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Parenting Apart

7 bytes added, 17:04, 13 April 2021
Creating a parenting schedule
There's really no limit to the ways that children's parenting schedules can be arranged, as long as the schedule is in children's best interests and practical from the parents' perspective. A search online will give you dozens of parenting schedule templates that you might want to think about out. What's important is that the schedule works for the children and for their parents.
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 are many 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 the least, for example, might have a job that supports the family and occupies most of their time, but might otherwise 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 schedule templates will offer additional variants based on the age of the children. There many good reasons for this. 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, two or three days, and 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 will become increasingly important to them. 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.