Falls Church, Virginia · Child Visitation & Parenting Time

Weekends can quietly turn you into the fun parent: the trips, the treats, the catching up, none of the ordinary weeknight life your child actually lives in. If you live close to your kids, there is a better way to be in their world. Here is the answer: a midweek dinner visit puts you back inside the school week itself, the homework, the dinner table, the bedtime, so you are a real part of your child’s ordinary days, not just the highlight reel. In the Falls Church area of Fairfax County, we build that weeknight time into the order.

By Alisa Chunephisal, Esq. · Founding Partner, NOVA Legal Professionals

This article is one part of our larger guide to child visitation in Virginia. For the full picture, start with our cornerstone, Child Visitation and Parenting Time in Virginia. Here, I will focus on the midweek dinner visit and how it makes you a school-week parent again.

What a midweek dinner visit is

A midweek dinner visit is a regular weeknight block, often a few hours after school or work, sometimes with a meal and homework, sometimes ending with an overnight, set on top of your weekend schedule. Because parents in the Falls Church corridor frequently live close to each other and to the child’s school, a weeknight visit is usually practical here in a way it is not for families spread far apart. You can read more on our midweek dinners page.

The Disneyland parent trap

Here is the trap nobody warns you about. When all you have is every other weekend, you start to feel pressure to make that time special, and slowly you become the parent of outings and treats rather than the parent of ordinary life. Your child enjoys it, but they also learn that the real, daily version of childhood, the homework and the routines, happens at the other house. A midweek visit breaks that pattern. It lets you be the parent who is simply there on a Tuesday, which is worth more than any trip.

Homework and bedtime are where parenting lives

So much of real parenting is unglamorous: checking the math homework, signing the permission slip, hearing about the friend drama at dinner, enforcing a bedtime nobody likes. These small, repeated moments are where a child actually feels parented, and they are exactly what the weekend-only parent misses. A weeknight visit hands those moments back to you. You stop being a guest in your child’s week and become part of its quiet machinery again.

Does a weeknight visit change child support?

Usually not, and it is worth understanding why. In Virginia, the shared-custody child support formula turns on the number of days, and a day generally means a 24-hour period, with an overnight shorter than 24 hours counting as a half-day. A midweek dinner that ends the same evening, with no overnight, normally does not add a counted day at all. So a non-overnight weeknight visit gives you real presence in your child’s life without, by itself, shifting the support math. If the visit grows into a regular overnight, that can begin to matter, and we will flag it if it does.

How a Virginia court views it

Midweek time is set, like all visitation, under the best interests of the child standard in Virginia Code Section 20-124.3. Courts favor schedules that keep a child closely bonded to both parents, and a weeknight visit, when the parents live near enough to make it workable on a school night, fits that goal well. A judge weighs the distance, the child’s school and activity schedule, and the child’s age, and will readily approve a sensible weeknight arrangement that supports the relationship without disrupting the child’s routine.

Write the weeknight into the order

A midweek visit fails when it is vague, so the order should name the day, the pickup and drop-off times, where the exchange happens, who handles transportation, and whether the evening includes an overnight. We write the midweek order with those details and make sure it fits cleanly with your weekend schedule, so the week has a clear, dependable rhythm. A Falls Church case in Fairfax County would be heard in the Fairfax County Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court.

How we help in the Falls Church area

We help you add a weeknight visit that puts you back inside your child’s school week, with the day, times, exchange, and overnight question all settled in writing, and with an eye on whether the time affects support. We do this for parents across the Falls Church communities of Fairfax County, including Seven Corners, Pimmit Hills, Bailey’s Crossroads, and the Lake Barcroft area.

Frequently Asked Questions