When you go through a divorce and work out custody and visitation arrangements with your spouse, you make an agreement based on the kids’ ages at that point. However, as anyone with kids knows, schedules change fairly regularly as kids get older and get more involved with school and extracurricular activities. A parenting plan made when children were 7 and 5 will likely not work when the children are 15 and 13. As such, it is prudent to revisit your parenting plan regularly to make sure it still meets the needs of your changing family. A good time to do that is around back to school time, since schedules for school age children tend to change with the beginning of the school year, rather than the beginning of the calendar year.
Towards the end of the summer (or even earlier for some very organized families), your children’s school schedules will firm up and you will learn about the dates for breaks in the school calendar, such as Thanksgiving, winter break, spring break, and any other school holidays. You and your ex can then (hopefully!) work together to adjust the visitation schedule so that it makes sense with the children’s new schedule. For example, maybe your daughter had dance on Tuesdays last year, but now has it on Wednesdays. If the non-custodial parent’s weekday visitation is dinner on Wednesday night, this new dance class may cut into it. As such, it may make sense to switch the weekday visitation to another day where there would not be a conflict with an extracurricular activity. In addition, perhaps one parent has a family reunion over Thanksgiving and wants to bring the children, but the other parent is supposed to have the children for Thanksgiving that year. Hopefully the parents will be able to work together to switch things around in that situation.
Technically, your parenting plan (however old it may be) is the custody and visitation order that must be followed by both parents. However, it does not make practical sense to go back to court to modify every time your child’s schedule changes. As such, try to work things out with your ex on your own. While exes who still greatly dislike each other may not be able to work well together in this way, it can save you both a lot of money as opposed to contacting attorneys each time you need to make a change. Just make sure you communicate via email so that any changes are confirmed in writing. That way, if your ex goes back on his or her agreement to modify visitation and tries to sue you for contempt of the order, you will have a paper trail.