3 Things You Need to Address When Negotiating & Drafting a Parenting Plan

 It is important that you address these things with the other parent when negotiating & drafting a parenting plan.

1. Do you want sole custody or joint custody

Custody or legal decision making means your & the other parent's ability to make major decisions about the lives of your children. Decisions such as medicine, education, and personal care decisions. So you need to think about if you want sole or joint custody. Once you've hammered that out, you need to start thinking about what parenting time plan you're going to be asking the other party to share with you.

There are lots of different parenting plans out there. You really should be thinking about the best interest of your kids and coming up with a plan for them so some people have a week on we got planned other people have one parent gets every other weekend so I would encourage you to do your research. Look at websites & figure out what plan works best for the kids & map it out with begin times and end times.

2. Planning Holidays

Once you have in your mind whatever parenting plan that you're going to go for the next thing to do is to move onto holidays. What are you going to be requesting for different holidays. You & the other parent may not celebrate the same holidays that most other people do. For example not everybody celebrates Christmas or Easter.

It’s important to define what each holiday is going to be in terms of start times and end times because really as I talked about in the video last week (https://youtu.be/9Obx_8CyBJg) that’s where people get into conflict especially around this time of year, Christmas & New Years. If you don't set start and end times it really could lead to a major incident that creates & not so great memory for the kids.

3. Vacations

You also want to think about vacation parenting time. As your kids get to be school-age they're going to be getting vacation like summer vacation in most cases. Some kids go to school year round but do you want you and the other parent to have the ability to take a week or two with the kids and go out of state or take a trip to Disneyland. So it is super important for you to include this into your parenting plan & propose to the other park party what specific vacation schedule you're asking for.

You also should be putting what notification schedule you want, in other words how far in advance do each of you need to let the other parent know if you're going to be taking a vacation & what sorts of information do you want to have before your child goes on vacation with the other parent. And are you willing to provide that same information.

If you're going into the courtroom you really need to have outlined these things for the court with specificity. The more specific you are the better you and the other parent are going to be in the future. Especially if it dispute comes up because then you can go right to the parenting plan & look at it. If it's not in the parenting plan then you're going to probably find yourself in custody court.