The impact of mental illness on a parent and, indirectly, on a dependent minor child, may be a consideration when a judge decides custody matters, or the parents negotiate an out-of-court settlement. If a parent has been diagnosed with a mental illness or it’s under control with the help of medication, talk therapy, or both, then it may not be an issue. But if you’ve reached a point where the illness impacts the child’s welfare, then a parent’s mental illness matters to everyone in the system.

Under NJ statutory law, N.J.S.A. 9:2-4, the court’s primary goal is to come up with a custody arrangement that’s in the child’s best interests. There are many considerations listed in the law, including, “the stability of the home environment offered…[and] the fitness of the parents….A parent shall not be deemed unfit unless the parent’s conduct has a substantial adverse effect on the child.”

There are different kinds of custody. Legal custody deals with major health, education, and welfare decisions about a minor child.  A parent with sole legal custody makes those decisions because for some reason the other parent is deemed incapable of participating in those choices.  Most NJ parents share joint legal custody, even if one parent has much more overnight time with the child.  Sole physical custody means that one parent has all overnight time with a child. That is very rare.  Most parents divide overnight, holiday, and vacation time with each other, sometimes equally, sometimes disproportionately.  A parent who has little to no physical contact with a child is not going to share legal custody.  But a parent who has 20% overnights and is a fit parent almost certainly will share legal custody. There can also be shared physical custody, where the child lives with one parent of the primary residence and spends 28 to 50 percent of the time with the parent of alternate residence.

A parent with limited custody rights — because they were surrendered, or a court found it wasn’t in the child’s best interest for that parent to exercise them — normally has a right to spend at least limited time with the child. Those visits can be unsupervised, or, if there are serious questions about whether a parent should be alone with the child, another person can supervise the visits. That type of supervised visitation may be in someone’s home or in a secure location inside a County facility or a private for-profit facility.  This scenario arises more and more as the opioid crisis and other substance abuse in this state and country have become rife.

The situation would need to be very extreme if a parent is refused any parenting time or visitation rights at all. We had that type of case in 2019, when a federal pre-trial detainee sought our assistance in securing the minor child’s visits to the facility.  Due to the nature of the charged offense and the psychiatric condition of the inmate, the Family Court Judge refused any visitation time whatsoever but left the door open to future applications based on substantially changed circumstances (the parent’s response to psychiatric treatment, the parent’s release from incarceration).  As an earlier blog of ours noted, there are plenty of federal and state facilities that permit and encourage minor children to visit incarcerated pre-trial detainees or convicted inmates, under circumstances that are deemed safe and, in the child’s, best interests. If you would like to speak to a member of Kingston Law Group regarding representation in child custody proceedings or have any questions about our practice, please contact our office to arrange a near-term and reduced fee initial consultation. Call 609-683-7400. We accept all major credit cards and offer general appointments from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday to Friday, plus evening appointments during the week by pre-arrangement only. Call now.  You will be glad you did.