A New School Year, A New Parenting Plan?
All parenting plans are modifiable. Most newly divorced parents look at the final court order of dissolution of marriage and mentally calculate the number of years, months, and days until their youngest child turns 18, because that is when your ex-spouse can no longer have a veto vote about how much money you spend on your children. Parenting plans contain a high level of detail about transportation, extracurricular activities, and holiday time; the purpose of this is to prevent conflict in the short term. As your children get older, these details may change, mostly because of children attending a different school than they attended the previous year. Sometimes divorced parents are able to work out the adjustments on their own without making major changes to the number of days each year that the children spend with each parent. If the children’s new schedule would seriously interfere with one parenting time, you might need to adjust the parenting plan to give the time-disadvantaged parent more days during the summer, for example. A Boca Raton child custody lawyer can help you revise your parenting plan to fit your current schedule.
Signs That You Might Need to Modify Your Parenting Plan for the New School Year
Here are some situations where families might need to adjust their parenting plans for the new school year:
- Last year, Son and Daughter were both in elementary school, but this year, Daughter is starting middle school. The children’s schools have different start and end times. Last year, Dad used to begin his parenting time by picking up the children from school on Friday afternoons, but this year, they will take the bus to Mom’s house, and Dad will pick them up at 6:30 on Friday evenings.
- Daughter’s Bat Mitzvah is this coming spring, and she must attend classes to prepare for it on weekends and some weekday evenings. Depending on the parents’ work schedules and the level of conflict between the parents, they might need to modify the parenting plan.
- Son will be attending boarding school out of state. Last year, he spent weekends with Dad year-round, but since he will be away at school this year, he will spend half of the summer and half of winter break with Mom and the other half with Dad.
- Son’s youth baseball team must travel to attend games on many weekends, and he must attend practices several times per week. The parents must agree on whether to take turns accompanying him to out-of-town trips or whether to have Dad accompany him on all trips and to give Mom most of the weekends when he is not traveling.
Contact Schwartz | White About Parenting Plans for Long-Divorced Parents
Parenting teens is always complicated, but it is doubly complicated if you are divorced. A South Florida family law attorney can help you if you and your ex-spouse disagree about how co-parenting should work with your child’s new schedule. Contact Schwartz | White in Boca Raton, Florida about your case.
Source:
2houses.com/en/blog/extracurricular-activities-and-shared-custody
