Helpful reminders for co-parenting after your divorce or legal separation
Why You Need a Parenting Checklist
Once your divorce or legal separation is finalized, you, your ex-spouse, and your child or children will be navigating the new world of co-parenting. Sharing custody can be difficult and stressful, but ensuring that your child or children continue to have close relationships with their parents while having their needs met is essential to their well-being.
Here is a handy printable Parenting Checklist. By having a solid mutual agreement around the listed issues, your child or children will continue to have the stability and security that they need to flourish. Our Peace Talks mediators are prepared to help you work out a mutual parenting agreement around any and all of these points.
Parenting Checklist
- Goals of parenting after separation
- Decision making for education, medical treatment, religious upbringing
- Schedule for children
- Weekdays/nights and weekends (Regular school year)
- School vacations
- Holidays (e.g. Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter, Palm Sunday, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Halloween, others)
- Special days (e.g. children’s birthdays, parents’ birthdays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day)
- Jewish Holidays (e.g. Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah)
- Special Agreements
- Pick up and return
- Child care arrangement
- Sick days – School in-service days
- Payment for college
- Education and health information about children
- Consistency between homes
- Labels for Custody
- Other
- Missed Visits
- Notice
- Reimbursement for expenses incurred
- Evolving Parenting Arrangements
- Parent moving away
- Step-Parents – Blended family
- Growing older
- Children’s future
- Regular Reviews
- Decision-Making and Parent Meetings
- Meet and confer
- Mini evaluations
- Required mediator