Often parents going through a divorce in West Virginia wonder who actually makes the call on decision making regarding their children after the divorce has happened. What a court will typically do is in the event that there is a divorce proceeding and no agreements of decisions have been made, the judge we’ll go ahead and decide based on a number of factors who is responsible in the terms of major decisions. Now, oftentimes what the judges will do is they will go ahead and have all the decisions be joint if they are a major decision. When it comes to day to day decisions, that’s generally going to be assigned to the parent with whom the child is residing at the time.
However, when it comes to major decisions like religion, elective surgery, driving a car, summer jobs, anything like that, those could be considered to be major decisions and often considered to be joint decisions for the most part. Now, sometimes what the court will do is allocate responsibility to one parent or the other when it comes to joint decision making. When parents can come to a joint decision on an issue even though they are supposed to, then this is why oftentimes there will be a provision in the parenting plan that says that in the event that the parties cannot come to some sort of agreement, they have to go to some mediation to deal with it.
Going into mediation could be step number one. Step number two comes up only in very extreme situations if there’s no joint decision making and mediation doesn’t resolve it or mediation is not considered to be an option. Eventually the parents will have to take it to the judge and then the judge has to make a decision for the parents. This is something most people do want to avoid however because the judge is not going to be happy a decision can’t be made and you may be paying out large sums of money to pay an attorney to represent you in court for something that should be resolved between the people without going to court. This is pretty much the process as far as major decisions go in West Virginia regarding children and decision making.
