Visitation Rights
What's the difference between "custody" and "visitation"?
There's a lot of confusion between those two terms, because a lot of people think that if you have visitation rights that means you don't have custody. That is not really true. In California, whenever you spend time with a child, you have physical custody. So basically, even if you are with the child 10% of the time, and it's considered visitation rights, you are still sharing custody; you still have joint physical custody even if you have visitation just 10 percent.
Beside the parents, who can claim custody or visitation rights?
Generally, the only two people with rights to a child are the mother and the father; their parents. Sometimes a grandparent can have rights; such as if one of the parties dies, is incarcerated, or is otherwise unavailable or unable to take care of the child. Then, a grandparent or a blood relative might assume the right. However, generally, unless you're the parent, you're not going to have custody rights.
What is the typical visitation schedule in a joint custody arrangement?
It really depends on how old the children are and how far the parents live from each other. However, generally, a typical visitation schedule would be the following. There's a custodial parent (somebody that the children live with) and then there's the non-custodial parent, who will have about two or three visitations during the week, and then the parents will alternate weekends. That's a typical parenting plan. It obviously changes because if the child is two months old, then it might not be the same as if the child was a running-around five-year-old toddler. Also, it changes if the father lives in LA as opposed to San Diego, for example, so distance really matters, too. So, it really it depends. There's no typical parenting plan.
