Legal Question in Family Law in Iowa

Re: custody

What you can do is hire an attorney or file a contempt of court action, if in fact there's a support and custody agreement in place.

Re: custody

This is not legal advice because I am not licensed to practice in Iowa. However, in Montana:

Your most recent court order trumps any oral agreement between you.

You said you have joint custody with your former husband (although the messages seems to have been posted by Robert, so I'm scratching my head a bit). I assume that joint custody is the result of a court action, and the court ordered joint custody with a specific parenting schedule.

One parent cannot arbitrarily change the parenting schedule. And, most certainly, a minor child is not in charge of where she lives.

The proper way to amend/modify a parenting schedule is to file a motion to modify, and to support your motion with the applicable statutes and findings of fact.

But at least here, courts do not allow a child's snit to rule, nor to they allow parents to disrupt a court-ordered schedule based on a child's snit.

Many parents try to become the child's "favorite" by allowing the child's temper to rule. Many children are savvy enough to play this for all it's worth. And no court of which I am aware will let it continue.