If you are going through a breakup with children (and are not married to your partner), you might be wondering what legal steps you may need to take to get custody of your children, or to ensure that your visitation rights are protected. You may wonder about Washington state custody laws for unmarried parents. If you are an unmarried couple with children and are breaking up in Washington state, this article will explore steps you may need to take if you want custody of your children, want to protect your visitation rights, and want to create a formal parenting plan.
We often discuss parenting plans in the context of divorce. When a married couple has children and wants to divorce, parents are required to submit a parenting plan to the court, outlining how parenting time will be shared and how parents will negotiate shared decision-making responsibilities before their divorce can be legally finalized. For married couples who want to formally divorce, a parenting plan isn’t just a suggestion, it’s required.
Yet, when unmarried couples with children separate, there isn’t a legal requirement to create a parenting plan because there’s no formal legal relationship between the parents to dissolve. Sometimes parentage hasn’t even been formally established, meaning that the courts may not formally recognize the child’s father as the child’s legal parent. While some unmarried couples choose to co-parent without formal parenting plans, child support arrangements, or custody arrangements, these informal arrangements are not without their risks. If you want to ensure that your custody rights and your visitation rights are formally established, you’ll want to submit a parenting plan to the court.
Without formally establishing parentage, a parenting plan, or child custody, issues can arise as time passes that can lead to conflict or the need to go to court. For example, what happens if your partner gets married in the future and wants to change your child’s last name, or move to another town, state, or even another country with your child? What happens if financial circumstances change, and your former partner suddenly stops supporting your child or offers less support? Or, what happens if one parent decides to deny you custody, visitation, or contact with your child? When child support and a parenting plan has been established, parents often have the protection of the law when these issues arise.
For example, if a parenting plan has been approved by the court, your former partner cannot take your child and move to another school district, town, city, state, or country without your permission and without notifying the court. Once parentage has been established and child support ordered, child support modifications are required to change child support amounts. And with a parenting plan in place, a parent who denies custody or fails to honor visitation schedules can be found in contempt of court and could face serious penalties, even including jail time. Choosing to co-parent without a parenting plan can be risky, which is why unmarried couples often take steps to formally establish parentage, custody, child support, and a parenting plan, when they break up, even if these things aren’t formally required under the law.
If you are an unmarried couple breaking up in Washington state, you may need to establish parentage before you can submit a formal parenting plan to the court, seek child custody, or seek child support. Because of this, the process of petitioning the court for a parenting plan and child support can sometimes be complicated for unmarried parents and may differ from the process that a married couple would follow.
That said, some cases are not so complicated. If both parents agree about parentage, parentage may already have been established when the child was born, or parentage can easily be established merely by both parents’ signing an acknowledgement of parentage form and submitting it to the Department of Health.
If both unmarried parents can agree about parentage and their parenting plan, they can submit the parenting plan for approval by the court, and often the court will approve the plan. The collaborative family lawyers in Seattle, Washington at Truce Law help unmarried parents craft parenting plans that work, helping them avoid a potentially costly court battle.
If you want to explore the process of getting a Washington state parenting plan for unmarried parents, consider speaking to a family lawyer today. The collaborative lawyers at Truce Law can help you and your partner craft a parenting plan that can be approved by the court. Our collaborative lawyers stive to help families reach amicable solutions, often helping them avoid a lengthily drawn-own court case.
Establishing Parentage for Custody, a Parenting Plan, and Child Support
If you are an unmarried couple looking to create a parenting plan that outlines visitation schedules, custody, and decision-making rights, or are seeking child support, you’ll first need to establish parentage or ensure that parentage has already been established. In Washington, having your name on the child’s birth certificate is not enough to establish parentage if you and the child’s other biological parent never got married. In some cases, establishing paternity in another state may not be sufficient to establish parentage in Washington, if the other state’s procedures don’t meet Washington’s strict standards for establishing parentage.
Finally, custody, visitation, and child support aren’t granted through establishing parentage. Establishing parentage merely means that a parent may be responsible for paying child support and grants a parent the right to petition the court for these rights and benefits.
In Washington, there are a few ways unmarried parents can establish parentage:
- Voluntary Acknowledgement of Parentage. Under RCW 26.26A.205, a child’s biological parents can sign an acknowledgement of parentage form and submit it to the Washington Department of Health. The acknowledgement must be witnessed and notarized. When an unmarried mother gives birth in the hospital, staff will often give parents this form to sign and notarize before they take the child home. The acknowledgement must include specific language, including acknowledging that the child has no other presumed parent, or any other acknowledged parent. Both parents must acknowledge that signing the form will be the equivalent of a court order establishing parentage and can only be challenged within four years after it is signed, and even then, only in specific circumstances.
- Court Order. Parentage can be established through court order. If you ask the court to approve a parenting plan, or child support, the court may open a parentage case, if parentage hasn’t already been established. The court may order genetic testing to establish parentage. Or the court may establish parentage through other means. For example, if you lived in the same home with the child and acted in the capacity as the child’s parent for at least the first four years of the child’s life, the judge may decide that you are the legal parent because changing or challenging parentage at this point would not be in the child’s best interest. For Washington to establish parentage through court order, Washington must have jurisdiction over the individual (or at least one of the possible fathers) under RCW 26.26A.415. Tribal law may apply in some cases, or other states may have jurisdiction over the matter in some instances. When jurisdiction is in question, the case can get complicated, and the case might need to be filed in the jurisdiction where the parent lives or where the child resides. It can be very helpful to have a family lawyer help you navigate the situation, because there are circumstances where Washington may have jurisdiction even if the parent lives elsewhere. When a parentage case does goes to court or is disputed, a range of issues can arise under the law as outlined under Washington’s Uniform Parentage Act. For example, the parent in question may deny parentage, situations may arise where two people may claim parentage, or genetic testing may be required.
- De Facto Parentage. If you are not the child’s biological parent, but lived with a child and freely raised and supported a child as your own, and the child’s biological parent consented to this arrangement, the court may decide that it is in the child’s best interest to declare you the de facto parent of the child. Genetic testing may not be required in this situation, because in such a circumstance, a genetic relationship isn’t relevant to the case.
- Denial of Parentage. If you are married, your spouse will be the presumed parent of your child. To change this presumption, a denial of parentage must be signed. For example, if you are married, but your husband is not the child’s father, your husband may need to sign a denial of parentage form, and the child’s biological father may need to sign an acknowledgement of parentage form. The situation can be more complicated for domestic partnerships, or if your spouse, or the child’s biological parent, questions, or disputes parentage.
If you and your unmarried partner want to avoid a drawn-out parentage case, and parentage isn’t in question, you and your former partner can sign a voluntary acknowledgement of parentage and submit it to the Department of Health. Otherwise, unmarried individuals who anticipate parentage disputes or issues might want to speak to a family lawyer in Seattle, Washington to help them negotiate the process.
Parenting Plans for Unmarried Parents in Washington State
If a parentage case goes to court, a judge will often rule about parenting time, and shared decision-making responsibility, effectively ordering the creation of a parenting plan. If one parent has already established parentage, he or she may submit a proposed parenting plan to the court, which will then be served to the other parent, who can either approve the parenting plan, or submit his or her own parenting plan proposal. Alternatively, both unmarried parents can choose the route of collaborative law or mediation to craft a parenting plan together outside of court, to then submit to the court for approval.
The parenting plan will specify where the child will reside, how visitation and contact will be arranged, and how decisions about the child’s schooling, medical care, and other major concerns will be addressed. Once parentage has been established, the process for entering a parenting plan can sometimes follow the same process that married couples use. For example, you and your former unmarried partner can take your custody or parenting plan dispute to a judge, and ask the judge to enter a ruling, or you and your former partner can work out an arrangement that works best for you and your family outside of court (usually with the assistance of a mediator, your family lawyers, or collaborative attorneys), and ask the court to approve it.
Here are some key issues that unmarried parents will decide when writing their parenting plan. You can also find a template parenting plan here.
- Decision-Making Authority. Unmarried parents can decide whether both parents or just one parent will be responsible for making decisions about the child’s medical care, schooling, or other major issues like religion, or extracurricular activities. If parents will have joint decision-making authority, the parents must specify how they will resolve disagreements, for example, through mediation, counseling, or court. If mediators or counselors will be brought in, parents must outline who or how these services will be paid for.
- Parenting Time Schedule. Unmarried parents must decide how parenting time will be split. Who will be responsible for the children during the weekdays, or the weekends? Will the schedule change when the children reach school age if they are under school age? Will the schedule change during the summer? How will unmarried parents divide holiday time with the children? And how will scheduling conflicts be resolved?
- Transportation. The parenting plan must outline where children will be exchanged for parenting time and who will be responsible for transporting children to and from scheduled parenting times.
- Relocation. Standard parenting plans in Washington state also outline rules parents must follow when they want to relocate the children to another school district, or out of state.
Parenting plans also include provisions for restrictions on parenting time when a child’s parent has problems like domestic violence, child abuse, assault, sex offenses, or other issues. Decision-making authority may be limited if these problems are present, or if one parent traditionally played the decision-making role.
Unmarried parents who live far apart when the parenting plan is put in place may also need to consider the practical issues that arise with long-distance parenting, for example, regarding visitation, or decision-making.
One way to order a parenting plan is to serve a parentage petition and proposed parenting plan to your former partner, but if your partner doesn’t agree to the parenting plan, the case might need to go to court. If parentage has been established, but unmarried parents cannot agree about the parenting plan, the judge might, in most cases order mediation.
Once parentage has been established, the procedure for disputing parenting time will often follow the same procedure for disputes involving married couples, with mediation being ordered by a judge, unless other parental issues or concerns are brought up (like domestic violence, for example). Barring any major concerns for the child’s safety, the courts tend to favor arrangements where a child can maintain a relationship with both of his or her parents. The courts may also consider other factors like previous arrangements parents had in place before the parenting plan was requested; the child’s needs; the child’s relationships with siblings, with school, and the community; the child’s wishes, if the child is a teenager; the parent’s work schedules; and the parent’s ability to care for the child.
There are more amicable ways to proceed rather than fighting over a parenting plan in court. For example, both parents can voluntarily sign acknowledgement of parentage forms, craft a parenting plan together outside of court (with the help of a mediator or their collaborative lawyers) and submit the parenting plan for approval when they reach an agreement about shared parenting time and decision-making that works for them.
Child Support for Unmarried Parents
Once parentage has been determined, and once a parenting plan has established, the courts order child support based on Washington’s Child Support Schedule. Generally, each parents’ income is calculated from all sources, and the noncustodial parent pays child support to the custodial parent, or the parent who has primary custody of the child.
Issues can arise if a parent fails to report accurate income, or if a child has special needs and requires additional support. Unmarried parents, like married parents going through divorce, may seek the help of a Seattle, Washington family law attorney when issues with child support arise.
Next Steps
If you have a child and were never married, but are breaking up or separating, you and your partner may find yourself negotiating a range of complex questions involving parentage, parenting plans, child support, and child custody. The Seattle, Washington family lawyers at Truce Law help unmarried couples navigate these complex questions and find amicable solutions. If you are looking to avoid going to court, Truce Law can work with you and your former partner to find answers that work for your family.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Every situation is unique. For guidance specific to your circumstances, consult a licensed family law attorney in your area.