it is “more accurate to refer to this section as an opportunity to exercise additional parenting time”.
• No denigration, including relatives. Indiana’s language covers the parents and requires them to “firmly discourage such conduct by relatives or friends”. Florida makes not discussing the litigation with the child — and not showing them documents — an express best-interest factor.
• No interference with phone and electronic contact. Indiana gives concrete examples of what counts: refusing to answer, refusing to let the child answer, recording the calls. And it warns that these behaviors “may lead to sanctions, a change of parenting time, or in some cases, a change of custody”.
• Exchange mechanics. Indiana: a parent may not enter the other’s residence except by express permission, and the child is collected at the front entrance. Trivial until it is not.
• Contact details and school events. Utah puts a 24-hour clock on updating addresses, phone numbers and email, and requires notice of school, sports and community events — with the other parent entitled “to attend and participate fully”.
• Clothing and punctuality. Indiana: “The custodial parent shall send an appropriate and adequate supply of clean clothing with the child.” It is in the Guidelines because it is the fight.

Keep reading

• Custody, and how it is decided
• Changing custody
• When you cannot pay child support — why withholding one does not fix the other
• Alienation, and what the term does and does not mean
• Child abuse, neglect and CPS
• If you cannot afford a lawyer