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Parenting Apart

5 bytes added, 00:04, 4 July 2022
Shift work
I'm not going to lie. Figuring out parenting schedules with parents who work shift work is really difficult, especially for parents whose shifts change all the time and parents who get only one or two days' notice of their upcoming shifts.
The point of a parenting schedule is to give everyone, including the kids, a degree of predictability and stability in their lives. A good parenting schedule should be something that each parent can map out on a calendar. You should know, today, at whose house the kids are going to be next October12th. The kids should know, today, when they're going to change homes next and what they need to take from one parent's home to the other's for their school and extracurricular activities. Shift work rarely lets you do this.
There are no good options for planning a parenting schedule around shift work. At a minimum, the parent with the shift work will need to tell the other parent about their work schedule as soon as they find out about it — the more notice that can be provided the better! — and the other parent must be prepared to be as flexible as possible in accommodating the children's time with the parent. The parent with the shift work must accept that the children and the other parent have schedules of their own that may limit the time the children can spend with them. Both parents need to think about how care for kids can be arranged when neither of them can do it, since few daycare providers work on a drop-in basis. And both parents must learn to be patient, tolerant and forgiving toward each other.