Parenting during and after divorce: time-sharing and shared parental responsibility

It is Florida policy to encourage both parents to have “frequent and continuing contact” with their children and to “share the rights and responsibilities, enjoys, of child rearing” after divorce.

Florida law refers to this as “parental responsibility,” and most parties have shared parental responsibility.

Florida law creates a preference for this so that both parents share in the decision-making for the child. In order for there to be sole parental responsibility, the court would have to find that shared parental responsibility would be detrimental to the child.

Therefore, the primary litigated issue is time-sharing, which was formerly known as “custody” and “visitation.” The two later terms have been deleted from Florida statute, and now we simply refer to it as time-sharing. Also, we no longer use the primary/secondary designation for parents. The parents are instead now known as “mother” and “father.”