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Alabama Child Visitation Guidelines


A Brief Introduction to Alabama Child Visitation Guidelines

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as statewide Alabama Child Visitation Guidelines. Generally speaking, these guidelines are posited by each separate county, and as of 2012, neither the Supreme Court of Alabama nor its state legislature has taken it upon itself to create uniform Alabama child visitation guidelines. 

The lack of Alabama child visitation guidelines isn’t necessarily a great detriment to you. For one thing, it means that counties and families have greater ability to personalize their own visitation schedule, based not on some arbitrarily decided upon Alabama child visitation guidelines but instead based on what will work best for each family member. The loss is in that Alabama child visitation guidelines allow you to have an idea of what the visitation schedules are for many other state residents, letting you know what to expect from your own and helping you evaluate your own as fair or harmful to your family’s growth.

Thankfully, it’s easy to guess at what Alabama child visitation guidelines are based on the information gathered from each county. These are some of the Alabama child visitation guidelines gathered using that method.

Typical Alabama Child Visitation Guidelines

• For the infants and very young, long visits that may upset a daily schedule are not recommended, especially since they can become practically untenable if the child is breastfeeding. Therefore, short regular visits are the best, usually two hours three days a week including one weekend visit. Longer visits may slowly be eased into over time.

• For children of three-to-five up to adolescence, the common practice is to have alternating weekends. These typically begin on Fridays at 6:00 P.M. and end on Sundays at 6:00 P.M. Only some counties simply indicate an alternating schedule. Others request that the first, third, and fifth weekend of even months be given to the secondary residential parent, and the second and fourth weekend of odd months be given to them. Wednesday nights are also often the targets of visitational rights, usually with hours around dinner time from 5:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. 

• The main area in which counties can argue with each other is  with holidays. For instance, Baldwin County mandates that one week of Christmas vacation be given to the secondary residential parent while the rest of the holidays are alternated, but Mobile county alternates respects the week of Christmas vacation but rotates the Thanksgiving holiday with Spring vacation

• The other important time period to consider is summer vacation. During it, the secondary residential parent is usually entitled to somewhere between four weeks and seven weeks with their child. The primary residential parent may or may not retain the secondary residential parent visitational rights, depending again on the particular county.

Atypical Alabama Child Visitation Guidelines

The most common reason for a major deviation from the Alabama child visitation guidelines is that one parent lives more than 100 miles away from the other. In these cases, Wednesday and weekend visits may not be possible, but Christmas vacation can be maintained, and summer vacation may even be extended.

Remember that parents in jail are still entitled to have visits from their children unless the courts deep that these visits cause harm to the children. Parents with a history of violence may find their rights curtailed according to Alabama child visitational guidelines, but supervised visits may still be possible.

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