Mediation Provision

David Siegel: Let's touch upon visitation.

Jesse Barrientes: Sure.

David Siegel: Because whoever doesn't have physical custody wants to have, in my opinion, or in my experience, a lot of visitation, a liberal, a nice schedule when they can rely on seeing the children. What's the standard that the court looks to in terms of visitation, and can this be deviated from?

Jesse Barrientes: First you have kind of what the general standard for visitation is, and some counties have outlined what they consider standard. Generally, in Joliet it's going to be visitation every other weekend from Friday after school until Sunday, depending on how old the kids are, 'til about maybe 8:00 or so, just depending on how old they are, and perhaps one day during the week. Not an overnight, but one day during the week where mom or dad could come and take the kids out for dinner, and spend a little quality time with them. Then we talked about the holidays. Generally what happens is the holidays are alternating, so one year you get Christmas, the next year I get them. One year you get Christmas Eve, the next year – you adjust them so I don't really have Christmas Eve and Christmas, even though the parties can agree on that.

David Siegel: Sure.

Jesse Barrientes: Whatever you agree on as it relates to the visitation, generally the courts are wiling to go along with.

David Siegel: It always saddens me a little bit when I see one of those alternating weekend fathers out with the child because it's pretty obvious when the father is often with the child, and there's no mother around, and they're doing alternating weekend dad type of activities. It always kind of touches me a little bit that that person did not have the ability to grow up with both parents together. You feel the same way?

Jesse Barrientes: I do. It's the best you can do under the circumstances, really. it's important to note too, all right, for the agreement purposes, that you want to know, and you want to specify who is going to pick them up, who's going to drop them off, and when they're going to do that you want to have a late provision in there so hey, I'm not going to have to hang around indefinitely if you're late. You have to give me a call, and all those things. It also provides for telephonic visitation.

In a joint parent agreement there's a special provision that's a mediation provision. That means if the parties can't agree as it relates to the children, first you have to submit your – and it could be drafted a number of ways, but generally the way I do it is first they have to submit the written request to each other to try to resolve it, and if they can't, they pick a mediator, and then if that doesn't work, and that falls through, they come in to court as a last resort.

Jesse Barrientes: I think as we come more and more in to the computer age, and the internet age, we're going to see a lot more visitation via computer, whether it be through Skype where the child can sit in front of a monitor and meet with the non-custodial parent at a specific time, for a specific duration, so they can actually see each other when they're not in each other's company.

Jesse Barrientes: Sure.

David Siegel: We're going to see more of that.

Jesse Barrientes: Sure. There's cyber visitation. That's a great idea because it kind of exposes – cures some of the alienation stuff. There are a couple other things that I think we could touch upon.

David Siegel: Let's do it.

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