Alcohol Use Disorder and Custody Agreements

If you know someone with alcohol addiction or alcohol use disorder, you know that it can wreak havoc on relationships, especially marriages. When a spouse is struggling to stay sober and relapsing regularly, it can cause the trust in your marriage relationship to deteriorate. In initial consultation meetings, we often meet a spouse who still deeply cares for their spouse with alcohol use disorder, but simply cannot continue to subject themselves or their children to the fall-out of having a spouse and parent in the household struggling with alcohol addiction. If you are in the same boat, there are options (and there is hope!) to negotiate a custody agreement outside of court rather than filing a contested child custody lawsuit.

Our team understands the priority of keeping your children safe with a parent with alcohol use disorder, while also recognizing and honoring that that the struggling parent is still a parent to your children. There is a way to craft a custody agreement that recognizes and bears both of those truths in mind.  

There are common-sense safeguards to include in a custody agreement to prevent the parent with alcohol use disorder from putting a minor child in harm’s way. There are basic restrictions to include in your custody agreement like not drinking within a few hours of receiving the child for parenting time or during parenting time and not driving the child after consuming alcohol. There are also remote alcohol monitoring devices like Soberlink or BacTrack that monitor a parent’s sobriety and aid that parent in continuing to stay sober in order to exercise parenting time.

In custody agreements, we often recommend having the parent with alcohol use disorder agree to submit to alcohol monitoring as a prerequisite to exercising parenting time. If the parent fails an agreed upon alcohol breathalyzer remote monitoring test, that parent forfeits their parenting time. The parent with alcohol use disorder can agree to submit to breathalyzer tests only during parenting time or daily (even outside of their parenting time), if that is necessary. Sometimes a parent will agree to submit to alcohol monitoring in the short-term, for three or six-months, and then re-evaluate the custody agreement after he or she has had the opportunity to prove sobriety in the interim.

The parent with alcohol use disorder must agree to submit to remote alcohol monitoring if you want to avoid court. There are many benefits of the parent agreeing to submit to remote alcohol monitoring. Most parents struggling to stay sober understand that they must be sober while they are with their children and exercising parenting time. Many parents want the opportunity to prove that they can maintain sobriety, parent their kids, and earn back their co-parent’s trust. They often would rather not go to court and have their personal issues preserved in publicly available court records, which they can avoid if they enter a custody agreement.   

​If you or your children’s other parent has alcohol use disorder and you are thinking of separating, please reach out to our office so we can provide individualized legal advice that applies in your unique situation. 

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