Flexibility in Parenting
Video Transcript: Can parents agree to do things outside of their court order? Hi, my name is Jason Sorenson. I’m an Oklahoma lawyer here at Wirth Law Office, and today we’re going to be talking about just that.
So let’s say you and the other parent have a court order, and the two of you decide there’s something that you’d like to do differently than what’s listed in the court order. Can the two of you agree to do that? The short answer to that is yes, as long as the two of you agree.
So the reasoning behind that is the court really doesn’t keep track of what’s going on in your court order unless somebody’s telling the court what’s going on with your court order. So if there’s nobody there to make a complaint to the court that somebody isn’t following the court order, then the court’s not going to know or even care that something isn’t being followed or that you guys have agreed to something else.
So parents really have the power to make arrangements outside of that court order if they want to. Such as, let’s say you want to change the pickup location or the pickup time, maybe give the non-custodial parent more time with the kids. Well, parents can agree to do that. They can really agree to just about anything they want to as long as both sides agree. But let’s say that one parent stops agreeing to that new arrangement, can they then enforce that agreement that you’ve made?
Well, that’s where it gets tricky, because once you guys fall into a disagreement, you’re going to fall back to whatever your original court order says. So if you do want a permanent change in your court order, then you’ll want to change the custody order itself, and you’d need to do a modification to do that. But this is just general information.
If you want more information about your case specifically, or you need help making a modification to make those permanent changes to your court order, you can visit us at makelaweasy.com to speak with a Tulsa divorce attorney.
