Background
Stacey and Legrand Crewse divorced in 2014 after a marriage that produced three children, one of whom remained a minor at the time of the relevant proceedings. The original consent decree awarded the parties joint legal decision-making authority and a rotating parenting schedule. After the divorce, Father relocated to Las Vegas for several years but maintained informal contact with the children. By May 2021, the relationship between the parents deteriorated, and the children began refusing to see Father.
In January 2022, Father petitioned to modify parenting time, alleging Mother was denying him access. Mother responded with a motion for temporary orders, alleging Father had engaged in dangerous driving, driven under the influence with the children present, and verbally and emotionally abused her. The court entered emergency temporary orders suspending Father’s parenting time and granting Mother sole legal decision-making authority. Multiple therapeutic interventionists were appointed but none succeeded in restoring Father’s relationships, and after 2022 Father had no contact with the child outside the therapeutic intervention process.
Following a five-day trial in April 2025, the superior court found no domestic violence by Father post-decree and that he had rebutted any presumption arising from past substance abuse. Nevertheless, citing significant conflict between the parties and a “strained relationship” between Father and the thirteen-year-old child, the court awarded Mother sole legal decision-making authority and set Father’s parenting time entirely “at [Child’s] discretion,” with no structured schedule.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals affirmed the grant of sole legal decision-making authority to Mother. It found the superior court’s order addressed every statutory factor under A.R.S. § 25-403(A), contained extensive factual findings, and was sufficiently specific to permit appellate review without speculation. That not every factor favored Mother did not require reversal, as the appellate court’s role is not to reweigh the evidence.
However, the court vacated the parenting-time order placing Father’s time entirely at the child’s discretion. Arizona law presumes that equal or near-equal parenting time is in a child’s best interests, and a parent without legal decision-making authority is entitled to reasonable parenting time unless the court finds it would endanger the child. The superior court made no such endangerment finding. To the contrary, it found Father committed no post-decree domestic violence, that his substance use did not impair his parenting, and that the child did not appear to fear him. The court even acknowledged it might not be in the child’s best interests to cut Father out of her life.
The appellate court held the superior court’s findings were insufficient to rebut the presumption favoring meaningful parenting time and failed to adequately explain why leaving parenting time to the child’s sole discretion served her best interests. Notably, the court itself admitted it had “no real, updated information on the child’s true feelings about Father,” and portions of the order rested on speculation rather than findings of fact. The matter was remanded for a parenting-time order consistent with Arizona’s statutory requirements and supported by adequate factual findings.
Key Takeaways
- An Arizona parenting-time order that delegates scheduling entirely to a child’s discretion — with no structured plan — fails to satisfy A.R.S. § 25-403.02(C)(3)’s requirement of a “practical schedule” and the broader statutory presumption favoring equal or near-equal parenting time.
- Before deviating from reasonable parenting time for a parent without legal decision-making authority, a court must make specific findings that parenting time would endanger the child’s physical, mental, moral, or emotional health under A.R.S. § 25-403.01(D); temper issues and a strained parent-child relationship, standing alone, do not satisfy this standard.
- A court’s own acknowledgment that it lacks current information about the child’s wishes, combined with reliance on speculation, undermines the factual basis required to support a non-standard parenting-time arrangement.
- Appellate courts in Arizona will decline to apply waiver of unpreserved arguments when the best interests of a child are directly at stake.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the high bar Arizona courts must clear before effectively eliminating a parent’s structured parenting time by delegating scheduling to the child. Giving a teenager unfettered discretion over whether a parent has any parenting time at all may feel intuitive when a parent-child relationship is damaged, but the court makes clear that such an arrangement must be anchored in specific statutory findings — not conjecture about the child’s emotional state. Practitioners should expect appellate scrutiny any time a trial court’s parenting-time order rests on a child’s preferences without current, reliable evidence of those preferences and without addressing the endangerment threshold.
The decision also illustrates the distinction between legal decision-making and parenting time: the same factual record that adequately supported awarding sole legal decision-making authority to one parent was held insufficient to justify effectively eliminating the other parent’s scheduled parenting time. Attorneys litigating high-conflict custody matters should ensure the record separately addresses each issue and contains up-to-date evidence of the child’s actual wishes and circumstances.