Post-Divorce: Can You Limit Your Extended Family's Visits With Your Kids?
If your relationship with your ex-spouse's family turns sour after your divorce, you may wish to limit their visits with your children. Although it benefits your kids to spend time with their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, it can also harm your kids if their extended family tries to manipulate them into hating you. Because you want to protect your relationship with your kids, contact a family lawyer for help. A family law attorney discusses the best way to handle your situation without harming your children's mental and emotional health. Here's why you need legal assistance and how an attorney helps you protect your kids.
What Happens When Family Relationships Sour?
Most people get along with their extended family members after divorce and continue to spend time with them during holidays, birthdays and other special events. If your extended family developed an immediate dislike for you after the divorce, you avoid family gatherings to keep the animosity down.
However, your ex can still expose your children to their family whenever they pick up your children for weekend visits, vacations and other events. When the other parent returns your kids, your children seem distant and even angry with you. Your kids may also blame you for the divorce or speak negatively against you. In some cases, your kids repeat the hateful things their extended family says about you.
If you don't ask a family law attorney to make changes in your custody agreement, the problem becomes worse.
Should You Request Changes in Your Custody Agreement?
Family court originally awarded you and the other parent joint custody of your kids because it was in their best interests to have two active parents in their lives. But if the other parent refuses to step in and put a stop to their family's abusive tactics against you, a family law attorney can ask the court to change the custody agreement.
One of the things an attorney may do is ask a family court judge to limit where the other parent takes your kids when they have physical custody of them and who they take them around. Although it may seem extreme to place limitations on the other parent, it may be the only way to keep your children mentally and emotionally safe from the extended family.
If you need more help with protecting your kids from their extended family, contact a family law attorney for assistance.