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→Parenting schedules
===Parenting schedules===
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:
<blockquote><tt>In the making of parenting arrangements, no particular arrangement is presumed to be in the best interests of the child and without limiting that, the following must not be presumed:</tt></blockquote>
<blockquote><blockquote><tt>(c) that decisions among guardians should be made separately or together.</tt></blockquote></blockquote>
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:
<blockquote>"The argument that a presumption would render the law more predictable in a way which would do justice in the majority of cases and reduce conflict damaging to the child between the former spouses also founders on the rock of the ''Divorce Act''. The Act contemplates individual justice. The judge is obliged to consider the best interests of the particular child in the particular circumstances of the case. Had Parliament wished to impose general rules at the expense of individual justice, it could have done so. It did not. The manner in which Parliament has chosen to resolve situations which may not be in the child's best interests should not be lightly abjured. Even if it could be shown that a presumption in favour of the custodial parent would reduce litigation that would not imply a reduction in conflict. The short-term pain of litigation may be preferable to the long-term pain of unresolved conflict. Foreclosing an avenue of legal redress exacts a price; it may, in extreme cases, even impel desperate parents to desperate measures in contravention of the law. A presumption would do little to reduce the underlying conflict endemic in custody disputes."</blockquote>
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:
Parents, of course, will have additional considerations of their own. Among other things, parents will want to think about:
There's nothing wrong with taking things like this into account when you're planning a parenting schedule. It's important to think about how the schedule will work in real life and whether it's actually doable. You probably don't want a schedule that requires you to make a round trip drive from Surrey to North Vancouver, or from Kamloops to Kelowna, four times a week — and the children probably wouldn't like it either — or a schedule that will see the children in daycare when the other parent is a good parent and otherwise available to care for them.
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 , 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.
====Schedules for children without shared parenting====