Since more than 50 percent of divorced people remarry, you can assume that your (or your former spouse’s) life may change, and that such changes could affect the way you parent your children. At the same time, kids grow and develop in unexpected ways, and may benefit from different amounts of time with different parents. Household schedules can change, so a drop-off or pick-up time that once was carefully placed before or after dinner doesn’t work anymore because the evening plan was shifted to accommodate swimming or band practice.
The ideal situation for a parenting agreement is that you never really have to refer to it again, because through the process of creating the document you have formed a new relationship with your former spouse that allows you to work things out. You don’t want to have to go back to the contract to handle every change that occurs in your lives. The agreement should really act as a safety net. It catches you if you can’t work things out on your own.
When creating your parenting plan, recognize that your children will grow and change. Unless you are a very new parent at the time of your divorce, you know already that children change dramatically as they proceed through developmental milestones on the way to adulthood. Parents also know that each child brings his or her own surprises along the way. Wise parents agree to meet monthly, quarterly, or, at the very least, twice yearly, to talk about how their children are doing. A half-hour conference over coffee every few months can go a long way toward preventing future disagreements.
Some parents write into their agreement that they will reevaluate it at specific intervals, perhaps based on certain developmental milestones. This helps set the expectation that parents may need to consider whether or not to modify the plan to meet the child’s new needs. While parents just getting through stressful negotiations about parenting or other aspects of their divorce may expect future meetings to be similarly challenging, let us assure you that in most cases it gets easier, not harder, to agree as time passes.
If you need to tweak your parenting plan over the years, you don’t need to sign new documents or go to court. You, as parents, will hopefully develop your new parenting relationship and proceed through the myriad of issues to raise your child together. There is less risk involved in agreeing to informal changes in parenting arrangements (as opposed to child support), because there is no retroactivity to court decisions relating to custody. In other words, if a court modifies your parenting schedule at some point, it is unlikely that you will have to “give back” time that you’ve already spent with the child.
If a couple finds that they are running into unforeseen problems that they can’t resolve, they can bring in a third party (such as a mediator) to help. They may even wish to specify in the agreement that an arbitrator will be used if necessary. Regardless of what the agreement says, if the result of any process used to make a decision that affects the child is not in the best interests of the child, the issue can be taken to a judge.
