If you have children, you will have to create a parenting plan — a detailed schedule and understanding of your arrangements for the future care of your children. This is a difficult issue for divorcing parents, yet it is the most important matter you deal with.

It is very important that you resolve the parenting relationship with a minimum of bad feeling and a maximum of cooperation. Children need both of their parents, and the parents need all the help they can get from each other in raising them. Harm to children from divorce is more closely related to conflict after the divorce, so your goal is to make arrangements that both parents can live with agreeably.

Avoid anything that makes either parent feel he or she is “losing” the child to the other parent. A child is not an object to be won or lost.

Start communicating with your children’s other parent to see what will work best for the children and still be comfortable for both of you.

Experience shows that pure joint custody — sharing parental rights and responsibility — works best for parents who are cooperative and capable of working out future problems as they come up.

The most popular and successful parenting plan provides for joint legal custody for both parents, primary residence (or physical custody) for one parent, and a relatively detailed schedule that shows exactly when each parent will have custody of the child. This sort of arrangement provides stability, while helping to reduce the sense of alienation and loss for the parent with secondary custody.

Finally, there is the old-fashioned award of primary physical and legal custody to one parent with a visitation schedule for the other. This is used primarily where the parents are unlikely to be cooperative.

A detailed plan helps to create stability and security, and helps to settle any disagreements. After judgment, parents can depart freely from their agreed plan from day to day by mutual agreement. But whenever they can’t agree to something different, they can rely on what the plan says. This is why the plan should be as detailed as possible.

If your plan is sufficiently detailed, it doesn’t matter what terms you use to describe the parenting relationship, because the parents will know where the child will be at any given time without reference to the legalistic terms of custody and visitation.

After the divorce, if co-parenting does not work well, you should seriously consider professional couples-counseling to help you work better at co-parenting. You can also get a lot of help from the many parent support groups and family service agencies.

Mediation. If you can’t agree on a parenting plan, the matter will have to be decided in court — an expensive and destructive process. Before it gets that far, you should try to mediate the issue with the help of a professional mediator.

In many states, you have no choice: before going to court, you will be required to mediate. Vast experience shows that a few sessions of mediation are usually extremely effective; custody mediation has about an 80% success rate. Some states require mediation of custody disagreements before parents are allowed to drag this issue into court. When all else fails, judges often require a home-study by appointed counselors who make recommendations to the court.

Rather than have a stranger — a judge or a social worker — make decisions about your child care arrangements, it will be much better if you work this out yourselves. Don’t hesitate to get professional help on this one.


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