Visitation Attorney in Lake Charles, Louisiana

When Your Time with Your Child Is Dictated by a Rigid Schedule

You’re working around a calendar, trying to squeeze a lifetime of parenting into a handful of days. The school pickups you miss. The bedtime routines that happen without you. The holidays you get on paper but fight over in parking lots. For many parents, the visitation schedule isn’t just a guide — it’s a battleground.

When the other parent treats your time as theirs to grant or deny, the relationship with your child suffers. You don’t need a suggestion. You need a court-ordered schedule that is clear, enforceable, and backed by the authority of the 14th JDC. If your current arrangement is failing, it isn’t because you aren’t trying hard enough — it’s because your legal framework is too soft.

I don’t litigate fairness in a vacuum. I litigate to ensure your visitation rights are concrete, predictable, and protected from the arbitrary interference of a co-parent who has decided the rules apply only when convenient.

If you haven’t already spoken to an attorney, you’re already behind. Contact Colonna Law Firm now.

The Enforceability Gap — Why Informal Agreements Fail

An informal agreement is not a court order. It doesn’t matter if both parents shook hands on it, texted it, or had a mediator write it up — if it has not been signed by a judge and entered as a judgment at the 14th JDC, it is unenforceable. When your co-parent decides to change the terms, you have zero legal leverage without that signed judgment.

The most common mistake I see in visitation disputes is parents who operated on a verbal or informal agreement for months or years, and then found themselves completely without legal recourse when the other parent stopped cooperating. The fix is straightforward: get the agreement formalized as a Consent Judgment. I handle that process efficiently and without unnecessary litigation when both parents are willing to agree on the terms.

The Contempt Pivot — When Your Order Is Being Violated

If you have a court order and your co-parent is consistently violating it — denying pickups, scheduling activities during your time, making the child unavailable, or refusing to facilitate exchanges — the answer is not a phone call or a strongly worded text. The answer is a Rule for Contempt.

A Rule for Contempt forces the violating parent to appear before a judge and answer for their interference. The court can impose sanctions including fines, make-up parenting time, and in serious or repeated cases, attorney fee awards and incarceration. I file contempt motions quickly and efficiently when a court order is being ignored — because every violation that goes unanswered teaches the other parent that the order has no teeth.

Documented, consistent violations of a parenting schedule can also support a modification petition. Courts view parental interference as a factor in the best-interest analysis — a parent who repeatedly undermines the other parent’s relationship with the child is not acting in the child’s best interest, and that record matters.

Act 605 and Equal Physical Time

Effective August 1, 2026, Louisiana Act 605 amends R.S. 9:335(A)(2)(b) to mandate that physical custody shall be shared equally when joint custody is ordered, unless the court determines equal sharing is not feasible or not in the child’s best interest. This directly affects how parenting schedules are set in new cases and modifications filed after August 1.

If you are currently receiving less than equal time and your case is being heard after August 1, 2026, the new law shifts the starting point in your favor. The other parent now bears the burden of demonstrating why equal sharing should not apply. I incorporate Act 605 into every parenting schedule negotiation and modification for cases governed by the new law.

Supervised Visitation — When Safety Is the Issue

If there are genuine safety concerns about the other parent’s home environment — substance abuse, domestic violence, mental health crises, or other risks — I litigate the terms of supervision rather than accepting a blanket denial of access. I do not accept broad accusations as a substitute for facts. I demand evidence, and I argue for the least restrictive environment necessary to keep your relationship with your child alive while protecting the child’s safety.

Supervised visitation arrangements can be structured through a neutral third party, a family member acceptable to both parties, or a professional supervision service. The goal in every case is to preserve the parent-child relationship in a format the court can approve — not to eliminate it.

Offshore and Shift Work Schedules in Southwest Louisiana

Non-standard work schedules — offshore rotations, 12-hour shift rotations, and extended travel schedules common in the petrochemical and maritime industries around Lake Charles — require creative parenting plan structures that standard week-on/week-off arrangements cannot accommodate. A parent on a 14/14 offshore rotation cannot follow a traditional alternating weekend schedule.

I have experience building parenting plans around the specific work schedules common to Southwest Louisiana’s industrial workforce, including provisions for makeup time when a rotation conflicts with scheduled parenting time and flexible exchange arrangements that account for shift changes. A realistic schedule built around actual work constraints is more likely to be followed and less likely to generate contempt disputes.

Frequently Asked Questions