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your custody battle is to know these factors (or those in effect in your own state, but of which the principles should be similar) and determine how they can benefit your position and the child's interests most. Your goal is to be chosen as the custodial or residential parent. This means that the child lives with you. Your ex will then have visitation rights.

To get to that goal, you have to develop evidence to support your claims related to each of the nine factors listed above. That evidence can be accumulated from a variety of different sources. That process begins at the first court hearing.

Once you file the complaint for divorce, the judge will hold a hearing at which he/she will make temporary orders determining where the child will stay and what the visitation schedule will be. If your spouse has been negligent in his/her parenting, you should have your attorney examine the spouse under oath. Your attorney should ask questions like, the time of birth, who the child's doctor is, when was the last doctor appointment, who gets up when the child gets sick at night, what are the child's teachers' names, etc. These questions will tend to establish how involved the parent is in the child's life. They set the tone for rest of the proceedings. You should develop a list of these types of questions and go over them with your attorney before the hearing.

Once the temporary visitation order is established, you should document each and every time your spouse is late picking up and dropping off the child, or when they don't exercise these visitation rights at all. If they are excessively late picking up, excessively early dropping off, our routinely missing or rescheduling visitation, it is a message about the parent's responsibility. You should have a journal that documents these things. You may want to review my article on visitation and what to do when an ex is a no-show

When custody is disputed a court appointed advocate (sometimes called a "guardian ad litem") will interview the parents, teachers, child, and tour the respective homes. You should make a list of people who you think should be interviewed. When the advocate comes to your home, obviously it should be clean and tidy. Make sure it looks like a home a kid lives in (e.g. artwork on the fridge, pictures on the mantle, etc.).

Some of the same people you have on your list for the advocate to interview might also be good witnesses for you in court. Come up with a list of character witnesses who will testify

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