Creating Your Child Custody Schedule - How to Get More Time With Your Child

Posted on March 14, 2009
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You have to be savvy when it comes time to negotiate a child custody schedule. The child custody schedule that you and your ex agree on will determine the time that you spend with your child until the child is 18 years old. Because you want to have as much time as possible with your child, you have to know the best tactics to maximize your visitation time. One great way to get the most time with your child in the custody schedule is to use holidays to up your visitation time.

Planning ahead is crucial to using holidays to your advantage. It may be useful for you to purchase a child custody software because a good child custody software should allow you to see all of the holidays for the year--and what parent has custody for that holiday. If you don't have the software that can do this for you, you can just go through the calendar and make your own list. Make a list of every holiday and write down whose visitation time the holiday falls under.

For the purpose of illustrating this idea, let's say you and your ex have a visitation schedule set up where you alternate weeks of custody. Both the mother and father have 50% time with the child. Now, let's say the father or mother wants to increase his or her time with the child and you're just about to negotiate holiday visitation time. The first thing to do is to take that list of the holidays and see what holidays do not already fall under your allotted child visitation time. Perhaps you notice that July 4th isn't a time when you already have custody. That's a holiday that you go for. Now, the ex is going to want a holiday too. That's easy enough--go through the list and give a big holiday that already falls under the ex's allotted visitation time. So, the ex gets Easter--which is a nice, big holiday--but you didn't lose any time because the child was already scheduled there.

Continue to do this with the rest of the holiday negotiation. Take the Thanksgiving weekend that is the ex's time, and give President's weekend which is already the ex's custody time. Every time you do this, the percentage of visitation time you have with your child goes up. In one scenario we worked out, the percentage time of the one parent increased by 6%! This is simple to do and can make a big difference with your child custody schedule.

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