Has anyone been successful in fighting 50/50 custody?

[Sarahd3342]

Hi,

If anyone here has been successful in fighting off 50/50 custody please could you explain how you did it?
I have got some arguments which include that I work part time (he will say his hours are flexible and they are but they are still ft), that I have all school holidays off, that I have a history of caring for our child during all holidays, that it would be disruptive to his routine, that I am closer to his school etc, that I am better at providing for her needs etc. but I don't think it's enough. There were some safeguarding concerns on his part and he has to do a parenting course but he will do that and he is on his best behaviour. I also don't know what to submit in terms of evidence. It says I have a few pages I can submit to he court...of what. To build my case as to why I am so worthy?

For anyone that has got this far, please do not comment if you are saying "why shouldn't he get 50/50?" It is not helpful. I believe that he should see our child as much as he can but the thought of our child having "2 homes" and 2 routines sickens me - our child will not cope with the disruption.

That's fine and lovely that you had an ex you were happy with.

Many women (or people if you like, but the evidence is that it is overwhelmingly women) leave their relationship because of abuse. If we know our child 's dad is an abusive bully it isn't "weaponising" or "game playing" to seek to minimise contact. In fact it would be grossly negligent not to fight to protect them.

Has there been a Cafcass report yet? What did it say?

The court will look at the "welfare checklist" to make the decision. This says

a court shall have regard in particular to—
(a)the ascertainable wishes and feelings of the child concerned (considered in the light of his age and understanding);
(b)his physical, emotional and educational needs;
(c)the likely effect on him of any change in his circumstances;
(d)his age, sex, background and any characteristics of his which the court considers relevant;
(e)any harm which he has suffered or is at risk of suffering;
(f)how capable each of his parents, and any other person in relation to whom the court considers the question to be relevant, is of meeting his needs;
(g)the range of powers available to the court under this Act in the proceedings in question.

Cafcass should have spoken to your daughter to see what she wants, although at just 5 her wishes and feelings aren't determinative.

The way that I would frame it would be

• not opposed to 50/ 50 in principle, eventually, but feel strongly this should be through stepped arrangements
• DD is only just 5, has just been through two huge life events: her parents separating and starting school. The sudden imposition of a "second home" to adapt to is not likely to be in her best welfare interests and this should be introduced more slowly to give her the best chance of adjusting to this gradually
• Because I work pt and have holidays free, DD is accustomed to spending school holidays with me. Again, not opposed to this expanding in principle but again should be stepped arrangements. Would like it written into the order that if XH is unable to look after DD during school holidays due to his work, it would be preferable for her to be with me rather than in a school or holiday club - as she gets older and her interests develop this may change but while she is still so young, holiday clubs are likely to be tiring, leaving her less refreshed for the start of the next term.
• Any 'harm' - XH has done his parenting course and really pleased that he has done so, recognise it was at the lower end of the scale, DD is enjoying spending time with him and he is in his element in the community with her with activities. However bedtime was always a flash point when we were together, DD struggles to sleep and XH would lose patience. DD remembers this and it is crucial that there is a genuine fresh start at his new house where he will implement the learning from his parenting course and not lose his temper over mealtimes and bedtime. I would therefore suggest that stepped arrangements begin with days when he is not having to work after bedtime and there is less pressure, so would suggest for the first half term of 2025 he collects her from school every other Friday afternoon 😇and returns her the next day Saturday at 5pm, then the next half term from Feb to Easter, from school every other Friday and returns her to school on Monday morning. (So EOW).
• Once DD is comfortable spending two nights at XH's, the stepped arrangements can increase to include the more pressured week night evenings, so from Easter, collect every other Friday from school and drop on the Wednesday morning at school (5 nights out of 14 per fortnight).
• Would invite the court to implement this as an interim arrangement with the stepped arrangements set out and then list it for further hearing at the end of May 2025, in the anticipation that it can increase to 7/7 in the second half of the summer term collecting from school on Friday and dropping to school the following Friday. If the stepped arrangements work well then you and he will file a consent order agreeing this and vacating the May 2025 date, but if there are bumps in the road you will ask the court to hear it.

Some courts will agree to the last one, some won't. If they won't then invite them to implement the stepped arrangements including the rise to 7/7 from the second half of the summer term, but with 'liberty to apply to vary the order' so that if it doesn't work out, you can bring it back to court.

It may be that as others have said, he will really step up and be an excellent parent and DD will flourish as you move towards a 50/50 arrangement - which would be a win.

If may be that the loss of his shagging and gym time EOW from now until Christmas is too much for him and he loses interest, in which case you have a solid base on which to say 50/50 isn't going to work.

@BluebellTimeInKent they're really great responses, thank you so much! Have you done this before?!!
Yes, CAFCASS said interim school pick ups 3 X a week (ouch) until 5pm to include dinner and one day at the weekend out in the community until the course is due. Already I am getting fed up of the rubbish DD is eating for dinner. Went to a friend's house (with dad) the other day, pizza restaurant the other day and cheese sandwich the other night. A 2nd report is due end of Nov and a court hearing is scheduled for early December. So your suggestions from January look like they would fit in with the timeframe. Thank you.

@BluebellTimeInKent hahaha I like how you phrase loss of shagging time. So funny!

He is feeding your dd and she’s eating. I wouldn’t get too bogged down in the detail and you’re probably giving her plenty of fruit and vegetables. Looking at what she gets over the week is far better than looking at individual meals. My dd has anorexia and one thing i’ve learned from that is food is food if it keeps her alive.

I really wouldn't bang on about the food. She's getting fed. You do need to let go of the trivia, you can't police her diet while she is there.

I don't think OP sounds controlling. She sounds like a woman who has been "default parent" for 5 years, has an ex whose strengths she can identify notwithstanding their separation (in his element out with DD in the community, 'fun,' does lots of activities), but who has also seen the worst of him (problems coping with ordinary preschooler behaviour at meal times, getting ready and bedtimes). Those problems were significant enough for the court to ask him to do a parenting course - courts don't do that just on the whim of one partner. It is understandable that she has reservations about how well a 50/50 arrangement will work, I'm guessing she is especially concerned about how her reception-age child would cope without her there to referee or defuse the situation if he lost his temper at bedtime.

It is really hard to go from being default parent to separate-but-co-parent @Sarahd3342 but you are going to have to bite your lip about things like bedtimes, screen time, food choices etc. Sausage and chips for dinner might not be what you'd feed her but it's not outside the scope of what's normal for a parent to feed their child. Keep it to the welfare checklist - unless DD is terribly overweight and you are under a paediatric nutritionist's advice, or she is celiac and shouldn't have pizza or something equally serious - pizza or a cheese sandwich three times a week does not constitute 'harm.'

Women who've been in abusive relationships really can't win. You seek advice in relationships and you're told to LTB, protect your child, to not let them see DC. You're told they won't bother to do 50/50, that they won't get it so you don't need to worry about that. Then you come on the divorce board and you're told he'll definetly get 50/50 and your being selfish and controlling to want to protect your child from the behaviour that harmed you.

Quite. You are demonised if you don't leave your abuser but if you do leave you are then told you are weaponising you children if you try and keep them safe.

I disagree on the food thing. When my DC are with MIL, and she's feeding them junk, that's fine. Because its now and again. If she was responsible for looking after them 50% of the time it would really piss me off. I don't blame OP for feeling this way currently

OP, I think the point you should be making to the court, and genuinely meaning, is that right now, a shift to 50/50 would be highly disruptive to your DD. To date, she has not had an overnight with him since June, and a huge step up in one go, at a time of plenty of other disruption, seems an unnecessary leap so working towards 50/50 seems a better option and allows ex more time to adjust to the kind of focused, full on parenting that drove the need for him to go to a parenting class in the first place.

I'd also add that if and when 50/50 is implemented, you believe it's important to have the split so that DD spends equal amount of school/weekend/holiday child with each parent so that both parents are equally involved in school/social/holiday/childcare.

@EliflurtleAndTheInfiniteMadness I think the issue is simply that it's impossible to give good advice to someone who can only describe their circumstances in a generalised way on a public forum. The advice here - and on relationships - is invariably bad for that reason.

The truth is no one knows the outcome. In the majority of cases I suspect - though I cannot say for certain - that someone who is genuinely abusive will probably get found out at some point in the process and will not get 50/50. However, unfortunately both of the following are also true:

1. There are people in abusive relationships who are unable to prove it and find they are doing 50/50 after divorce; and

2. There are people who are not in abusive relationships where one party makes a false allegation (whether for control, financial advantage, legal aid etc) and gets away with it.

Both 1) and 2) taint the court's ability to make good outcomes in every case. The outcome in an individual's case needs careful scrutiny from a sympathetic but skeptical legal professional who can weigh the strength of the evidence, who knows how well CAFCASS performs in their region, who knows how judges are likely to react and advise on the best course of action. You cannot do that on a public forum.

Do you think he wants 50:50 to avoid paying you child maintenance?

A friend doesn't claim any child maintenance from her ex because she knows her child would not cope well with 50:50. Her ex would not want to pay her child maintenance, he would almost certainly apply for 50:50 rather than pay her money.

He has agreed to pay the full childcare bill for the week, which he pays to the nursery direct, not to her. He is the higher earner and the nursery bill is less than child maintenance would be. My friend can support herself on her own salary.

@OneMoreLime that is a possibility. Conveniently he filled in the court papers as soon as I had an email from CMS stating they were looking to contact my husband. But, my solicitor said that regardless, I will have spousal maintenance (I told him all the money I had, savings, etc and said, let's just assume my husband has £0 personal savings but just going off his salary and the minimum spousal is more than what he is paying in cms. I don't know whether it's to not pay the money, to punish me/controlling, for appearances or is genuinely naive.

@ShinyShona thank you. Yes, there's things I could say but there is just no evidence so it would be pointless.

@MrSeptember thank you! I know what you mean...if it's a one off then okay but if it's regularly it's not helpful! But like others said I probably should just leave it. He's probably giving her that kind of food to avoid the stress of meal times and her being fussy.

@millymollymoomoo I'm sorry if I have come across that way. My daughter was brought up with a dad and so should continue a meaningful relationship with him.

@BluebellTimeInKent exactly your post, thank you!

Ruthless 😮
But also ingenious

Oh dear, hit a nerve here?

@Sarahd3342 I would be wary of a solicitor that guarantees you spousal maintenance. There is no guarantee and if he gets 50/50 custody then he has good grounds to reduce his work commitments and also good grounds to insist that you increase yours. A solicitor might venture to advise on the likelihood but it would be a rare case indeed that a solicitor would guarantee any part of the outcome.

Even if you do get spousal maintenance, unless he earns an awful lot of money then it will be time limited to provide you with an opportunity to increase your hours and earn more. I don't know your respective earnings and I've not scrolled back to see your child's age but it would be well outside the norm to last more than five years and probably no more than three, assuming yours is an average case. Also, it would be based on there being no child maintenance to pay.

Obviously every case turns on its own facts, but a recent case I supported was husband on £120k, wife on £15k part time, three children, 50/50 split of custody, around £300k of equity. No pension to speak of. Husband had offered all equity for clean break but it went to final hearing. Financial outcome was immediate sale of family home, 70/30 split of equity and £400 per month global maintenance for two years with a time bar. Wife was told to go full time if she needed more money. By my calculation in pursuing spousal maintenance the wife ended up around £80k plus legal fees down and also carried the risk that the husband could lose his income at any point in those two years.

The other thing to be cautious about with spousal maintenance is that it's a "movable feast." It's only really as good as the person paying it. Solicitors like to talk about enforcing it if it isn't paid but they downplay just how hard enforcement is in practice. There was another recent case - and I paraphrase now because I only briefly read about this one - but the payer moved to China, took out loans and then deliberately lost his job to avoid paying. Solicitors like to claim people like that eventually go to prison but what actually happened was that the maintenance was terminated and a clean break ordered.

I would recommend you try and get spousal maintenance capitalised if you can and failing that I wouldn't rely too heavily on it as a source of income if you don't think he will be a reliable payer.

*Edited because my sums were wrong!

I would be incredibly surprised if you were granted spousal support in the UK with a reception aged child, choosing to work part time.
It’s very unprofessional for your representation to tell you there is a going rate you would be entitled to because that’s not the case at all.

Spousal maintenance is vanishingly rare now, and only
given in very limited circumstances, for very limited length of time.

As PP said; I’d be very wary of any solicitor who advises you will certainly get it.

You’ll be expected to work full-time to maximise your income, especially if 50/50 awarded.

Oh gosh! Thanks for all your advice about spousal maintenance. And @ShinyShona those stats sort of bring it all home. £400. For 3 kids. £120k salary. That's in line with my husband's salary. And I don't have 3 kids. And whilst there is a disparity in income it's not 100k disparity. I may need to think things through! I was told my minimum would be far far more than that...try triple. But yes, my own reading indicates spousal is very limited and not exactly straight forward to enforce.

This is making me think...I reckon there's some element of financial motivations behind his custody aims. Did I mention. An earlier proposal of his for the holidays was that it would be 50/50 and every other day he would pick her up from my care at 5pm every day after he had finished work and return her to me in the morning? He did say he would have her Sundays.

You say you don't want your DD moving between 2 homes. Perhaps he feels the same way and wants his home to be the primary residence. Maybe he wants more than 50/50 but is trying to be fair to you?

50/50 would be expected to run as usual in the holidays, in most cases. As far as the CMS are concerned, it’s nights which count, so if he had her every night this would be full-time.

You can run various scenarios through the CMS checker, if you know his salary

You really need a good lawyer to talk you through all of this.

The starting point is 50/50 in most cases now.

@Harvestfestivalknickers I really don't think so. When we were together he would say that if I wasn't there he would be forced to move away near his family as he wouldn't be able to do it all alone and would need help.