For parents who want to share their children’s time more equally, there are many possible schedules. Some common ones are:
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- every other week,
- every two weeks,
- Monday morning through Thursday morning and Thursday afternoon through Monday morning,
- Wednesday morning through Saturday morning and Saturday morning through Wednesday morning,
- September through June and summers for parents who live in different states.
Every schedule has different pluses and minuses associated with it. Which schedule works for your family will depend on how close you live to the other parent, your work schedules, ages of your children, the children’s individual temperaments, school demands, and their hobbies and activities. The schedule you choose should depend on how important it is for the children to be in the same house during weekdays (i.e., school nights) and how well your children adapt to the transition between homes. Can your children organize their school work when they make transitions between homes during the school week? If they have religious, sports, music, or other training on a regular basis, then maintaining the consistency of such classes is important. Children shouldn’t have to miss activities on a regular basis because they have to be at the other parent’s house. For a great article on shared parenting, click here.
How children go to school and return home also will affect your schedule. Do they need to be driven, can they switch busses, are they in a carpool?
Do your children have a maximum amount of time they tolerate being away from either of you? The length of time may differ from their primary caretaker and their secondary, if that is how your family has been arranged in the past. All of these factors are considerations in determining the best parenting schedules.
Are There Alternatives to the Typical Shared Parenting Plans?
Some less common, but important, variations on schedules also deserve mention. For reasons that will become obvious in the descriptions below, these arrangements are harder to maintain than more common ones, and they often require greater cooperation and sacrifice on both parents’ parts. However, when values or circumstances dictate creative solutions, these are worth considering.
Parents who can successfully do it report great satisfaction with “nesting”. In this arrangement, the children stay in one place, and the parents move out of the home and into an apartment or family member’s home. Sometimes the parents share one other dwelling, other times they can afford to rent or own two different ones. Sometimes they each return to a parent’s or friend’s home as their secondary residence. Parents then move in and out of the family home according to the dictates of schedules that work best for them. Click here for an article on nesting.
Sometimes parents live far away from one another. In these situations, children may spend school years with one parent, and longer holiday periods, vacations, and summers with the other parent.
When parents live near each other, they may choose to alternate the child’s primary residence every other year. The children do not spend much time living between homes, but they do visit the other parent regularly. However, each parent gets to be the primary parent some of the time, smoothing over the sense of one parent being the less central figure. This schedule, though often proposed, is counter to children’s best interests in most situations. This arrangement erodes consistency in discipline across phases of life, as well as the child’ sense of belonging in a home.
Excerpted from Your Divorce Advisor: A Lawyer and a Psychologist Guide You Through the Legal and Emotional Landscape of Divorce (Simon & Schuster/Fireside 2001). For more information: http://www.yourdivorceadvisor.com/.
How children go to school and return home also will affect your schedule. Do they need to be driven, can they switch busses, are they in a carpool?
Do your children have a maximum amount of time they tolerate being away from either of you? The length of time may differ from their primary caretaker and their secondary, if that is how your family has been arranged in the past. All of these factors are considerations in determining the best parenting schedules.
Are There Alternatives to the Typical Shared Parenting Plans?
Some less common, but important, variations on schedules also deserve mention. For reasons that will become obvious in the descriptions below, these arrangements are harder to maintain than more common ones, and they often require greater cooperation and sacrifice on both parents’ parts. However, when values or circumstances dictate creative solutions, these are worth considering.
Parents who can successfully do it report great satisfaction with “nesting”. In this arrangement, the children stay in one place, and the parents move out of the home and into an apartment or family member’s home. Sometimes the parents share one other dwelling, other times they can afford to rent or own two different ones. Sometimes they each return to a parent’s or friend’s home as their secondary residence. Parents then move in and out of the family home according to the dictates of schedules that work best for them. Click here for an article on nesting.
Sometimes parents live far away from one another. In these situations, children may spend school years with one parent, and longer holiday periods, vacations, and summers with the other parent.
When parents live near each other, they may choose to alternate the child’s primary residence every other year. The children do not spend much time living between homes, but they do visit the other parent regularly. However, each parent gets to be the primary parent some of the time, smoothing over the sense of one parent being the less central figure. This schedule, though often proposed, is counter to children’s best interests in most situations. This arrangement erodes consistency in discipline across phases of life, as well as the child’ sense of belonging in a home.
Excerpted from Your Divorce Advisor: A Lawyer and a Psychologist Guide You Through the Legal and Emotional Landscape of Divorce (Simon & Schuster/Fireside 2001). For more information: http://www.yourdivorceadvisor.com/.
For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com
