Sunday, June 7, 2009

Creating Child Custody Schedules

By Dianna Nelsun

The task of creating a custody schedule can be overwhelming for divorced parents. It can be an arduous challenge to figure out how much time the child will spend with the parents and when that time will happen. It can turn into a massive project of day counting, rewriting, and figuring out details.

The child custody schedule is also one of the most important things in a custody agreement. This is the document that outlines the time the child has with each parent. It's important that the parents work through the challenges of creating the custody schedule so they will be happy with the end result.

Parents can choose between many custody schedules. Many parents decide to adopt a joint custody schedule. In this schedule, both parents get about the same time with the children.

Similar to the joint custody schedule is a fifty-fifty shared schedule. This is when each parent gets fifty percent of the time with the children. A common sample of a fifty-fifty split schedule is the parents alternating custody every other week.

Sometimes the parents want to have equal time but the child needs to live primarily at one residence during the week because of school. There are ways to accommodate this. One way is to give one parent custody during the weekdays of the school year. The other parent gets time on the weekends and then gets more time during summer, winter, and spring break. This can even out the time.

The custody schedule includes the basic rotation of custody. Some samples of this are one parent having primary custody with the other parent having custody every other weekend, one parent having primary custody and the other parent getting several overnights in the month, and one parent having primary custody with the other parent getting every weekend and other visits or overnights.

The schedule also includes the custody time for the holidays. The mother and father usually split the holidays between them. Then they alternate the years of the holiday. It's important for the mother and father to both have major and minor holidays.

You can get through the difficulties of creating a child custody schedule by taking it one step at a time. Once you and the child's other parent are satisfied with the schedule it will all be worth it. Then you can focus on enjoying the time you have with the children.

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