legal blog

Life doesn't stop the day your custody order is signed. Jobs change. Parents move. Children get older and their needs shift. New partners come into the picture. Old arrangements that worked when your child was five stop working when they're twelve. And sooner or later, most parents with an existing custody or possession order find themselves asking the same question: "How do I change this?" Texas law does allow custody orders to be changed — but not casually, and not just bec

Almost every parent walking into our office with a custody case asks some version of the same question: "Why can't we just do 50/50?" It's a fair question. On paper, 50/50 custody sounds like the fairest possible arrangement — each parent gets equal time, no one is a "weekend parent," the child grows up with two homes instead of one home and one visitor. But under Texas family law, the honest answer is more complicated. 50/50 possession can be excellent for some families, dam

Manage third-party custody & visitation in Houston. Learn thresholds, best interests, & tips for grandparents, siblings, or relatives.

Understanding parental relocation: key legal steps, court's focus on child's best interests, and the role of family law attorneys in Texas.

What does “sole custody” mean? It probably depends on who you ask. When some clients use the term, they mean only that they want to have physical custody of their child a majority of the time. For others, it means a type of custody in which the other parent’s rights are severely restricted or even terminated. This confusion may be, in part, because “sole custody” isn’t a legal term - at least, not in Texas. Instead, the Texas Family Code uses the term “conservatorship” to ref

If parental alienation is a factor in a divorce or custody case , there are many resources available to prevent the alienation including parent education programs, children education programs, and psychotherapy. Parents may agree to one of these remedies as a preventative measure, or it may be ordered by the court if the judge foresees parental alienation being an issue. Available educational programs are specifically designed for prevention and early detection of at-risk chi

For much of the twentieth century, Texas family courts had a habit of treating mothers as the default custodial parent and fathers as the visitor. That default is gone. Under the Texas Family Code as it exists today, a father has the same legal rights as a mother — the same right to custody, the same right to make decisions about the child's education and medical care, the same right to build a real day-to-day relationship with the child. The catch is that those rights are no

Parental alienation is a condition in which children exhibit an unreasonable aversion to a parent with whom they would normally develop affectionate relations, usually due to the other parent’s negative attitude towards the rejected parent. If a child is exposed to one parent vilifying or demeaning the other parent, that child can go on to develop similar negative feelings against the targeted parent. Sometimes, the alienating parent does this unintentionally, not realizing