When parents cannot agree on a schedule, a judge does not decide by instinct. Florida law hands the court a list. Section 61.13(3) of the Florida Statutes makes the best interests of the child the primary consideration and sets out roughly twenty factors, closing with a catch-all for anything else relevant to that parenting plan.
Two things about that list surprise most people. It produces findings rather than a score: unless the parents agree on a schedule and the court approves it, the court must evaluate all of the factors and make specific written findings of fact. And no single factor settles the case. A parent who looks stronger on twelve of them can still lose on the two that matter most to this child.
Parenting plans, schedules, and the 2023 equal time-sharing presumption are covered on our parenting plans and time-sharing page. This article is about the factors themselves, and how each one actually gets proven.
The four questions the statute is really asking
The factors read as twenty separate items. In practice they cluster into four questions, and it helps to know which one a piece of evidence answers.
Will this parent support the child's relationship with the other parent?
This is the first factor in the statute, and it is first for a reason. The court looks at each parent's demonstrated capacity and disposition to facilitate and encourage a close and continuing parent-child relationship, to honor the time-sharing schedule, and to be reasonable when changes are required. A companion factor asks whether each parent keeps the other informed about the child. A third asks whether a parent shields the child from the litigation, and it is unusually concrete: not discussing the case with the child, not sharing documents about it with the child, and refraining from disparaging comments about the other parent to the child. A fourth addresses knowingly giving the court false information about a domestic violence or child abuse action.
Read together, these factors reward restraint. A parent who forwards the angry message to the child is producing evidence, and it is not evidence in that parent's favor.
Who has actually been doing the parenting?
Several factors look backward at the real division of labor: the parenting tasks each parent customarily performed before and during the case, including how much was undertaken by third parties, the anticipated division of responsibilities afterward, and each parent's demonstrated capacity to act upon the needs of the child as opposed to the needs or desires of the parent.
One factor is the one parents lose most often without seeing it coming: demonstrated knowledge of the child's circumstances, including friends, teachers, medical care providers, daily activities, and favorite things. On the stand it arrives as plain questions. Who is the pediatrician. What is the teacher's name. Which medication, and what dose. Beside it sit participation in the child's school and activities and the capacity to provide a consistent routine: discipline, homework, meals, bedtime.
What does stability look like for this child?
Here the court weighs how long the child has lived in a stable, satisfactory environment and the desirability of continuity; the geographic viability of the plan, with special attention to school-age children; the child's home, school, and community record; the child's developmental stages and needs, with each parent's capacity to meet them; and the child's reasonable preference, if the court deems the child to be of sufficient intelligence, understanding, and experience to express one.
Is the child safe, and is each parent able?
The remaining factors go to capacity and to risk: the mental and physical health of the parents, their moral fitness, the capacity to maintain an environment free from substance abuse, and evidence of domestic violence, sexual violence, child abuse, abandonment, or neglect, including reasonable cause to believe a parent or the child is in imminent danger, whether or not an action was ever brought.
Moral fitness is narrower than it sounds
Almost every first meeting reaches this question. Florida does not require fault to end a marriage, and the moral fitness factor is not an invitation to retry the marriage in front of the judge. Florida courts have long required a connection between the conduct and the child: whether it has had, or is reasonably likely to have, an adverse impact. A theoretical possibility of harm has not been treated as enough.
So the affair itself is frequently not the point. A series of new partners introduced to a young child, or a child left unsupervised, can be. Bring the facts to your attorney and let that connection be tested privately.
What a child's preference does, and does not, do
There is no age in the statute at which a child chooses. The court considers a reasonable preference only if the child has sufficient intelligence, understanding, and experience to express one, and even then it is one of twenty.
Florida also makes it difficult to place a child inside the proceeding. Under the family law rules, a minor child may not be deposed, subpoenaed to appear at a family law proceeding, or brought to court to testify or attend a hearing without a prior court order based on good cause shown, absent an emergency. A child's perspective usually reaches the court through someone else.
How the factors actually get evidenced
Notice how often the statute uses the word demonstrated. That is why two parents describing the same household can produce very different records. Proof tends to come from five places.
- Documents you already have. School portals, attendance and grade reports, pediatric and therapy records, the co-parenting app or text thread, and a calendar showing who took the sick days and made the pickups.
- Witnesses who are not related to you. Teachers, coaches, pediatricians, and daycare directors carry weight because they have nothing at stake. A relative testifying that you are a good parent is expected. A teacher testifying about who attends the conferences is evidence.
- Your conduct while the case is pending. The statute expressly looks at the division of parenting during the litigation, so a temporary schedule is also a record. How you handle exchanges, messages, and last minute changes becomes proof about the permanent plan.
- A social investigation. Where the parenting plan is at issue because the parents cannot agree, the court may order a social investigation and study of the pertinent details concerning the child and each parent. It is conducted by qualified court staff, a licensed child-placing agency, or a licensed mental health professional, and it produces a written study with recommendations and the facts found, furnished to the court and all parties of record.
- A guardian ad litem. If the court finds it is in the child's best interest, it may appoint a guardian ad litem to act as next friend of the child and as investigator or evaluator, not as attorney or advocate. Where an allegation of child abuse, abandonment, or neglect is verified and found well-founded, the appointment is required.
What rarely helps is a long catalogue of the other parent's failings with nothing tying any of it to the child, or a recording made by putting a phone in a child's backpack. The factors are forward looking and child centered. Evidence shaped that way lands. Evidence about the marriage rarely does.
Where this leaves you
Most Florida parenting plans are agreed rather than tried, and family cases here are routinely referred to mediation first. That does not make the factors academic: they set the terms of the negotiation, because both sides measure against what a court would likely find. Remember in that room that the mediator is neutral and represents neither of you. Your attorney is the person there for you, and our divorce page covers how the children's issues sit inside the larger case.
Two steps are worth taking now. Write out your child's actual week, hour by hour, and who does each part of it today. Then gather the records that would show a stranger the same thing. If you already have a plan and your circumstances have changed since it was entered, a different standard applies, addressed on our post-judgment modification page.
Family cases in Tampa are heard in the Hillsborough County Circuit Court, Family Law Division, at the George Edgecomb Courthouse, 800 E. Twiggs Street. To talk through your situation with Rechel & Associates, P.A., serving Tampa Bay families since 1992, call (813) 931-8111.