Some psychologists mental health professionals and many separating parents believe that the best parenting schedule after separation is for parents to share their children's time equally or almost equally. While that may be true for some children, the federal ''[[Divorce Act]]'' doesn't say that any particular distribution of the children's time is presumed to be in their children's best interests, and the provincial ''[[Family Law Act]]'' specifically says that ''no'' particular parenting schedule should be presumed to be in children's best interests. Section 40(4) of the ''Family Law Act'' says:

The absence of any presumptions about parenting schedules in the legislation, whether for shared parenting time or something else, is intentional. Both the ''Divorce Act'' and the ''Family Law Act'' say that decisions about children are to be made considering only their best interests. As a result, parents, arbitrators and judges have to think about is what is best for the particular child in the particular circumstances of their particular family, not what is generally best for children. This is what Justice McLachlan said in ''[https://canlii.ca/t/1fr99 Gordon v. Goertz]'', a an important 1996 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada:

When it comes to parenting schedules, what parents, arbitrators and judges have to decide is what is best for the children in light of the best-interests factors set out at section 16 of the ''Divorce Act'' or at sections 37 and 38 of the ''Family Law Act''. Sometimes this winds up being a shared parenting schedule, sometimes it doesn't. Among those best-interests factors, some of the more important are:

#*the age and maturity of the child, and their ability to be away from a parent, especially for younger children and children who are being breastfed,#*the child's need for stability, especially for younger children and children with special needs,#*the views and preferences of the child, especially for children who old enough to have an opinion and understand how their parents' separation and their own preferences might impact their lives,#*the pattern of the parents' usual time with the child when they were still together,#*each parent's ability to care for the child, including the presence of any family violence,#*the nature of the child's relationship with each parent, and#*the social needs of the child and their involvement with school, extracurricular activities and friends.

#*how far away they live from each other and how much driving will be involved, especially the length of time the children will be able to handle being stuck in a car,#*how their work schedules can and can't be fitted around the child's parenting needs, including how they'll manage caring for the child on non-instructional school days and on days when the child is sick and has to stay home,#*whether the schedule will regularly require them to pay for other people to look after the child and if so, the amount of time that the child will be in the care of someone other than a parent,#*how they express conflict and the extent to which the child will be exposed to their conflict, especially if the schedule requires frequent exchanges of the child between homes,#*how they'll manage moving the child's belongings between homes, especially bulky things like hockey equipment, and#*whether each of them is flexible enough to accommodate unexpected events in the other parent's life that might require a temporary change in the schedule.

A lot of the templates you'll see will offer variants based on the parenting skills of each parent. This is an important consideration when you're thinking about the schedule that is most likely to be in the children's interests. While there are many families in which the parents split the task of parenting fairly evenly and both parents have excellent parenting skills, there are others in which one parent takes on most of the work involved in raising the children. (There , and there are many perfectly good reasons why this might be the case. The parent who does most of the work might have crowded the other parent out. The parent who does the least might just not be interested in the business of parenting.) However, it's not always fair to measure parenting skills based on how the work involved in parenting was split during the relationship. The parent who does did the leastparenting might, for example, might have had a job that supports supported the family and occupies occupied most of their time, but might otherwise be or want to be an engaged and committed parent. It's important to think about the actual parenting skills of each parent, not just how they divided up parenting responsibilities before separation.

The parenting Parenting schedule templates will offer additional variants based on the age of the children. There many good reasons for thistoo. A child who is being breastfed won't be able to be away from their mother for very long, and the sort of parenting time the other parent will have will usually need to be short but frequent. A toddler is better able to handle being away from a parent for an extended period of time, say one, or two or three days, but will need to see both parents frequently. A child who is starting school suddenly has a schedule that's got nothing to do with their parents, and a child who is leaving elementary school will not only have homework and extracurricular activities that need to be taken into account, but the beginnings of a social life that is going to become increasingly important to themas they get older. A teenager's social life will be in full bloom and it may be more important to teenagers that they spend time with their friends and in their extracurricular activities than with their parents. The reality is that parenting schedules ''have'' to change based on the age of the child and, eventually as teenagers, their preferences. The schedule that works for a toddler won't work for a kid in Grade Two, and the schedule that works for a kid in Grade Two won't work for a kid in Grade Eight. That's just how it is.