Child custody agreement is the key document to protect your child when you are in the process of divorce or separation. The agreement, also known as the parenting plan, is a document on how much time each parent spends with the child and how the parents will share the responsibility for the child physical and psychological development. Therefore this document will have direct impact on your child and on your relationship with your child for many years to come. Because of the importance, you need to make sure that you child custody agreement is created for the best interest of your child while it will give you the fairs rights for child custody and visitation.
Physical vs. Legal Custody
There are 2 types of child custodies:
- Physical child custody: You live with your child and take care the child’s daily life and activities, such as going to school. You are the custodial parent.
- Legal child custody: You make long term decisions with your ex on your child’s long-term development, such as the school to go to or the religion. Because you are not living with your child, you become the non-custodial parent.
Keep in mind that if you get only the legal custody, you need to check all the items putting into the agreement to ensure that your visitation rights and relationship with your child are well protected, such as when and for how long, weekends, birthday and vacation.
Important Items for Your Child Custody Agreement
- Physical vs. legal custody. The physical custody decides who’s going to live with your child.
- Sole vs. joint custody. One parent can get both physical and legal custodies and the other get none. Or you can split the responsibility according to your work schedule and availability.
- The visitation schedule.
- Parenting provisions.
- Child support terms.
- Decision making on child’s physical and psychological development.
- Anything else that will be helpful to raise your child and avoid dispute.
Now let’s look at the details.
The Visitation Schedule
Child custody visitation and child custody rights are where most disputes may come from. Therefore you need to define when, how often and for how long the non-custodial parent can visit the child; whether staying overnight is allowed; birthday, holiday and vacation arrangement. Additional situations may also include how far away the custodial parent can move, and the visitation arrangement when one parent is re-married.
A detailed schedule is needed to define all the activities throughout the year, include:
- A residential schedule that defines the repeating cycle of custody and visitation. This is the basic schedule to define when the child is going to stay with which parent throughout the year.
- A visitation schedule that specifies when and for how long you can visit your child if you don’t get the physical custody. This can become complicated if you have to consider whether you can stay overnight with your child, or whether you can stay with your child without your ex’s supervision.
- A holiday schedule that will define where the child will stay with which parent for each holiday.
- A vacation schedule that will specify which parent can take the child for each vacation or break, whether the parent can go with the child on a vacation trip and where they can go (such as out of the state or abroad).
- Schedule for special events. For example for your child’s birthday.
When creating your schedule, use a calendar. This way, it’s a lot easier to define all the activities and responsibilities. Once finished, you can simply copy your part onto your calendar and keep it.
Parenting Provisions
These are the mother and father child custody responsibilities, rules and stipulations that you and your ex agree on. This is a critical area of your child custody agreement. Therefore spend some time to think and discuss with your ex to decide what to be included. Important provisions include:
- How to deal with legal custody: to make important decisions for your child’s growth and development.
- Child’s school and education.
- Health care (medical and dental care, health insurance).
- Changing to the agreement.
Dealing with Dispute
Ideally, you will be sitting down with your ex to discuss all the details and prepare your child custody agreement. The agreement is then presented as a stipulation to the court by your lawyer, where the judge makes it legally binding.
Unfortunately, in many cases, you may not agree with your ex and can’t reach an agreement. Physical custody and visitation rights, for example, can become concerns.
If this is the case for you, and you worry that you may not get the child custody agreement you need to fully protect your child and your child custody rights, you should get professional legal assistance as soon as possible.
Keep in mind that it is critical to get the agreement right the first time. Otherwise the legal battle can be extremely long and expensive, with little chance for you to win!
Click Here for details on how you can protect your child and your custody rights when preparing your child custody agreement.