Creating an Ideal Visitation Schedule

A divorce becomes substantially more complex when there are children involved. Unfortunately, one of the hardest parts of finalizing your formal separation is determining how you will split child custody with your ex. Whether you seek sole custody or joint custody of your children, you will likely need to design a visitation schedule if you want your children to maintain a relationship with both of their parents. Discussing your situation with an experienced Irvine visitation lawyer is essential to designing a visitation schedule that works for you and your family.

Your lawyer will have crucial information for how you can design a visitation schedule that works for you. The good news is that most divorcing couples will usually design the visitation schedule together, and a court will usually approve whatever plan you come up with, believing that each family knows what’s best for them. Of course, things can become a little more complicated if you and your spouse don’t agree on what will work for your kids – but with the guidance of an attorney, it will hopefully be far easier to agree. Remember, if you cannot agree, the court will decide for you.

Determining How to Split Visitation

Once you and your former spouse are ready to mediate and design a schedule, there are certain questions you will need to ask yourself. For example, where will the children go to school, and who lives closer? How will you organize yourselves around your kids’ after-school or extracurricular activities? How will school vacations be dealt with? Who takes over when something unexpected comes up, such as a day off school you weren’t planning for or your child is sick? How will holidays work? Will it be important for the parents to live near one another? How will child support be divided?

Answering these questions is key to designing a visitation schedule that works for your family. It will guide where you and your ex will choose to live and how holidays, emergencies or unexpected occurrences will be handled.

Our Irvine Visitation Lawyer Will Help You Draft a Feasible Schedule

Whatever you decide, having very specific guidelines regarding how your child’s time will be split is key to ensuring that everyone is happy. A sample schedule might include having one parent live with the child during the school year, while the other parent gets them every other weekend and for a month during summer vacation. Perhaps the parents alternate how the child spends birthdays (one year the child stays with one parent, and the next year with the next) and decide that one parent has the ultimate responsibility of being with the child when they are sick. 

Being extremely specific about how you want to handle your visitation schedule is the best way to ensure you won’t have any issues. Working with an Irvine visitation lawyer is the best approach for getting that done. Contact our offices today.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes a parenting schedule work in practice?

Matching it to the children’s ages and to both parents’ real availability rather than to an abstract sense of fairness. Younger children generally do better with more frequent, shorter transitions that keep contact with both parents regular. School-age children can handle longer blocks, and a week-on week-off arrangement often suits older children who want fewer disruptions. A schedule that requires a parent to be somewhere they cannot reliably be will break down within months regardless of how equitable it looked on paper.

How should holidays and school breaks be handled?

By allocating them explicitly, year by year, rather than by a general provision about sharing. The workable approach assigns each holiday to one parent in even years and the other in odd years, defines when each holiday period begins and ends by day and hour, and treats winter break, spring break, and summer separately from the regular rotation. Holidays are the single most common source of enforcement disputes, and nearly all of those disputes come from ambiguity rather than bad faith.

What terms do parents most often leave out?

Several that predictably matter later. Who transports and where exchanges occur. How much notice is required to request a change, and in what form. Travel notice and consent for trips out of state or abroad, and who holds passports. A right of first refusal giving the other parent the option of additional time before a third-party caregiver is used. How each parent accesses school and medical information. And how the schedule accommodates activities that fall during the other parent’s time.

Should the schedule anticipate the children getting older?

Yes, because it will otherwise generate a modification motion at each stage. A plan built for a five-year-old rarely suits a fifteen-year-old with sports, a job, and a driver’s license. Practical approaches include a built-in review at defined ages, drafting the older-child provisions with flexibility for the child’s own commitments, and stating how activities and social obligations are handled. Anticipating the change is considerably cheaper than litigating it.