Coparenting And Child Custody Schedules

Divorced parents who decide to try coparenting need to have a solid parenting plan and child custody schedule. A good custody schedule will help to eliminate confusion with the parenting plan by providing consistency and reliability. In order to create a custody schedule that works for you, you need to have a basic schedule that you put on a calendar for at least a year, a good holiday and special events schedule, and a way to easily make changes in a monthly schedule. Having these things can help make coparenting successful.

The first thing to decide is what type of basic custody and visitation schedule that you want. There are fifty-fifty and other various split and share time arrangements. The best arrangement is the one that benefits the children and that works for the parents. A standard fifty-fifty agreement is alternating weeks between the parents. Some samples of other various split and shared time are: splitting the week between the parents, having one parent with the kids during the school week and the other parent on the weekends--and making the difference in time up in the summer, alternating every two weeks, alternating months of custody with visitation to the other parent on the weekends, etc.

You can divide the time up however you want. It's best to come up with a schedule that rotates through the year and to project this onto at least a year long calendar. This will help you visualize the time and to know how to adjust for holidays and special events.

Dividing up the holidays is the next step. This is pretty simple. You just need to evenly divide the holidays between the parents and then determine how long the holiday will last. Generally the parents switch holidays every other year. There are also some arrangements that split important holidays so the children spend them with both parents. Along with the holidays, you need to consider any special events or vacation time. There may be a switch in the basic schedule during the summer months when the kids don't have school. You can also add in events like sports games where the parents may trade off going. Think about the times that the schedule changes.

Most people find that a calendar format is the easiest way to keep track of the custody and visitation. It's helpful to have a long term and a short term calendar. Perhaps you want to keep a master year long calendar, but only put a month up at a time where you can make changes. Come up with a system that works for you--and one that allows you to make changes for the month, because changes always come up.

Including a basic schedule, thinking about holidays and vacation time, and coming up with a system that allows you to see a long term and short term layout of the custody and visitation times is a key for making coparenting successful. Generally, parents who share custody find that they have a lot of pick up and drop off times to remember--and that can be confusing. Clearing up that issue allows things to run much more smoothly.