Summer Is The Time For Divorced Parents To Make Holiday Plans

Parents love to complain about how summer vacation cannot be over soon enough. The days when your children’s laments about boredom seem interminable, especially when everything you might do that could cheer them up costs a fortune. It is better that you should enjoy the days of being annoyed by your children’s laziness and boredom while they last. Soon you will be scrambling to buy all the items on the list of school supplies and buying as many school clothes as you can during the tax-free window. The expenses of the back-to-school season follow surprisingly quickly on the expenses of Maycember. If you are co-parenting your children with your ex-spouse, then back-to-school season will mean conflict about which extracurricular activities your children can participate in and who is paying for them. The Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays seem like they are in the distant future, but to see them that way is a mistake if you are a divorced parent of minor children. Managing holiday family conflict begins now, when the summer is just getting started. For help living with the reality that your holiday plans are tied to your ex-spouse, contact a Birmingham child custody lawyer.

The Family Courts Have Zero Tolerance for Black Friday Surprises

The more detailed you make your parenting plan, the better. Attending additional sessions of family court mediation just to work out the details of how Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, and three-day weekends during the school year will go is worth the effort, because it means that you do not have to deal with the stress of your ex’s constantly changing demands at every holiday.

An Alabama couple wisely included a provision in their parenting plan whereby, if either party wanted to deviate from the holiday parenting time schedule as formalized in the parenting plan, he or she would have to notify the other parent in writing at least 30 days before the holiday. This would give the other parent time to object and to bring the matter before the court, if necessary. The year after the couple’s divorce was finalized, the wife traveled with the children to Minnesota to visit her relatives for Thanksgiving, when the parenting plan said that they should be with the husband. She only notified him shortly before she traveled, so there was no time to object. She also made travel plans for Christmas that contradicted the parenting plan; it said she should bring the children to the father on December 19, but she insisted on keeping them until December 20, so the parties went to court over a difference of one day.

Contact Peeples Law About Starting in the Summer to Prevent Holiday Co-Parenting Conflict

A Birmingham family law attorney can help you draft and enforce an airtight parenting plan if your ex-spouse is so difficult to deal with that the conflict over Thanksgiving plans begins before the summer solstice.  Contact Peeples Law in Birmingham, Alabama today to schedule a consultation.

Source:

scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17782351196448859543&q=divorce+holiday&hl=en&as_sdt=4,61,62,64&as_ylo=2015&as_yhi=2025