Going to court for the first time can be a scary experience. The forms you filled out are unfamiliar to you and the terms are foreign. Not knowing what you will find when you get to court and not knowing what will come from any rulings can be very distressing. So what can you expect when you head to court and what should you focus on?

The best thing to do is make a bulleted list of the things that are important to you. Make sure that you add those items to the papers that you file. This is the list that you will focus on for the time that you spend in court.

The time you spend in court will typically amount to 15 minutes or less. Both sides will get about 5 minutes each and the judge will get about 5 minutes. Since you have 5 minutes what do you think you should spend it on, the most important thing on the list or complaining about something that the other parent did that you thought was immoral?

Now that you have a rough idea of how you should prioritize your time, let's fine tune it a bit. The most important thing to most parents is spending time with their children. Courts don't like to make changes to visitation schedules easily. If you consider that it could take 6, 12, 18, 24 months or more to resolve a custody case, you may want to consider how important the word temporary becomes when attached to visitation. Not only could the order you get be in effect for well over a year. It could be considered permanent because of the length of time it remains in effect.

Now reprioritize that bulleted list. What item is at the top? How important does the other parents issues seem now? I know it is tempting to consider that the moral actions of the other parent seem so egregious that you want to punish them and keep them from the influence of a bad parent. But if you mess up from the beginning it will literally take you years to recover if you ever do.

Make sure you understand what is truly important to you and your priorities. Get those taken care of first and the rest will fall into place.