What"s the Difference Between Legal and Physical Custody?

When you get a divorce, you've got a lot of things on your mind, things that you need to take care of.
You need to decide how the property is going to be divided, whether alimony will be paid and if so how much, what will happen to the house, how mutual debts will be taken care of.
And, most importantly, what will happen to the children.
You love your children and want what's best for them, and you have to determine whether that will involve them staying with you or living with your spouse.
Deciding your children's future is called determining custody.
While you may be used to thinking of custody as who the child stays with, it is actually more complex than this.
Where they live is just part of the issue.
Not only is there physical custody, but there is also legal custody.
And, additionally, there is both sole and joint custody, which determine which parents have the rights to both physical and legal custody.
What is Physical Custody? Physical custody is what you're used to thinking of as simply custody.
It is the right to live with the children and to be their parent on a daily basis.
If you have custody, you'll be making the sorts of decisions about them like when they're going to bed and what they're having for breakfast.
You'll also get to have a special, one-on-one relationship with them.
Physical custody can be either sole or joint.
In sole custody, only one parent has this right.
Courts often award sole custody to one parent if the other is unfit, or has a partner who is unfit.
This usually means that the parent has drug or alcohol dependency issues, or a history of abuse.
However, most courts are moving away from regularly awarding sole custody, so that divorced fathers can have more of a role in raising their children.
In joint physical custody, parents share these duties, with the children splitting time between the parents and usually trading off for major holidays.
Naturally, this necessitates that the parents live near each other.
What is Legal Custody? Legal custody is the right to share in making decisions concerning the future and well-being of your children.
This includes decisions about the schools your children go to, the medical care they receive, and the religion they are raised in.
Legal custody is almost always joint, and the courts will only award sole custody in certain extreme cases.
If you have joint legal custody and your ex-spouse is not including you in the decision process, you can bring him or her to court and the judge will enforce the terms of the divorce.