Parenting Plan Guide
Parenting Schedule
This is the part of your parenting plan that most affects how you and your kids experience divorced life.
While both you and your coparent are always your kids’ parents, only one of you is “on duty” at a time. The parenting schedule defines when you and your coparent are each “on duty” during the SCHOOL YEAR, SUMMER, and HOLIDAYS and special occasions, like FUNERALS AND WEDDINGS.
Courts used to refer to this as “physical custody”, but almost all now talk about this as “parenting time”, denoting a shift away from possession toward CONNECTION.
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The primary principles guiding parenting time are:
- Supporting the children in building strong relationships with both parents.
- Enabling consistency and predictability for the children.
- Accommodating for the children’s developmental stages and individual attachment and care needs.
- Protecting the children from any form of abuse.
If you and your coparent can reach agreement, you can actually decide on any parenting schedule you want. Courts would rather parents agree on a complicated plan than order a simple one they’ll resist following. However, keep the above principles in mind.
Also keep in mind that every reputable, longitudinal study about children of divorce shows objectively that their long-term outcomes are best when they have strong attachment with both parents. This includes academic scores, college attendance, encounters with the justice system, self-harm, mental health, physical health, healthy relationships and marriages of their own, household income, and so much more.
Even when one or the other parent is not ideal, a parenting schedule that allows for meaningful emotional connection with both parents is key to the children’s long-term wellbeing.
Exactly which parenting schedule that means you should adopt is not a one size fits all formula. Every child and family is different. We’ll share more ideas about that under SCHOOL YEAR PARENTING SCHEDULE.
Obvious exceptions are where there’s a history of abuse by one or both parents requiring a SAFETY-FOCUSED PARENTING PLAN, or where you and your coparent live far enough apart to warrant a LONG-DISTANCE PARENTING PLAN. Even here, you’ve got options.
