There is no single test. The statute lists factors, and a court considers all of them that are relevant.
Best interests of the child is not a phrase a court applies at large. Section 61.13(3) lists the factors a Florida court must consider when it creates or modifies a parenting plan, and a judge weighs every factor relevant to the case before it.
The subsection directs the court to evaluate all factors affecting the welfare and interests of the child, including each parent’s capacity to facilitate a close relationship with the other parent, the division of parental responsibilities, the moral fitness and mental and physical health of the parents, the home and school record of the child, evidence of domestic violence or abuse, and the reasonable preference of a child of sufficient maturity.
§ 61.13(3) · read it on leg.state.fl.us
The first factor is the one parents underestimate: willingness to support the child’s relationship with the other parent. Conduct that looks like protecting a child can read to a court as interference.
Factors are weighed, not counted. A single serious finding — domestic violence, for instance — can outweigh several minor ones going the other way.
Each factor needs evidence attached to it. School records, medical records, a contemporaneous log of incidents. Assertions without documents rarely move a judge.
Most parents have never read these factors. They are being measured against a list they have not seen, which means they fall short on factors they could have met, and they let the other party’s failures go unrecorded because they don’t know those failures matter.
By the time an attorney explains the list, months of useful evidence are gone. Knowing what a court weighs — and having the forms to record it as it happens — is the difference between arriving prepared and paying someone to reconstruct a year you can’t prove.
Because every factor is evidenced separately, this is where documentation turns directly into money. A parent who arrives with an organized, dated record pays for argument; a parent who arrives with a phone full of screenshots pays for someone to sort them first.
Part 6 covers parenting preparation and the incident log, and the case file stores the records each factor depends on.
See what is included