You just received an email from your child’s other parent, telling you he or she plans to move out of the city or state with your child. When this happens, it leaves many parents with a sense of irreparable dread and a feeling of helplessness. Now what? How can this be stopped?

Per Illinois 750 ILCS 5/609.2, a parent who has majority parenting time or a parent who has been awarded equal parenting time can petition the court for relocation, which is considered a substantial change in circumstance. The parent wishing to relocate with the child must give written notice to the other parent 60 days in advance, including the date, the address of the residence, and length of time if the relocation is not intended to be permanent. A copy of this written notice must be sent to the circuit court as well. Many parents fail with this simplest of tasks: properly notifying the other parent and the court 60 days before they move. As such, the court may see them unfit to carry out such a relocation.

Fighting Relocation of a Child

When petitioning the court for permission to relocate, the court will always make a decision in what the judge believes to be in the best interest of the child. Factors that will be analyzed include:

When parents get divorced or separated, they must decide how to split time with their children. Traditionally, for shared child custody agreements, the children live with one parent part-time and go with the other parent on the weekends, every other week, or however the parenting plan is structured. This requires the children to move from one home to the next, every week, for years, until they are old enough to be out of the house.

Another option for parents who have shared custody has gained in popularity. Birdnesting, or just nesting for short, keeps the child in one home while the parents come and go. This requires the parents to each have their own separate living situation, or to share a separate home together; birdnesting parents do not have to ever sleep under the same roof or spend time with one another, however.

Birdnesting Offers Children More Stability

We know much more about child psychology and development today than three or four decades ago when mothers were almost always given full custody. Children of divorce or separation do best when they spend regular, daily time with both parents, not just one. Children also do better when they have stability in their lives. Stability offers predictability, routine, and consistency, which are all paramount to child development. Birdnesting offers the best of both of these worlds — spending equal or close to equal time with each parent while living in the most stable environment possible. Continually packing, unpacking, being driving to dad’s house on odd weeks and mom’s house on even weeks, sleeping in different rooms half the time, not having access to certain toys and other comforts — this all reduces a child’s sense of stability.

Movies, television, and media reports would have us all believe kidnappers are lurking in bushes and snooping around playgrounds, ready to nab a random child whenever the opportunity presents itself. This could not be farther from the truth. While strangers do abduct children, these types of kidnappings are not the rule, but the exception. In fact, in only 0.1 percent of child kidnapping cases (one out of 1,000) is the abductor a stranger to or a slight acquaintance of the child. Almost all abductors are family members, and in most of these cases, it is one of the parents.

Parental kidnapping occurs when one parent has custody of the child and the other goes against a court order and takes the child unlawfully. Sometimes the parent takes the child back home, which could be in the same town. Other times, desperate parents leave the state or even the country. If your child was abducted by his or her other parent, a family law attorney can:

• Help you locate your child;
• Make sure the other parent does not receive custody;
• Fight to ensure future visitations are supervised by the state; and/or
• Fight to take away all visitation rights of the other parent.

Parents Without Custody Order Can Commit Abduction

While most children are taken by a parent during a child custody dispute or in the months or years after the custody decision has been made, it is also possible for a parent to commit the crime of abduction even if no custody has been issued. For example, if a married spouse or an ex-spouse were to take their child on an unannounced trip without notifying the other parent, they may be committing child abduction. Under Illinois statute 720 ILCS 5/10-5, it is unlawful for a parent to knowingly conceal their child for 15 days or more if they fail to make reasonable attempts to notify the other parent of the specific location of the child. This type of abduction would seriously damage the negligent parent’s chances of receiving a favorable child custody decision in court.

Building a life together as a married couple inevitably involves the accumulation of personal assets. The time and effort it took to financially afford and personally choose these items cannot be measured in dollars alone. Facing the prospect of dividing years of memories and hard work these items represent due to divorce requires some ability to look at this situation with objective eyes. Neither should expect to get everything they want.

Part of this evaluation is having a realistic sense of what percentage of marital property each spouse should expect to receive, and Illinois is not a community property state that guarantees each spouse 50 percent of all property. Instead, it follows equitable distribution rules that base property division in divorce on what is most fair under the circumstances, which creates a vague standard that is at the discretion of the judge. As a result, spouses should make all efforts to mutually agree on property division, so the outcome is known, but also having an understanding of how courts view this issue and the process judges use to formulate a settlement is important as well.

Property Division Laws

One of the most important things to understand about property division in an Illinois divorce is that only marital property may be divided. Non-marital property, including inheritances, gifts, and property owned before marriage by one spouse and kept separate, remain with the person who purchased or received these assets. Further, Illinois is a no-fault divorce state, so the misconduct of a spouse during marriage, outside of using marital funds for non-marital purposes, will not factor into a court’s analysis of property division. Instead, the judge will work through a long list of prescribed factors to determine which allocation of assets and liabilities would be most fair. Some of these factors include:

Divorce is a huge decision and step in a person’s life. Once a divorce is granted, a couple’s marriage is over, and it brings significant changes to finances, child custody, and living arrangements. Every relationship faces challenges at some point, and needing a break to assess whether the marriage can work is not uncommon. Some spouses may not be ready to file for divorce, but still need some structure for parenting issues, property rights, and financial support.

One option at this juncture is a legal separation. While it can ultimately lead to divorce, that outcome does not always occur. Couples who enter into legal separation agreements are still legally married and cannot remarry or finalize certain aspects of dissolving the marriage without seeking a divorce. In other words, legal separation is revocable, whereas divorce is not once granted.

Breakdown of Legal Separation

Legal separation is a court-approved action that recognizes and formalizes the physical and financial separation of a couple as they consider reconciling or getting divorced. It differs from physical separation, in which a couple simply agrees to live apart, by creating an enforceable agreement binding the spouses to certain terms related to parenting, child support, alimony, and property division. In order to qualify for this legal remedy, at least one spouse must have resided in Illinois for at least 90 days and the couple must be living apart. This procedure is still available even if one spouse does not presently live in Illinois, but if he/she never lived in the state, the court will not be able to settle issues of child support and maintenance. Additionally, in order for the court to have authority to order a parenting plan, the child must have lived in Illinois for at least six months. Further, the parties must agree on the division of marital assets and debts for it to be included in the court’s order. Otherwise, this issue will remain open and unsettled. Another important point to understand is that any award for spousal maintenance will be revisited if a divorce case is later filed, with no impact from the earlier award on the divorce proceeding. Only in instances where a couple agreed to non-modifiable alimony would this treatment not be applied.