If you are involved in a family law case and have children, there are many aspects to consider when thinking about a parenting plan. Before getting into the specifics, however, it is important to remember that most parents care deeply about their children, and, if you and the other parent are thinking about a parenting plan, remembering that you both care deeply about your children is important. Being able to come back to that space can provide support in the times you may disagree. Secondly, you are reading this article because you likely want to make the best decision for your family, particularly for your child(ren). Thus, this article is written from this perspective and is written with the intention of offering input into ways to consider how to bring your children’s perspectives into a parenting plan that works best for your family.
This article will provide an overview of why children’s perspectives matter, regardless of the age of the child, some issues that children often consider very relevant, and some issues that tend to matter less to children. It will conclude with an overview of what to consider in parenting plans. Separation of parents can be difficult for children, but it does not have to be devastatingly difficult. This article will discuss how to support children in the parenting plan process, value their input, and make informed decisions. This article cannot predict every possible issue that might arise. Instead, it is designed to be a thoughtful look into a variety of issues that can arise so you can be prepared to consider your child’s input in future decisions.
It is also important to remember that while almost all children want to be heard, seen, and valued, they rarely want to make decisions. Asking them specific questions about which parent they want to live with often puts them into an impossible situation of choosing between people they love. Thus, it is important to focus on more general needs and experiences and work from that space.
As a children’s attorney, I am often asked when children should have input or even be able to make the parenting plan decisions. The answer in most jurisdictions from a legal perspective is that they almost never make the decision, but they do have input in different jurisdictions based on their age and maturity. There is always a question about the aspects over which children should have any input and where they should have less. People interpret input and age appropriateness differently, but all children, regardless of age, can tell adults a lot if the adults know how to listen. Listening to or witnessing children at all ages is important regardless of what the law requires in your jurisdiction. You know how to listen to or witness your children and their needs, even when they are nonverbal.
As children age and mature, how they want to provide input will change. For example, an infant will be able to tell you what is working and what is not based on their mood, sleep and eating patterns, and other factors you have come to recognize in your child. You know your child best and can recognize changes in their patterns. It also takes time for a child to settle, so giving some time for that settling to occur before making final decisions can be helpful. A toddler may be able to articulate in words some of what they are feeling, but they are still going to tell adults much more through their actions. School-age children will often do both, particularly depending on their verbal maturity. And teenagers will often be able to articulate not only what matters to them but why. The why becomes more crucial as children mature. Your knowledge of your own child will impact what questions you ask and how you ask them. It will help you to make the most informed decisions that include your child’s input.
The reason children should have input is similar among ages and changes as children mature. Certainly, the main reason is that every child is different, so understanding their unique needs is always going to be the most important. That is why understanding your infant’s needs and what they are experiencing through how you witness them is important. As children age and have more understanding of processes, developmentally it is important for them to have a say in what happens in their lives. Not having final say, except in some extreme circumstances, is also important. For example, few parents let toddlers make big decisions about their lives, but toddlers are also very expressive and are beginning to make simple decisions. Deciding where to live is a bigger decision than is developmentally appropriate for a toddler. Further, children of all ages, including teenagers, need boundaries provided by parents, and parenting plan decisions are one way for parents to hold such boundaries while also offering a space for gradually increased flexibility, should that be supportive for your child.
There are other reasons for children to have a voice but not a final decision. Often, children simply do not want to be put in the middle. As a children’s attorney, I never ask my child clients to choose between parents and rarely ask about specifics of parenting time. And often children tell me they love both of their parents and want the adults to make the final decision. Sometimes there are extreme circumstances in which children have strong opinions about not wanting contact with one parent or another. In those cases, more input is likely needed from professionals to determine how to navigate the delicate nature of why a child is refusing contact.
When you are creating a parenting plan and asking your child for input, it is important to let them know why you want their input, what areas you feel it is important for them to have input, and who will make the final decision. For example, you might say:
We would like to know how different plans feel to you. We want to know what is going to be important to you at each house, and we want to know if there are issues that are the most important to you, such as sports. But we will make the final decision about where you will live when and what the rules are based on your input, just like we would do if we were still together. That means you may not get exactly what you want, but your thoughts will help us to make the best decision possible.
This is a simple example, but it lays out that the child is not making the final decision but gets a say, just as they would in any other situation, about the issues they feel are important to them.
As a parent, it can be more important to know why a child wants something than what they want. Often you can address the why more easily than the what. For example, if a child likes walking home from school, and only one parent lives close enough for that, it is possible to have the child walk home to that parent’s house and for the other parent to pick the child up for the evening once they are off work. In that way, the child gets what is important to them, and there is still the opportunity for the other parent to have weekday parenting time and the child to have contact with that parent during the week.
Finally, it is important to remember that your life will change significantly upon your separation. This means that your parenting and relationships are also going to change. All of this is going to impact your child, and you can continuously check in to see how new aspects are feeling to your child, especially as time provides more stability and they begin to adjust to their new life. Everyone is altering their lives post-separation, so it can take time to find what works for each person, including the child.
Quite often in parenting plan disputes and agreements, decisions are made that do not consider the issues that matter most to children. This section will outline first the issues that are less important to children and then many of the ways children have expressed their wants and needs in parenting plan discussions.
Many parents (and even courts) focus on specific amounts of time with each parent. Children rarely, if ever, express a desire for specific amounts of time with parents. They want quality. They care a lot less about specific numbers of days. That does not mean that time is unimportant to them, only that it is not their focus. Thus, specific percentages are not the goal of a child-focused parenting plan.
Instead, children care about safety and security. They will not often say those words specifically, but what they will articulate is the importance of knowing what is happening, being seen and heard, and feeling like they matter to the adults in their lives. Children often care about being with their siblings, and this can become difficult when parents have additional children with new partners, creating more siblings with which to contend. Knowing the relationship all children have with each of their siblings, whether family of origin siblings (biological or adopted) or stepsiblings, is going to be very important. Sometimes children have difficult relationships with stepfamilies, and those must also be navigated in a parenting plan, whether by reducing contact with stepsiblings or discussing how your child will interact with stepsiblings and/or stepparents.
Other important issues to consider for children are where their friends live, how easy it is to get to the school they attend, where they have pets (and whether pets will change houses with them), and how they will continue their hobbies, such as sports, church, and camp. These are the issues that often matter most to children. Further, children often care deeply about extended family and will want to know that contact with that family is part of a parenting plan. It is important to note that few jurisdictions require consideration of extended family, but children rarely care what the law requires and instead care about the people they love and who love them.
Additionally, children have items, such as toys, mementos, electronics, and school supplies that they may either want to have at both homes or take between them. How mature and responsible a child is will determine what is possible for each one. Speaking with the child and the child’s school, when appropriate, is important to understand options. Finally, regardless of where a child is physically living from one day to the next, most children want as many people to support them at their events as possible. Working out how parents will co-exist in spaces and support their child together at the child’s events is important. As a child’s attorney, I hear often how pained children are when a parent refuses to take them to their hobbies or sporting events because it is the “parent’s” time or the parent refuses to show up for games during the other parent’s parenting time.
Again, asking the “why” question matters. This is not in a pejorative sense but in a way to help you understand what it is they are hoping to achieve by caring about a particular topic. Then, even if you cannot support exactly what they want, you can hopefully find ways to support the why of what they want. Often asking why can help overcome an impasse in decisions about a parenting plan because it stops being about a specific issue and becomes about honoring values or ideas.
For a parenting plan to work it needs to be both structured and flexible, so as children get older they can provide more specific input. Structure helps children to feel safe by letting them know what to expect in their lives. So much of children’s lives are structured, and parenting plans should be no different. That structure can be whatever works for your family, but structure is important. Early on in the parenting plan process, or for younger children in particular, it can be helpful to have a calendar for children to follow and see, and it should be the same in both houses. Reminders to children in the mornings when they will be changing homes is also important.
Flexibility is also important. Issues arise, families need time together for a variety of issues, and sometimes a parent needs to leave town. Children, of course, also need the flexibility to go to a friend’s house for a sleepover, when appropriate, or to go to summer camp, if you as parents agree that they should. If a parent is stuck on having a particular amount of parenting time instead of being more child focused, this can interfere with a child’s willingness to want to be with that parent. Children, particularly as they get older, will want to be with friends; this is developmentally appropriate regardless of whether parents remain together.
Thus, parenting plans should have a general schedule (e.g., week on, week off or 2-2-5-5, or whatever works for your family). This schedule might change as children age and can have more or less back-and-forth time. There is no right or wrong here, although younger children tend to do less well with more back-and-forth, while also needing to retain ongoing contact in other ways. Ongoing contact can be video chat or meals with one parent while still sleeping at the other parent’s home each night. Older children may need less contact with the parent they are not living with in that moment, even if there is more time between seeing that parent. Older children can also have contact through texts or phone calls more easily and on their own terms, rather than contact facilitated by one parent.
Parenting plans should also have agreements and decisions about school holidays (including one-day holidays), family vacations, hobbies, and other matters. Every family is going to have different relationships to different holidays, so it is important to discuss all of them that matter to you and your family. Many families decide to have a “right of first refusal” in their parenting plans. What this means is that if one parent goes away during their parenting time without the child, the other parent has the option for the child to stay with them before the leaving parent asks someone else.
Additionally, often children want to have sleepovers with their friends, and this takes children away from the parent with whom they are having parenting time. Parents should think through how to address how often a child can be away from the home. It is important that parents not limit a child’s activities because it is “their” parenting time. A child should not lose the ability to be a child and have their usual life just because their parents have separated. Similarly, it is important to consider how children’s hobbies will be navigated. For example, how will a child get to baseball practice, and will both parents attempt to be at all games? What about practices? Will it make more sense for a child to live with a parent closer to the practice field during the season? This can all be outlined in the parenting plan so everyone knows what the agreement is.
It is important that parents plan ahead how decisions about vacations will be made. For example, in even years Parent A may get to provide initial dates, and in odd years Parent B may get to provide initial dates. The assumption with that plan is that unless there is some other event that cannot be moved, the parent who does not get to provide initial dates will work around the first parent’s schedule. Another option is that each parent will have two weeks per year that are the same every year, unless otherwise agreed upon. Whatever way works for your family, it is important to have a written structure as to how vacation time will be divided. If children want to attend camp, having an understanding of how vacations will work with the child’s other summer plans is important to plan ahead.
Finally, it is crucial for parents to know what matters to their children and why. Often the why is more important than the what. For example, with sporting events, as mentioned, children care more about whether their parents show up for them than about how often they sleep at each parent’s house. Children care that their parents are flexible with parenting time when it makes sense for the needs of the family.
It is most important to remember that every family is going to be different, and you as the parents are the people who know your family and your situation best. That is why it is most important for you to come up with a structure that works for your family, for your family’s values, and for the way in which you want to raise your children. That said, children do best when they have structure and some input regarding the flexibility of that structure. They want to be heard and rarely want to make decisions, sometimes even well into adolescence. And they want the ability to live their lives similarly to children whose parents are not separated. Thus, children’s perspectives matter, at any age. It is just as important for parents to be able to read an infant’s cues about where they are sleeping as when they need to sleep. As children get older and can tell you why they want something, often the why will lead to the what, meaning the why will help you as a parent make the best possible decision for your family.
Finally, caring about the other parent and supporting connection to the other parent is also crucial to a parenting plan working well and being child focused and inclusive. Although not discussed above, it is here at the end because none of this will work if you as parents are not supportive of each other and of your child having a good relationship with each other. That can be difficult at times, confusing because you want your own life and are no longer in a relationship with your former partner, and it is still important for your children and their development. Even if it is difficult for you to be around the other parent, one of the most important ways you can support your child is to at the very least be cordial to the other parent, and if you are able, then to be fully engaged in sharing house rules, plans, and changes with the other parent. The more you can continue to collectively support your child, the better the child will be able to grow and learn to advocate for themselves and become the adult you want them to be.
Generally speaking, children’s needs and desires tend to center around the following, especially when their parents are separating:
