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Divorce and the Parenting Plan
Taking the time to develop a workable parenting plan can help parents keep the best interests of their children in mind as they begin to form new lives post-divorce.
January 19, 2012 /HomeFamily PR News/ -- For a married couple, much of the decision making process is informal and ad hoc. If a child needs to go to football practice or piano lessons, whichever parent is available at that time can take them. If a child needs medical attention, both parents are typically involved in taking the child to see a doctor or go to an emergency room. From schools they will attend to where and when vacations will occur, are decided in a collaborative manner.
When a divorce occurs, a single household becomes two and all the complex activities that go on in a family have to be rethought.
That all Changes
During a divorce, the decision making process is greatly disrupted. In the majority of divorce cases, the parties take an adversarial stance, and the spouses view each other with suspicion and implicitly, if not explicitly, view their soon- to-be-ex as "the enemy."
...Had a Great Fall
The personal and emotional rollercoaster of a divorce can leave even sensible and reasonable parents a little unnerved. Every detail of your life, your finances and your values are taken apart and examined.
But courts, unlike "all the kings horses and all the kings men" of the childhood rhyme of Humpty Dumpty, have to put all the pieces back together again.
The Parenting Plan
In Missouri, the legislature has enacted a set of requirements that each parent must submit a parenting plan to the court during a divorce. The parenting plan is essentially a written blueprint of how both spouses will interact concerning their child or children.
The Missouri Statute is very detailed. The statute divides into three major areas: physical custody (where the child will live), legal custody (who will make decisions for the child) and financial obligations (who will pay the expenses of the child).
Physical Custody
The physical custody section is made up of nine specific events or activities. A parent creating such a plan needs to sit down with a calendar and work their way through the year, determining what living situation will serve the best interests of the child, which is the standard the court will use when evaluating the plan.
One thing to consider when drafting the plan is that your spouse will be doing the same, and both plans will be submitted to the court. If they are widely divergent, and treat the other parent poorly, it is likely they both will be rejected and the court will develop its own plan that it will then order as the Plan.
This document will control what holidays you spend with your child, how your summers will be divided, what your weekdays and weekends will look like, how and where you will meet to transfer your child. You have to allocate transportation duties for all the child's activities, when your child can call you and when you can contact them by phone. And as important as any of the others, how to implement temporary changes to the schedule brought about by all the other curveballs life will toss at you.
If possible, working with your spouse to develop a workable parenting plan is going to go a long ways toward ensuring the success of the parenting plan and your children. If you have young children, you will remain in a relationship with your ex-spouse for as long as your children are minors and the quicker you are both able to develop a workable relationship, the better off your children will be.
The custody portion of the plan needs to be well thought out and carefully placed together, as this document will control your day-to-day existence with your children.
Legal Custody
The second element of the parenting plan will describe in detail the legal custody of the children. This means who and how decisions are made concerning the child. As with physical custody, this part of the plan must be specific.
You will have to explain how the education decisions will be made and how you and your ex-spouse will receive information from the school, from grades to any problems.
You will need to decide how medical and healthcare decisions, choice of doctors and medical care, and how to communicate the medical conditions, such as illness of the child and how to handle medical emergencies involving the child, will be made.
You also have to develop a process to decide which extracurricular activities your child will participate in, and how to deal with each parents responsibilities during that time. For instance, if you want your child to attend summer camp, how will you alter time allocation if it means the other parent loses summer vacation time with the child?
The importance of developing a viable plan that both parents can live with is underscored by the necessity to include a method to resolve disputes over interpretation of the parenting plan.
And Then There's Money
Here there is even more guidance, in the form of a worksheet created by the Missouri Supreme Court that calculates the child support either or both parents will be required to pay.
However, the parenting plan must include the amount of child support, who pays, and who will maintain and pay for health insurance and health care expenses of the child. The plan needs to account for who pays for items that are not reimbursed by insurance coverage.
You must also decide how any educational, childcare and transportation expenses will be paid.
How to Develop a Successful Parenting Plan
Your life is complex and this document will likewise be complex. A great resource for developing a parenting plan that will work is your divorce attorney. They have a great number of clients and they can use that experience to help describe possible solutions to your particular situation.
A divorce and the accompanying dissolution of your family into two distinct units can be traumatic, but you want your parenting plan to truly serve the best interests of your child or children, and by doing that, your new life as a parent will be similarly a success and improvement.
Article provided by The Marks Law Firm LLC
Visit us at www.themarkslawfirm.com
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