How should I prepare for Parenting Planning?
How should I prepare for the parenting planning meeting? This is another question that I get really often, and there are several things that you can begin to think about and consider before the parenting planning meeting to make it efficient and to really have your thoughts together ahead of time.
Here are some questions that you could write down, make some notes about your preferences, and have a general opinion or thoughts to discuss as you go into the meeting.
Questions to Consider:
What type of schedule would you like? And this is in terms of ratio. So are you and your spouse planning on a 50/50 split? Is it going to look more like 60/40? There are really good baseline templates for plans of all types of ratios. And so regardless of the ratio that you are looking at, there are some templates for you to start with.
What are the scheduling barriers? So does one of the spouses work odd hours or do they have shift work? Is somebody a nurse who works seven to seven? How does that impact childcare and childcare costs?
What would you like to see in the summers? Usually in the summers, children have about three months off. What would you like to see happen during that time? Do you want the schedule to stay the same throughout the year? Do you want it to switch up some in the summer?
Which holidays are really important to you?
There are obviously all kinds of holidays. Some parents I’ve worked with felt strongly about having their kids on Halloween and their co-parent really didn't mind giving up that time with them. And I've had people who felt really strongly about Easter and the other parent felt like, “yep, absolutely. You can have them on Easter.” And that was kind of their split. Most people tend to alternate year over year. So if I have them this Christmas, you have them next Christmas, and so on.
How much vacation time would you like to have with the kids and without the kids?
Something that I'm seeing more often lately, which I think is really healthy, is parents considering how are they going to build into their parenting plan the ability to take their kids on vacation with them and for them to have longer breaks without the kids. So four or five days or so without the kids so that they can go and do something that makes them feel healthy and whole.
Other things to consider:
Be prepared to shift in terms of the ownership of parenting tasks. In some families one of the parents runs point on the day-to-day tasks and activities, and sometimes that's shared equitably. Often what we see is that that leans in the direction of one parent or the other.
“What types of things are you talking about, Katie?”
I mean filling out forms for school, making sure lunches are packed, we have all of the practice schedules on the calendar, things like that. So be prepared to talk about that and really look at shifting some of the ownership of those tasks. Some discussion may sound like, “Okay, so if Sally continues in soccer, I'll run point on soccer practices and games, I'll get those on the joint calendar so that you have access to them. And then if Bobby wants to keep doing basketball, you'll run point on that, put all of that information in the joint calendar and we'll work from that.”
If you remember one thing from this blog…
Probably the biggest piece of advice that I have is to stay focused. So what are your biggest goals in this process? Almost always what I hear from parents is that their biggest goal is that their kids come out of the divorce feeling supported, loved, like they have two healthy parents, and that they're going to have a wonderful childhood.
One of my favorite questions to ask is how do you want your children to think of and describe the divorce in 10 or 15 years? When their college buddies ask them, "Oh, your parents got divorced. That must have sucked. What was that like?" You want your kids to be, what do you want them to be able to say? I have not yet met a parent who didn't say something like, "I want them to say that, yeah, they got divorced, but it was fine. Everybody was nice to each other. They took good care of us. We had two awesome houses and two awesome parents."
And so because you're interested in the collaborative divorce process, I have a feeling that that applies to you also, and you can do it. I know you can. I have seen family after family accomplish it.
