Posted by Nydia Streets of Streets Law in Florida Child Custody

Supervised visits in a Florida child custody case are ordered when a court finds that unsupervised visits are not in the best interest of a child. This could be because a parent has placed a child in dangerous situations previously or the parent has otherwise demonstrated that he or she is incapable of protecting the child’s welfare with unsupervised visits. When supervised visits are ordered, a court usually has to state how the parent can eventually gain unsupervised visits. This was an issue in the case Natali v. Natali, 2D20-513 (Fla. 2d DCA March 26, 2021).

The trial court entered a final judgment of divorce which included a parenting plan. The parenting plan provided that the father would exercise time-sharing in two phases. In the first phase, he would have supervised visits. In the second phase he would have unsupervised visits. He could transition automatically to the second phase once he regularly exercised supervised visits for at least three months and he filed a certificate of completion of a parenting course with the court. The mother appealed, arguing the prospective change to unsupervised visits without court intervention or oversight was error.

The appellate court agreed with the mother that this automatic change to timesharing was impermissible. The court held “As the Mother correctly identifies, this plan does not contemplate any court intervention or decision-making in order for the Father to advance to Phase 2; it permits him to do so automatically and immediately upon completing three months of supervised timesharing and filing the required documentation. Although the trial court determined that it was not in the child's best interest for the Father to exercise unsupervised visitation as of the date of the judgment, it apparently concluded that the best interest determination would flip upon the completion of these two conditions. But given the framing of the benchmarks, they could take many months or even years to occur, by which time the circumstances bearing upon the best interest analysis may have changed significantly.”

Creating a Florida parenting plan when supervised visits are involved requires consideration of important factors. Schedule a consultation with a Miami child custody lawyer to understand how the law may apply to your case.