Indiana custody orders outline how parents share time with their children. These documents include general schedules that outline the regular exchange of custody and the overall division of parenting time.
While dividing parenting time can be a straightforward and simple matter, special days can serve as a major complication to the custody arrangement. Both parents likely want to spend holidays and birthdays with their children to make lifelong memories.
Parents typically do not follow the same custody schedule on holidays and birthdays as they do throughout the year. Instead, the Indiana child custody guidelines recommend a different approach for special days that only occur once a year.
Indiana embraces an alternating schedule
While parents can theoretically set whatever custody terms they deem appropriate, the basic guidelines for Indiana custody orders often play a major role in how parents split time with their children. For holidays and birthdays, Indiana recommends an alternating schedule.
The children may spend one holiday with one parent and the following holiday with the other. The guidelines recommend that the children spend Mother’s Day weekend with their mother and Father’s Day weekend with their father.
The guidelines acknowledge that allowing the children to spend holiday weekends with one parent can cause a disruption to the normal parenting schedule. In some cases, one parent may actually have three consecutive weekends with the children due to the holidays. However, there is a presumption that those consecutive weekends balance out when the other parent then has parenting time on a holiday weekend.
The alternating schedule approach to holiday and birthday custody ensures that parents can spend special days with their children each year and that the children can celebrate their birthdays with each of their parents every other year. While parents do have the option of establishing their own schedules, the alternating schedule proposed in Indiana’s current custody guidelines is a reasonable approach that works for a significant majority of families where parents share.
Consulting with an attorney about child custody concerns and special arrangements for dividing parents for the time can help parents understand their options. Parents who understand Indiana’s suggested approach to shared parenting time can help ensure that special days are a positive experience for their children instead of a source of stress or conflict.