Are you facing a divorce and wondering about custody arrangements for your children? Let’s clear up some common misconceptions about joint and sole custody in Texas.
Joint or split custody means the children are with each parent 50% of the time?
Yes and No.
In Texas, we have what we call "Joint Managing Conservatorship" or "Sole Managing Conservatorship". Those are the two types of conservatorship, which is another word for custody that we have in Texas.
Joint and sole refer to the rights and duties that the parents have, which usually include:
- Decision-making,
- Who gets to designate the residence of the child,
- How they’re going to raise the children,
- Who makes educational decisions,
- Who makes medical decisions,
- Who makes decisions regarding marriage before the age of 18,
- Who decides if the child can enlist in the military before turning 18.
There are a couple of others, but those are usually the main ones.
In Joint Managing Conservatorship, those rights are equal between the parents. Typically, one parent will have the right to designate the residence of the child, and sometimes that’s restricted to a county and surrounding counties, and sometimes it’s not. The other parent has equal rights and duties in making decisions unless the primary parent was able to get exclusive authority on educational decisions, medical decisions, and psychological decisions. But typically speaking, in Joint Managing Conservatorship, the parents have equal rights and duties except for one pays child support and one gets to designate the residence.
In a Sole Managing Conservatorship situation, one parent gets to make all those decisions. When you start talking about joint custody, it’s really referring to the rights and duties, not the amount of time. So, about the time each parent gets to spend is in what we call the possession part of the final decree or custody order – that’s where you outline where the children are when. And usually, the default in Texas is if one parent has the right to designate the residence, then the other parent has a standard possession order. That’s going to be your first, third, and fifth weekends of each month, alternating holidays, and you get a couple of hours on Thursday if you live within a hundred miles of each other. When you start talking about joint or split custody, they mean different things than what most people think it means. If you’re wanting to come up with some possession schedule, that’s a 50-50 split of time. That’s going to be different than joint managing conservatorship.
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