Gone are the days of dunce caps and willow switches to force kids to behave in school. The same problems underlying outbursts in the 1800s, though, still haunt our children. Difficult home lives, low self-esteem, being bullied; all these problems are everlasting in schools from Virginia to Vladivostok. As a parent, you are not helpless. Here's what you can do to ...
Standards of conduct for Virginias Guardians ad litem (GAL) exist; you can find them through Virginia's courts. The problem is not what is written on the paper. The problem, for many Virginia men, is how the actual person, the one fulfilling the valuable role of child advocate, handles the job day to day. Personal bias, what appears to be a predetermined ...
More than 168,400 special needs children were enrolled in Virginia's public schools in 2016, according to the Virginia Department of Education. For 2013 (the most recently available year) Virginia recorded over 29,400 divorces. Those two typical statistics intersect far more often than most people realize. If you are contemplating a divorce and you are the father of a special needs child, ...
The legal word "consent" is often associated with intimate matters like sex, statutory rape and marriage. It also extends, though, to the often-inevitable outcome of sex: pregnancy. Women in Virginia have powerful rights to give or deny consent to the fathers of their unborn children, such as consent to attend prenatal appointments, consent to hear information from their obstetricians, and ...
The NBA has brought us a pulse-pounding history of slam-dunk wins, but for Virginia Dads, one slam dunk may turn you into Paul Pierce when Ron Artest pulled his pants down. Thinking you can stop paying child support when your kid turns 18? Not so fast. The “Age of Majority” … Not a Slam Dunk Bar room "lawyers" (your buddies who ...
When you divorce your wife, you also divorce her family. That moment is a huge reset button for relationships. Any veneer of cordiality is ripped away. Any pretense to continue tolerating one another is sundered. After the divorce's legal clauses come out, the claws come out. What if your ex-wife's parents or siblings are deliberately trying to drive a wedge between ...
Sometimes in these pages we joke around a bit, get a little weird, or push a few buttons. Yet one area is always off-limits to those attitudes: children. Virginia's children are among the most helpless, fragile and innocent among us. Virginia's adults, and even more so Virginia's attorneys, have a high calling to protect Virginia's kids. Emergency custody hearings are ...
Who is a reasonable person? A reasonable person, simply put, can make commonsense decisions just as you or we would. We have handed the American legal system that legacy, in the form of a standard of behavior: what would a "reasonable person" do in this legal dilemma or that situation? What would that same "reasonable person" consider to be a "reasonable and ...
In Virginia, some parents have an interesting (if inaccurate) view of court documents. Apparently, they feel they are optional, as in, the parent can ignore the specific directions of a court. These same parents may feel "Shampoo, Rinse, Repeat" is a little bossy, or that advice not to look at solar eclipses is just fear-mongering. Imagine their surprise, then, to ...