Tips For Sharing Custody During The Summer Holid

Summer break for kids comes full of potential for you to create wonderful, loving, and lasting memories with your child. Whether it’s a road trip, summer camp, or an overseas vacation, summer is a great way to relax and have fun with your children.

Unfortunately, summer also comes with the potential for inciting conflict between a former spouse for divorced parents. Parental time-sharing arrangements can limit the possible activities you can enjoy with your child. However, a mindful and careful divorcee can minimize conflict and preserve the joy of summer vacation for your child and yourself. Consider the following tips to make sure this summer and future summers run smoothly.

Prepare a Schedule

If you take the time to plan a summer vacation schedule in advance, you can submit it to the court for approval. As long as you get the blessing of the court, the summer vacation schedule can substitute your routine child custody schedule. Advance agreement between you and your spouse about summer plans is an excellent way to avoid conflict.

Mind Your Kid’s Emotions

Custody exchanges can potentially disrupt the stability of a routine schedule for your child. As a result, your child might be in an emotionally vulnerable state of mind. In such cases, it is important for parents to take care to maintain awareness of your child’s emotions and to be sensitive about their concerns, whether they miss the other parent or their friends. Even if you’ve spent a lot of time and effort developing a summer plan in advance, no one can force fun on someone. Mind the circumstances and give your child time to adjust to their new environment before insisting on major activities.

Send Updates to Your Former Spouse

Communication is a key component in any marriage. However, for many divorced couples, poor communication was probably a major contributing factor that helped end their marriage. Unfortunately, good communication is as important in divorce as it is in marriage, if not more so. If an unforeseen change in vacation plans occurs, notify your former spouse, so they don’t feel left in the dark. This can help avoid unnecessary conflict, which can dampen the summer festivities.

Designate a Safe Place for Custody Exchanges

Turning custody over to your former spouse can be very difficult for parents, especially when sharing an amazing vacation with their children. However, custody exchanges don’t have to be more difficult than necessary. A prime consideration when selecting a location for custody exchanges is finding a public space where your child can feel secure. Although parents like solidifying the bond they have with their child, a custody exchange should not be arranged to make the other parent look like they’re ending the party. Courts might consider this to be an attempt of generating parental alienation, which is frowned upon. A court will remember this and factor that into future custody or support matters against your interests.

Foster Parent-Child Communication

Remember, you’re the bond between your child, and the other parent is important too. While it can be tempting to disrupt that relationship to gain ground on your ex in terms of vying for the affection and attention of your child, it can open your case up to an entirely new set of problems in the future. Thus, it is important for you to encourage communication between your child and the other parent. Your child probably misses the other parent, so letting them talk on the phone or through a video chat application will probably score you more points in the long run.

Effective Legal Counsel from Moshtael Family Law

Going through a divorce is one of the most challenging and stressful processes one can experience. Furthermore, divorces involving minor children can be even harder to endure. Thankfully, you don’t have to get through these challenges by yourself. At Moshtael Family Law, you can benefit from the sophisticated counsel of our legal team, backed by nearly two century’s worth of collective legal experience. We are here to handle the difficult, technical legal aspects of your case, so you don’t have to stress more than necessary about its outcome.