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My ex has psychiatric problems; will that help me get custody?
Psychiatric problems can be influential in a custody determination. If your ex has a documented history of mental illness or a verifiable personality disorder, the judge or custody evaluator should consider this to be a negative factor in awarding custody.
If your ex has emotional or psychiatric problems, you will want to document this fully and present it to your attorney and the evaluator, if one is used.
My ex is trying to alienate our child from me; will that help me get custody?
It might. More and more judges and evaluators are becoming familiar with parental alienation and are willing to consider it as a serious issue; some custody evaluations are decided on this factor alone.
Although evaluators typically refer to it as the "willingness to support the child's relationship with the other parent", it works out to be more or less the same thing.
If you can show credible evidence of alienation, it should be considered as an important factor in deciding custody.
My ex is associating with drug users / violent people / criminals. Will that help me get custody?
During a custody evaluation it might, but if custody has been established for some period of time, don't expect the courts to act unless the circumstances are extreme (and possibly not even then).
Your best bet is to document everything as fully as you can. If you believe the situation poses a genuine threat to your child, contact your attorney about filing for custody.
Is it harder to initially determine custody or to change it later?
It is usually much easier to determine initial custody than to change or reverse it later.
The court looks at different things when they initially determining custody than they do when modifying custody. When initially determining custody the court looks at a variety of factors that are similar in most States. These are often called the "12 Factors" or some similar name. Chances are your State uses some variation of this in their State Statutes.
When hearing a request to modify custody, however, the court adheres to a stricter standard. Not only must have been a change in circumstances, but there must be a "substantial change in circumstances", enough to warrant uprooting the child from the environment he or she is currently in. This is a much harder thing to do in court than making an initial custody determination in most cases.
My ex and I separated informally (without paperwork) quite some time ago. How will custody be decided after all this time?
If a substantial amount of time has passed with no legal separation or custody order in effect, it's likely that the prevailing arrangement(s) (whatever they may be) will be used by the court as the basis for determining custody.
The court will usually preserve the status quo, unless sufficient reason exists to change it. In essence, whatever you've been doing in terms of 'custody' will probably continue.