A parenting plan is a written agreement in which parents make agreements about the upbringing of the children after a divorce. A parenting plan contains agreements about the care and development of their children, but also about communication between children and both parents and finances.
When you get divorced and you have children, you are legally obliged to draw up a parenting plan. In the parenting plan it is agreed in a broad sense how the children will be raised after the divorce. Divorcing parents can largely determine themselves what is agreed in a parenting plan. However, the government does set a number of minimum requirements. One is, for example, obliged to record the care and contact with the children, to make agreements about the provision of important information about the children and to record the costs of the care of minor children. If they cannot come to an agreement together, they can enlist the help of a mediator who helps to record agreements in a parenting plan.
An important clause of a parenting plan is a so-called care arrangement or visitation arrangement . This establishes respectively how the care tasks are divided and how contact with the children will proceed if one of the two parents has parental authority. In the latter case, the non-custodial parent has no responsibility for the child’s upbringing and care, but does have the right to see the child on a regular basis.
Because children develop strongly over the years, a parenting plan may no longer suit new situations. Both parents can then choose to adjust the agreements. They must both give their consent for this, since the new agreements must also be declared legally valid.
List of Acronyms Related to Parenting
