As a devoted parent, your child's well-being is paramount, especially during a divorce. Your top priority is ensuring your minor child's needs are met during and after this family transition.
A crucial step is developing a comprehensive parenting plan. This will help create stability and consistency for your child during and after the divorce process.
What is a Parenting Plan?
A parenting plan outlines how you and your former spouse will effectively co-parent, sharing responsibilities for your child's care and upbringing after the divorce is finalized.
What to Include in a Parenting Plan for Divorce
While every co parenting plan is unique as your child / children, there are a number of areas each must cover.
Parenting Schedule: How will you divide the children's time between parents?
This includes:
- Weekday and weekend arrangements
- Holiday and vacation periods
- School breaks (summer, winter, spring)
- Special occasions (birthdays, Mother's/Father's Day)
- Unexpected events (snow days, sick days)
* This part of the plan can also serve as an input into the calculation of child support.
Decision-Making Responsibilities for the Kids:
Who can make major decisions for children such as medical care and treatment or relocation or out-of-state moves?
Issues Related to Children's Well-Being:
Things like schooling, extracurricular activities, health care, child care, religion and overnight guests, to name a few.
Transportation Issues:
Things like who will be responsible for driving the child / children from house to house for parenting time, or what happens if one divorcing parent moves far from the other?
Exceptions to Parenting Agreements:
- What happens if one parent has to travel for work during "regular" parenting time?
- What happens if one parent wants to switch a holiday or weekend?
- Or wants to take the kids out of the country for an extended period of time on vacation?
All of these things (and more) must be included in a comprehensive parenting plan.
The Challenges of Creating a Divorce Parenting Plan:
- There are very few guidelines that outline explicitly how to make a parenting plan and determine how much time the children should spend with each parent.
- When it comes to parenting plans, there is more than meets the eye and in the majority of cases, this subject is too complex to try to resolve on your own.
- This topic has very little to do with rules or formulas, and more to do with parental responsibility, good co-parenting and negotiation.
You'll get the best parenting plan agreement by negotiating - preferably with the help of a qualified professional!
"Crafting the ideal parenting plan is both an art and a science.
It needs to contain enough detail to make it clear and easy to follow, yet be flexible enough to allow for exceptions and evolve as your kids get older."
There are very few guidelines that explicitly outline how to create a parenting plan.
There are also no "cookie cutter" formulas for how to create a parenting plan that will work best for your children and family.
And even if you and your spouse think you have your parenting plan all figured out, in reality, you may have left a lot out because you simply "don't know what you don't know."
To illustrate just how much detail needs to go into sound parenting agreements, take this example regarding the Christmas holiday:
Mark and Lisa are divorcing and have two children, ages 6 and 4. Throughout all the years they've been married, they traditionally celebrated Christmas Eve with Mark's family and Christmas Day with Lisa's family.
They decided that after the divorce, Mark will get the kids every Christmas Eve and Lisa will get them every Christmas Day.
Sounds simple, right?
But many parents of young children believe that one of the joys of the Christmas holiday is the morning of December 25th when their kids wake up excitedly to see what Santa brought them.
Given that Mark has the kids Christmas Eve and Lisa Christmas Day, where do the kids wake up on Christmas morning?
The kids' bedtime is 7pm. So Mark feels they should sleep over at his house and he'll bring them to Lisa's place after breakfast on Christmas Day. But Lisa feels that since Christmas Day is her day with the kids, they should wake up at her house.
Uh-oh... Now what?
More details are needed in order to avoid problems. And there's no family law that states when Christmas Day begins.
"We'll just figure it out as we go."
Despite divorcing, some couples maintain an amicable relationship regarding parenting. While this benefits their children, it can unexpectedly complicate the process of creating a comprehensive parenting plan.
Despite their impending divorce, Jeff and Amy maintain an effective co-parenting relationship.
Confident in their ability to cooperate, they believe a detailed parenting schedule is unnecessary. Their approach relies on addressing childcare matters as they arise, rather than planning in advance.
But unfortunately, parenting plans are about much more than just what's happening in the here and now.
The best parenting plans need to address not only issues faced today, but also the issues divorced parents will encounter in the future. Along with many other issues they might not even be aware of at the present time.
If you leave everything open, you’re going to have a lot of problems in the future.
It's now three years after Jeff and Amy's divorce.
Initially, their co-parenting arrangement remained smooth. However, the dynamics shifted when Amy began a serious relationship with Rob. The children have grown fond of him, complicating matters further.
Rob proposes a Thanksgiving trip to Texas, where his family resides. The plan involves Amy and the children flying out Wednesday and returning Sunday. This prospect stirs unease in Jeff, who feels threatened by Amy's evolving family situation.
Their vague parenting agreement, established during more amicable times, now proves problematic.
Jeff believes he can veto the trip, citing his right to spend Thanksgiving with his children. Amy, conversely, sees no explicit prohibition in their arrangement.
Caught in this parental tug-of-war are the children, unwitting victims of their parents' oversight in crafting a detailed custody agreement.
As you can see, determining how to create a comprehensive parenting plan isn’t always easy to figure out, let alone agree upon.
When it comes to parenting plans, there is more than meets the eye.
Since no two couples, divorces or parenting situations are the same, there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to fairly resolving parenting arrangements.
And as you’ve been learning, less is not more when it comes to creating a sound co parenting plan.
A lot of parental conflict can be caused by leaving even the smallest detail undiscussed or undocumented. And coming to agreement on what each spouse thinks is fair and what’s best for the children can be quite tricky.
These are just some of the reasons that make parenting plans much too difficult to try to resolve on your own.
When the law gets involved with resolving child custody, it’s a problem.
When divorce lawyers fail to negotiate a child custody agreement, the matter escalates to family court. There, a judge—bound by limited guidelines—will determine your children's future using the vague "child's best interest" standard.
Consider this: Are you comfortable entrusting a stranger with decisions that profoundly impact your children's lives?
What if the resulting court order feels unfair to both parties or fails to truly serve your children's needs?
A better alternative exists: Divorce Mediation.
By choosing mediation, you maintain control over these crucial decisions rather than delegating them to a stranger.
This process empowers you as parents to:
- Negotiate custody arrangements directly;
- Prioritize your children's needs;
- Craft a future that reflects your family's unique dynamics.
This sets a good foundation for co-parenting. And fosters agreement in other areas such as child support, alimony and property division.
Divorce with kids has many challenges.
But one of them doesn’t have to be creating your parenting plan agreement.
You may no longer be married spouses, but you’ll always be parents.
Mediation enables you to have a child-focused divorce.
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