Shared Care and Home Schooling
Melissa Jones, an associate at McAlister Family Law, explains.
Sharing Care
It is important to remember that despite the urge to set out a clear timetable for the children each day, this might not be practical, depending on the ages and needs of your children and also whether you or the other parent needs to work from home.
When you co-parent you are reliant, to a certain degree, on flexibility and trust with the other parent. Each parent has their own style of parenting and while you may not agree on everything regarding the children, the ability for your children to experience secure and stable upbringings across two homes is possible.
Parenting Plan
For co-parents, one handy tool is a “Parenting Plan”. In essence, it is a written document that records the practical day to day arrangements of parenting. Also, if you are looking to make an application to the family court for a Child Arrangements Order (Section 8 Children Act 1989) in the future, the court will expect you to have looked at a Parenting Plan option.
The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (CAFCASS) which represents children in family court matters in England, describes the benefits of making a Parenting Plan:
- it will help everyone involved know what is expected of them;
- it acts as a valuable reference to go back to;
- it sets out practical decisions about the children, such as living arrangements, education and health care.
Home Schooling
There is a section dedicated to “education” in each parenting plan, so, if you are looking to create a plan for the first time or even if you already have a plan, a good talking point would be home schooling and how you can co-operate to make it work. You might find that one parent really likes the idea of planning the day around available resources online, where a number of celebrities are producing content designed to fall in line with the national curriculum. On the other hand, it might be that the other parent is really hands-on and wants to use this time to teach the children practical skills such as woodworking, gardening, baking, and more.
Communication
For many years now, family law practitioners have been encouraging the use of a “communication book”, with the idea being that one parent records useful information about their time and activities with the children, and the book is then passed to the other parent on handover. One way this could be done is by sending electronic updates or setting up a designated email just for communication about child arrangements. You could even develop your own form of homework diaries and there are plenty of apps out there that could help you stay connected as a family.
In the end, what’s important is communication – there is no question that no matter what the situation, children always benefit when both parents talk to one another and agree the way forward.
